UBC: historical true crime
Feb. 10th, 2013 03:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyBourke, Angela. The Burning of Bridget Cleary. 1999. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
King, David. Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris. New York: Broadway Paperbacks-Random House, 2011.
Roughead, William. Classic Crimes. New York: New York Review Books, 2000.
Summerscale, Kate. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective. New York: Walker & Co., 2008.
I may have blogged about The Burning of Bridget Cleary before, but if so, I can't find the entry, and y'know, it doesn't hurt to say again that this is an excellent book.
Bridget Cleary was burned to death by her husband in 1895. The reasons--as Bourke demonstrates--are difficult to tease out; it isn't clear ultimately whether Michael Cleary believed his wife was a changeling, or if in the aftermath of her (at least semi-accidental) death, maddened with grief and guilt, he came to believe that he believed she was a changeling. Bourke is very interested in the ways that traditional Irish folk beliefs, as a coherent system of orally transmitted knowledge, were becoming obsolete at the same time that, as artifacts of indigenous Irish culture, they were acquiring a different kind of value. And she's interested in the ways that those two different kinds of valuation were hopelessly and tragically at loggerheads in the Clearys' house in the summer of 1895. She describes the way that class, religion, politics, familial jealousies, and a nasty case of bronchitis combined to create the circumstances under which Bridget Cleary died. Bourke is careful, compassionate, and nonjudgmental, and she's very good at marking clearly the divide between what we can know and what we can only speculate about.
William Roughead was a Scottish lawyer and true crime writer in the first half of the twentieth century. I should confess first of all that I find him compulsively readable, although he may not be to everybody's taste (profoundly influenced by Dickens, check). The twelve essays collected in this book discuss crimes from 1765 to 1926, ranging from the infamous, like Burke & Hare, to the utterly obscure, like Katharine Nairn or John Donald Merrett. I can see his influence quite strongly in Dorothy Sayers (it doesn't hurt that some of the cases he discusses are cases she clearly used as inspiration for her stories, like Madeleine Smith (Harriet is kind of an inversion of Smith in Strong Poison) and Dr. Pritchard (quite explicitly, in the opening of Unnatural Death)). I have thus far resisted the urge to go to Amazon and just buy all the Roughead I can find, but it's a struggle. He has also pointed me toward other true crime writers of his era, and I shall be seeking them out, as well. And I shall bewail the fact that the Notable British Trials series (also prominent in Sayers) is out of print and the individual volumes going for crazy amounts of money.
It is also thanks to Mr. Roughead that I found Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, which is another excellent book, this one about the murder of Francis Saville Kent in 1860. Summerscale not only charts the 10-days-wonder of the investigation and the belated (and somewhat doubtful) confession of the little boy's half-sister, but also fits the case into the criminological history of Victorian England and the history of its crime literature. Inspector Whicher, who was pilloried in the press for daring (correctly) to accuse a sixteen-year-old girl of murder, was the model for Wilkie Collins' Sergeant Cuff, and more broadly, his Pyrrhic success in the Kent case (he was right, but couldn't prove it for a variety of reasons, mostly to do with other people NOT DOING THEIR JOBS) was a major cause of the fall of the police detective from an idolized and idealized superman to Inspectors Lestrade, Gregson, Jones, et al. in Conan Doyle.
The one thing I wish Summerscale had done is, at the end, after she'd laid out all the evidence (and we have more evidence than Whicher did), I wish she'd gone back and listed out the remaining discrepancies. Because there are several, and I don't know that Summerscale's theory (that Constance and her full brother William committed the murder together and that her confession was meant to exonerate him and free him from the burden of the family scandal) entirely resolves them. It's quite clear--it's clear from reading Roughead, although if Roughead recognizes it, he doesn't make it explicit--that Constance murdered her little half brother to get revenge upon her stepmother (and father, although she never says so) for their treatment of her full brother. (Her anxiety to assure everyone that she wasn't seeking revenge for their treatment of her is telling.) But it's not clear that William was guilty, and it's not clear that assuming his guilt solves more problems than it causes.
But I almost always want true crime writers to provide more explicit meta-commentary on the crime and the crime-solving process, and the fact that Summerscale doesn't give me what I want doesn't mean she hasn't written a very good book.
So there was a serial killer at work in Paris under the Nazi occupation. His name was Marcel Petiot, and the number of his victims is actually unknown. "More than ten" is about as precise as anyone can get. Petiot's M.O. was grisly in itself: he pretended he was a Resistance fighter, running an organization to smuggle Jews, and downed Allied pilots, and other people who wished urgently to leave, out of France. He took his victims' money, had them pack their clothes and valuables, and brought them to his house on rue Le Sueur, where he killed them, means unknown, dismembered them (and the forensic pathologists of Paris were quite admiring of his skill), and variously burned their bodies, treated them with lime, or dumped them, piecemeal, in the Seine. King speculates that he used cyanide gas to kill them (as the Nazis were using at Auschwitz & other death camps), and it's a good speculation. Petiot had any number of people helping him in his operation, people who may or may not have known what was really going on, and--although King doesn't really discuss this adequately--he seems to have been an entirely opportunistic killer. Whoever his nets brought in, that was who Petiot killed.
This is an interesting book, and I suppose I'd rate it "pretty good." King's prose is functional (except where he fails things like parallel structure), and I don't envy him his task of trying to organize his bewildering material. (Although there were a couple of little ha-ha! bait-and-switches in his narrative that I could really have done without.) But here, even more than with Summerscale, I really wanted a final chapter that stepped back and took stock, rather than leaving me floundering between the accusations of the prosecuting lawyers, the indignant rebuttal of Petiot (he claimed that everyone he killed was either a German or in the pay of the Germans and that he was, in essence, being prosecuted for being a patriotic Frenchman), and the weaselings of the defense attorney. Petiot was clearly guilty and clearly a sociopath, but there was still a lot of muddle left over, and I kept feeling like not all of the muddle was inevitable.
King, David. Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris. New York: Broadway Paperbacks-Random House, 2011.
Roughead, William. Classic Crimes. New York: New York Review Books, 2000.
Summerscale, Kate. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective. New York: Walker & Co., 2008.
I may have blogged about The Burning of Bridget Cleary before, but if so, I can't find the entry, and y'know, it doesn't hurt to say again that this is an excellent book.
Bridget Cleary was burned to death by her husband in 1895. The reasons--as Bourke demonstrates--are difficult to tease out; it isn't clear ultimately whether Michael Cleary believed his wife was a changeling, or if in the aftermath of her (at least semi-accidental) death, maddened with grief and guilt, he came to believe that he believed she was a changeling. Bourke is very interested in the ways that traditional Irish folk beliefs, as a coherent system of orally transmitted knowledge, were becoming obsolete at the same time that, as artifacts of indigenous Irish culture, they were acquiring a different kind of value. And she's interested in the ways that those two different kinds of valuation were hopelessly and tragically at loggerheads in the Clearys' house in the summer of 1895. She describes the way that class, religion, politics, familial jealousies, and a nasty case of bronchitis combined to create the circumstances under which Bridget Cleary died. Bourke is careful, compassionate, and nonjudgmental, and she's very good at marking clearly the divide between what we can know and what we can only speculate about.
William Roughead was a Scottish lawyer and true crime writer in the first half of the twentieth century. I should confess first of all that I find him compulsively readable, although he may not be to everybody's taste (profoundly influenced by Dickens, check). The twelve essays collected in this book discuss crimes from 1765 to 1926, ranging from the infamous, like Burke & Hare, to the utterly obscure, like Katharine Nairn or John Donald Merrett. I can see his influence quite strongly in Dorothy Sayers (it doesn't hurt that some of the cases he discusses are cases she clearly used as inspiration for her stories, like Madeleine Smith (Harriet is kind of an inversion of Smith in Strong Poison) and Dr. Pritchard (quite explicitly, in the opening of Unnatural Death)). I have thus far resisted the urge to go to Amazon and just buy all the Roughead I can find, but it's a struggle. He has also pointed me toward other true crime writers of his era, and I shall be seeking them out, as well. And I shall bewail the fact that the Notable British Trials series (also prominent in Sayers) is out of print and the individual volumes going for crazy amounts of money.
It is also thanks to Mr. Roughead that I found Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, which is another excellent book, this one about the murder of Francis Saville Kent in 1860. Summerscale not only charts the 10-days-wonder of the investigation and the belated (and somewhat doubtful) confession of the little boy's half-sister, but also fits the case into the criminological history of Victorian England and the history of its crime literature. Inspector Whicher, who was pilloried in the press for daring (correctly) to accuse a sixteen-year-old girl of murder, was the model for Wilkie Collins' Sergeant Cuff, and more broadly, his Pyrrhic success in the Kent case (he was right, but couldn't prove it for a variety of reasons, mostly to do with other people NOT DOING THEIR JOBS) was a major cause of the fall of the police detective from an idolized and idealized superman to Inspectors Lestrade, Gregson, Jones, et al. in Conan Doyle.
The one thing I wish Summerscale had done is, at the end, after she'd laid out all the evidence (and we have more evidence than Whicher did), I wish she'd gone back and listed out the remaining discrepancies. Because there are several, and I don't know that Summerscale's theory (that Constance and her full brother William committed the murder together and that her confession was meant to exonerate him and free him from the burden of the family scandal) entirely resolves them. It's quite clear--it's clear from reading Roughead, although if Roughead recognizes it, he doesn't make it explicit--that Constance murdered her little half brother to get revenge upon her stepmother (and father, although she never says so) for their treatment of her full brother. (Her anxiety to assure everyone that she wasn't seeking revenge for their treatment of her is telling.) But it's not clear that William was guilty, and it's not clear that assuming his guilt solves more problems than it causes.
But I almost always want true crime writers to provide more explicit meta-commentary on the crime and the crime-solving process, and the fact that Summerscale doesn't give me what I want doesn't mean she hasn't written a very good book.
So there was a serial killer at work in Paris under the Nazi occupation. His name was Marcel Petiot, and the number of his victims is actually unknown. "More than ten" is about as precise as anyone can get. Petiot's M.O. was grisly in itself: he pretended he was a Resistance fighter, running an organization to smuggle Jews, and downed Allied pilots, and other people who wished urgently to leave, out of France. He took his victims' money, had them pack their clothes and valuables, and brought them to his house on rue Le Sueur, where he killed them, means unknown, dismembered them (and the forensic pathologists of Paris were quite admiring of his skill), and variously burned their bodies, treated them with lime, or dumped them, piecemeal, in the Seine. King speculates that he used cyanide gas to kill them (as the Nazis were using at Auschwitz & other death camps), and it's a good speculation. Petiot had any number of people helping him in his operation, people who may or may not have known what was really going on, and--although King doesn't really discuss this adequately--he seems to have been an entirely opportunistic killer. Whoever his nets brought in, that was who Petiot killed.
This is an interesting book, and I suppose I'd rate it "pretty good." King's prose is functional (except where he fails things like parallel structure), and I don't envy him his task of trying to organize his bewildering material. (Although there were a couple of little ha-ha! bait-and-switches in his narrative that I could really have done without.) But here, even more than with Summerscale, I really wanted a final chapter that stepped back and took stock, rather than leaving me floundering between the accusations of the prosecuting lawyers, the indignant rebuttal of Petiot (he claimed that everyone he killed was either a German or in the pay of the Germans and that he was, in essence, being prosecuted for being a patriotic Frenchman), and the weaselings of the defense attorney. Petiot was clearly guilty and clearly a sociopath, but there was still a lot of muddle left over, and I kept feeling like not all of the muddle was inevitable.
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