UBC: Rule, The End of the Dream: The Golden Boy Who Never Grew Up, and Other True Cases

[truepenny]

The End of the Dream: The Golden Boy Who Never Grew Up by Ann Rule

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

• The End of the Dream: Scott Scurlock (aka Hollywood), bank robber, Seattle 1992-1996
  
• "The Peeping Tom": the murder of Kay Owens, Salem OR, 1971
  
• The Girl Who Fell in Love with her Killer": Granite Falls WA, 1973 ("Barbie Linley," 15, was raped, shot three times in the head, and left for dead in a ditch. By some terrible miracle she survived . . . only to fall in love with and marry her rapist/nearly-murderer before his trial.)
  
• "An Unlikely Suspect": King County WA, 1974 (the murder of "Vera English" by her 14 year old stepson)

Scott Scurlock is also the subject of an episode of The FBI Files, which I watched yesterday. Because I'm interested in storytelling, it was fascinating for me to watch the very different ways this story was presented. The FBI Files is, of course, all about the investigators and the investigation; Rule, although also interested in the investigators and the investigation (it was honestly awesome to be able to watch her protagonists being interviewed, to fit their voices and faces together with her descriptions), gives equal focus, and considerably more words, to the bizarre career of Scott Scurlock, from mildly wild boy in Virginia, to beach bum in Hawaii, to methamphetamine chemist in Washington State, to bank robber. (For some reason, The FBI Files describes him as a local actor, which he was not--or, at least, not in any legitimate sense.) Along the way, he built (or had his friends build for him) the "biggest treehouse in the world." Rule emphasizes the way that Scurlock used and discarded friends and lovers alike, and the way he absolutely destroyed the lives of his two accomplices, Mark Biggins and Steve Meyers. (Steve Meyers' brother, artist Robert Meyers, clearly gave generous interviews.) The FBI Files doesn't really care why Scurlock did what he did. Rule does, and she does her best to diagram out the reconstructed thought processes of someone who ticks off a bunch of items on the Hi! I am a Sociopath! list.

The shorter pieces in this book show how hard true crime writing actually is; the less space you have, the less you can create narrative tension, the less your story has any sense of payoff. And I don't mean that in a "good triumphs over evil" way, but simply structurally. The stories are all kind of flat, even when the events themselves are almost unbelievable. (A fourteen-year-old boy, wanted for murder, driving his victim's car, making it all the way from Washington State to Florida? A fifteen-year-old girl surviving being shot in the head three times, and then marrying the guy who shot and raped her?) This may be where being a gifted prose stylist can be your saving grace. Rule is a good and compelling writer, but she doesn't have the élan to her writing that William Roughead does, or Jonathan Goodman when he's on a roll. (Goodman is evidence that one can also have too much style to one's prose, but that's a different problem.) I'll reread Roughead, and Goodman's better pieces, simply for the pleasure of reading them, and that's not something I can say about Rule.



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