truepenny | UBC: Trillin, Killings

Killings by Calvin Trillin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Contents
"A Stranger with a Camera" (Jeremiah, Kentucky, April 1969) Hugh O'Connor, killed by Hobart Ison
"I've Always Been Clean" (West Chester, Pennsylvania, June 1970) Jonathan Henry, killed by John Mervin
"Jim, Tex, and the One-Armed Man" (Center Junction, Iowa, February 1971) Tex Yarborough, killed by Jim Berry
"Sergei Kourdakov" (Southern California, May 1973) Sergei Kourdakov, killed by self?
"You Always Turn Your Head" (Gallup, New Mexico, May 1973) Larry Casuse, killed by self? cops?
"Harvey St. Jean Had It Made" (Miami Beach, Florida, March 1975) Harvey St. Jean, killed by unknown (N.b., St. Jean was Candy Mossler's defense attorney.)
"Partners" (New England, October 1975) John Oi & William Sheehan, killed by Armand Therrien
"Melisha Morganna Gibson" (Cleveland, Tennessee, January 1977 [80 miles away, I was 2 years old]) Melisha Morganna Gibson (age 4), killed by her stepfather, Ronnie Maddux: "There was nothing at all unusual about taking an abused child back to the family that had abused her" (100).
"Family Problems" (Manchester, New Hampshire, July 1978) John Betley and Doris Piasecny, killed by her husband Hank Piasecny in 1963; Hank Piasecny killed in turn, 15 years later, by his and Doris' daughter, Susah Piasecny Hughes
"Todo Se Paga" (Riverside, California, February 1979) several people killed in a feud between the Lozano and Ahumada families
"It's Just Too Late" (Knoxville, Tennessee, March 1979 [25 miles away, I was 4 years old]) FaNee Cooper (pronounced Faw-NEE) killed in a car accident?--did she cause it herself? was it reckless driving? did her stepfather, pursuing the car in which FaNee was riding, cause the accident by giving chase? Sad, infuriating, fascinating.
"Called at Rushton" (Central Pennsylvania, November 1979) Marilyn McCusker, killed in an industrial accident at a coal mine--cruelly on topic in 2017
"Resettling the Yangs" (Fairfield, Iowa, March 1980) So Yang, 8 year old Hmong boy, killed by his father Theng Pao Yang in a botched murder-suicide
"Among Friends" (Savannah, Georgia, February 1981) George Mercer IV, killed by (most likely) Michael Harper in a botched kidnapping-for-extortion (which may have been a botched fraudulent kidnapping-for-extortion, with Mercer on board for all of the plan right up to the murder)
"The Mystery of Walter Bopp" (Tucson, Arizona, May 1981) Walter Bopp killed by unknown, with an array of startling possible motives
"A Father-Son Operation" (Grundy County, Iowa, September 1982) Esther Meester Hartman, killed by her husband of more than 30 years, Lawrence Hartman

[Incidentally, The New Yorker has Trillin's essays online.]

This one is tricky. I don't know whether to give it four stars because I found it somewhat unsatisfying . . . or to give it five stars because I found it somewhat unsatisfying, and that's the point.

This is a collection of essays written for The New Yorker, in which Trillin is writing slice-of-life Americana pieces, except that they're all about homicides. And he's very precise in his title. All of them are killings, but not all of them are murders

Like The 1st 48, which I have a semi-guilty love for, Trillin's pieces are at least half about the way that, in real life, homicides often aren't mysteries and don't have plots. If they are mysteries, they often go completely unsolved, or the police know who did it but don't have enough evidence for a conviction, or everyone knows who did it but has no evidence at all. Bits of the coming homicide can be seen in the victim's life--but not all of it. Trillin is looking for patterns, but he's not looking for conventional patterns. He's looking for the patterns that form around the homicide, not the pattern of the homicide itself. He talks to everyone who will talk to him, and he is clearly striving to be unjudgmental without the false lacquer of "objectivity." He's interested in subjectivity, in how people understand the great disasters they are part of, in what stories they tell themselves and why. In his afterword, he notes that the patterns he finds may or may not be patterns that hold up over time, and cites several cases in which the pattern Trillin wrote about was destroyed weeks or months later when new information surfaced. As far as he's concerned, that's part of the pattern, too.

These are short pieces, plangent, beautifully written. If they're frustrating, and they are, it's because that's the nature of reality, which is not obliged to be plausible or satisfying.

So, okay, yes. Five stars.

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