UBC: Goodman, Boessenecker, Gardner
Jul. 21st, 2013 12:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepenny3 books this time, two mediocre, and one quite good. I'm discussing them in that order, with the Boessenecker & Gardner together because their subjects harmonize--it wasn't a planned diptych, but they turn out to make excellent foils for each other.
Goodman, Jonathan. Murder on Several Occasions. Illus. Nina Lewis Smart. Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2007.
This is a collection of true crime essays by an English writer, apparently very well known. Goodman is too précieux for my taste, which, given that I am someone who will use précieux in a sentence, probably tells you about as much as you need to know. He seems to be modeling himself at least somewhat on William Roughead, but at an even further remove from the Victorian/Edwardian writers that Roughead was modeling himself on, and with a kind of archness that I found deeply off-putting, the style simply gets in the way. The more modern the crime, in particular, the more jarring the elaborate flourishes of the prose became. There may have been a deliberate intention to create an alienation effect, but if so, I found it to be a poor choice and in somewhat dubious taste.
(I've blogged about my aversion-compulsion relationship with true crime as a genre before, so for now let's just say that I was rubbed the wrong way by Goodman's air of handing round the popcorn.)
I thought that was going to be all I had to say about Goodman, but then I hit his essay, "Doubts about Hauptmann," in which he forgets to be arch because he is consumed with venomous fury toward Sir Ludovic Kennedy and his book The Airman and the Carpenter. Murder on Several Occasions was worth buying for that essay alone, because when he's mad enough to spit nails, Goodman is an excellent writer, clear and vicious and compelling. That essay was worth the irritation of some of the other essays in the book.
The essay on George Smith (he, as Dorothy Sayers says, of brides-in-the-bath fame), "Also Known as Love," was also very good, and although I disliked Goodman's essay on Burke and Hare, mostly because he was defending Robert Knox, but without any evidence that Knox ought to be defended (if Knox didn't know for a fact that his dissection subjects were murder victims, he certainly had enough evidence that he should have been asking some very pointed questions; one possibility is marginally less culpable than the other, but only marginally), the postscript about Bishop, Williams, and May, who tried the same get-rich-quick scheme in London in 1831, made up for it.
Boessenecker, John. Badge and Buckshot: Lawlessness in Old California. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988. [library]
I wanted this book to be so much better than it is, because I realized (as a consequence of To Hell on a Fast Horse, which I'll get to in a minute) that one of the things that fascinates me about the quote-unquote Old West is how permeable the boundary between the outlaws and the lawmen was. You can see it in a highly compressed form in the matter of Tombstone, but it's visible in the careers of any number of men (including both Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid), how which side of the line they stood on depended on what day it was and which way the wind was blowing.
Boessenecker is not interested in this question. He is, in fact, the opposite of interested. He is interested in idolizing the lawmen in late nineteenth-century California and demonizing the outlaws. It is a telling detail that he uses, without irony or any sense of possible problems, the word "badman" to describe the law-breakers he discusses. It is true that some of them were very bad men, but that completely unselfconsious labelling of them says way more about Boessenecker than it does about any of his subjects.
Unfortunately, this simple binary of good and bad makes his potentially fascinating subject matter flat and largely uninteresting. He writes flatly uninteresting hagiographies of John C. Boggs, Steve Venard, Ben K. Thorn, Doc Standley, and Tom Cunningham (sheriffs and marshals, and of them, the only one who stands up off the page is Doc Standley, and that because his sense of humor is palpable in the anecdotes Boessenecker relates), and then flatly uninteresting and unnuanced accounts of Captain Rufus Ingram, C.S.A.*, Bill Miner, Kid Thompson and Alva Johnson, Ben and Dudley Johnson, and George and Vern Gates. The last section of the book, about lynchings, was actually compelling despite Boessenecker, because even he couldn't flatten out the deeply problematic nature of the relationship of lynching to the law, and the fact that--especially in regards to the Modoc County lynchings--the law could be so grossly partisan and incompetent as to be practically "badmen" themselves.
Boessenecker has no grasp of how to tell a story. He swamps the reader with trivial details, uses the passive voice to elide important questions of agency, and is incredibly frustrating because of his refusal to examine any of the difficult issues raised by the history he presents. On the other hand, he has certainly done his research, so if you need a source for this particular corner of history, he is, if nothing else, a good place to start.
---
*Captain Ingram, in the middle of robbing a stagecoach: "Gentlemen, I will tell you who we are. We are not robbers, but a company of Confederate soldiers." The fairies at Captain Ingram's christening clearly forgot to give him the gift of irony.
Gardner, Mark Lee. To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West. New York: William Morrow-HarperCollins, 2010.
This book is the story of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett, and what makes it a really good book is that, for Gardner, that story does not end with Billy's death. It isn't a simple story, either. Gardner is very aware of the ethical questions Boessenecker avoids and very aware of the forces pulling and pushing against each other in New Mexico in the 1880s. Billy wasn't an outlaw because he was a "badman," although he was certainly not a good man, either. He was an outlaw because he ended up on the wrong side in the Lincoln County War, and because the Governor of New Mexico felt that it simply was not necessary for a man like him to keep a promise made to a man like Billy. (Of all the awful people in this book--and there are a lot of them--Governor Wallace may actually be the most repellent.)
And Pat Garrett wasn't a simple cardboard saint like the lawmen in Boessenecker's version of history. Gardner makes it clear that Garrett could have been an outlaw instead of a lawman; both before and after he killed Billy, he was involved in deals that were shady at best and he, like Wyatt Earp, was a gambler, a man who was never going to stop looking for the big score and thus a man who was perpetually in debt. His own, only dubiously solved, murder was in the middle of another ethically fraught tangle, once again in Lincoln County, around the still unsolved disappearance of Albert Jennings Fountain. Gardner is aware, as Boessenecker refuses to be, that history is messy and full of questions to which there are no answers, and his efforts to find answers anyway, to puzzle out the motivations of Billy the Kid as well as the motivations of Pat Garrett, are what make this book worthwhile and satisfying in a way Boessenecker isn't.
Goodman, Jonathan. Murder on Several Occasions. Illus. Nina Lewis Smart. Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2007.
This is a collection of true crime essays by an English writer, apparently very well known. Goodman is too précieux for my taste, which, given that I am someone who will use précieux in a sentence, probably tells you about as much as you need to know. He seems to be modeling himself at least somewhat on William Roughead, but at an even further remove from the Victorian/Edwardian writers that Roughead was modeling himself on, and with a kind of archness that I found deeply off-putting, the style simply gets in the way. The more modern the crime, in particular, the more jarring the elaborate flourishes of the prose became. There may have been a deliberate intention to create an alienation effect, but if so, I found it to be a poor choice and in somewhat dubious taste.
(I've blogged about my aversion-compulsion relationship with true crime as a genre before, so for now let's just say that I was rubbed the wrong way by Goodman's air of handing round the popcorn.)
I thought that was going to be all I had to say about Goodman, but then I hit his essay, "Doubts about Hauptmann," in which he forgets to be arch because he is consumed with venomous fury toward Sir Ludovic Kennedy and his book The Airman and the Carpenter. Murder on Several Occasions was worth buying for that essay alone, because when he's mad enough to spit nails, Goodman is an excellent writer, clear and vicious and compelling. That essay was worth the irritation of some of the other essays in the book.
The essay on George Smith (he, as Dorothy Sayers says, of brides-in-the-bath fame), "Also Known as Love," was also very good, and although I disliked Goodman's essay on Burke and Hare, mostly because he was defending Robert Knox, but without any evidence that Knox ought to be defended (if Knox didn't know for a fact that his dissection subjects were murder victims, he certainly had enough evidence that he should have been asking some very pointed questions; one possibility is marginally less culpable than the other, but only marginally), the postscript about Bishop, Williams, and May, who tried the same get-rich-quick scheme in London in 1831, made up for it.
Boessenecker, John. Badge and Buckshot: Lawlessness in Old California. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988. [library]
I wanted this book to be so much better than it is, because I realized (as a consequence of To Hell on a Fast Horse, which I'll get to in a minute) that one of the things that fascinates me about the quote-unquote Old West is how permeable the boundary between the outlaws and the lawmen was. You can see it in a highly compressed form in the matter of Tombstone, but it's visible in the careers of any number of men (including both Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid), how which side of the line they stood on depended on what day it was and which way the wind was blowing.
Boessenecker is not interested in this question. He is, in fact, the opposite of interested. He is interested in idolizing the lawmen in late nineteenth-century California and demonizing the outlaws. It is a telling detail that he uses, without irony or any sense of possible problems, the word "badman" to describe the law-breakers he discusses. It is true that some of them were very bad men, but that completely unselfconsious labelling of them says way more about Boessenecker than it does about any of his subjects.
Unfortunately, this simple binary of good and bad makes his potentially fascinating subject matter flat and largely uninteresting. He writes flatly uninteresting hagiographies of John C. Boggs, Steve Venard, Ben K. Thorn, Doc Standley, and Tom Cunningham (sheriffs and marshals, and of them, the only one who stands up off the page is Doc Standley, and that because his sense of humor is palpable in the anecdotes Boessenecker relates), and then flatly uninteresting and unnuanced accounts of Captain Rufus Ingram, C.S.A.*, Bill Miner, Kid Thompson and Alva Johnson, Ben and Dudley Johnson, and George and Vern Gates. The last section of the book, about lynchings, was actually compelling despite Boessenecker, because even he couldn't flatten out the deeply problematic nature of the relationship of lynching to the law, and the fact that--especially in regards to the Modoc County lynchings--the law could be so grossly partisan and incompetent as to be practically "badmen" themselves.
Boessenecker has no grasp of how to tell a story. He swamps the reader with trivial details, uses the passive voice to elide important questions of agency, and is incredibly frustrating because of his refusal to examine any of the difficult issues raised by the history he presents. On the other hand, he has certainly done his research, so if you need a source for this particular corner of history, he is, if nothing else, a good place to start.
---
*Captain Ingram, in the middle of robbing a stagecoach: "Gentlemen, I will tell you who we are. We are not robbers, but a company of Confederate soldiers." The fairies at Captain Ingram's christening clearly forgot to give him the gift of irony.
Gardner, Mark Lee. To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West. New York: William Morrow-HarperCollins, 2010.
This book is the story of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett, and what makes it a really good book is that, for Gardner, that story does not end with Billy's death. It isn't a simple story, either. Gardner is very aware of the ethical questions Boessenecker avoids and very aware of the forces pulling and pushing against each other in New Mexico in the 1880s. Billy wasn't an outlaw because he was a "badman," although he was certainly not a good man, either. He was an outlaw because he ended up on the wrong side in the Lincoln County War, and because the Governor of New Mexico felt that it simply was not necessary for a man like him to keep a promise made to a man like Billy. (Of all the awful people in this book--and there are a lot of them--Governor Wallace may actually be the most repellent.)
And Pat Garrett wasn't a simple cardboard saint like the lawmen in Boessenecker's version of history. Gardner makes it clear that Garrett could have been an outlaw instead of a lawman; both before and after he killed Billy, he was involved in deals that were shady at best and he, like Wyatt Earp, was a gambler, a man who was never going to stop looking for the big score and thus a man who was perpetually in debt. His own, only dubiously solved, murder was in the middle of another ethically fraught tangle, once again in Lincoln County, around the still unsolved disappearance of Albert Jennings Fountain. Gardner is aware, as Boessenecker refuses to be, that history is messy and full of questions to which there are no answers, and his efforts to find answers anyway, to puzzle out the motivations of Billy the Kid as well as the motivations of Pat Garrett, are what make this book worthwhile and satisfying in a way Boessenecker isn't.
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Date: 2013-07-21 09:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-21 09:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-23 07:50 am (UTC)Admittedly Firefly isn't a realistic pictire of the old west (and to be fair, isn't really trying to be), but that was one of the things that always rang true about it for me—the way Mal and his crew were perfectly happy being criminals, but were equally satisfied to take money to enforce the law if such a deal was on offer.
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Date: 2013-07-26 01:12 am (UTC)