truepenny | Review: Peters, The Infamous Harry Hayward (Reply)

The Infamous Harry Hayward: A True Account of Murder and Mesmerism in Gilded Age Minneapolis by Shawn Francis Peters

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I find myself profoundly meh about this book, so much so that I'm having a hard time thinking of anything to say about it. It wasn't a bad book, but it wasn't terribly interesting. (Also, the subtitle, "A True Account of Murder and Mesmerism in Gilded Age Minneapolis," is take a few liberties with the truth. Hayward was BELIEVED to mesmerize people, but there's not a lick of evidence to say he actually DID, and he was not a professional, or even amateur, mesmerist.) Hayward was, as Peters says, a textbook psychopath, charismatic, amoral, reckless, homicidal when bored. He devised an elaborate plot to cheat a young woman named Catherine Ging out of all her money and then kill her and collect on her life-insurance policies. The only really remarkable thing here is that he actually found a catspaw to commit the murder for him--on the mistaken theory that if he didn't pull the trigger himself, he couldn't be convicted of her murder. His second line of defense was to throw all the blame on his brother, and I suppose the other remarkable thing here is the Hawyard family dynamics, where in their parents' eyes the bad brother (and Harry Hayward was clearly a bad man long before he met Kittie Ging) could do no wrong and the good brother could do no right (and a third brother apparently stayed the hell out of it).

Competently written (although badly copy-edited) but without the particular gift for exposition that could make me fascinated by this case.

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