UBC: Gilmore, Cold-Blooded

[truepenny]

Cold-Blooded: The Saga of Charles Schmid, the Notorious "Pied Piper of Tucson" by John Gilmore

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


[loan--thank you, kind patron!]

This is an straightforward, bare bones account of the murderous career of Charles "Smitty" Schmid, who murdered Alleen Rowe because he wanted to know what it was like to murder someone, Gretchen Fritz because she was blackmailing him about the Rowe murder (and because he was tired of her and her drama: Gretchen & Smitty are basically a case of one sociopath consuming another), and Wendy Fritz because she had the bad luck to be with her sister. Gilmore's account is almost entirely testimony and interviews, which on the one hand is great because it's all primary sources and you do get an unpleasantly vivid sense of Schmid's personality, but on the other hand ends up feeling flat and unfinished--which may just be the effect of my personal taste rather than a problem with the book.

I think it *is* a problem with the book that it feels so disorganized. The straight chronological account with no kind of meta-narrative or assessment or exploration of contradictions is certainly verisimilitudinous, but while I look to my nonfiction reading for truth (or as close as we can ever get), this kind of chaotic quotidian verisimilitude is something my real life provides me plenty of. We find the truth of history not in replaying it like a cassette tape, as the tape gets thinner and thinner and finally breaks, but by analyzing what's on the tape. Or at least (and here my metaphor falls apart) by providing signposts to guide the reader through the disorganized facts.

This was interesting for what it was, but it could have been much more interesting if treated as history, there to be analyzed and questioned, rather than "objective" reporting.



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