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True Crime: An American Anthology
edited by Harold Schechter
By
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
Non Fiction
True Crime: An American Anthology
edited by Harold Schechter
Well, not crime, if by crime you mean arson and rape and robbery and all manner of white-collar criminality.
Murder. Just murder. Fifty articles. 700 pages. True Crime is all murder.
You know how it is with anthologies. They take you back — in this case, to show you how respectable folk like Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain all wrote murder stories. What anthologists never tell you: These books are done on tight budgets, and a very good reason to fill a hundred pages of a brick of a book is because there is nothing sweeter than a great author’s great story that is in the public domain and thus costs nothing to include. (That’s probably why there’s nothing here from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood or Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song — their agents are, no doubt, mercenaries.)
Once you’re on the modern side of Lincoln, though, anyone interested either in murder or colorful writing — or blood, gore and guts — will snap to attention.
Here’s Ambrose Bierce:
Charles O’Neil was, it seems, temporarily insane when he threw his wife off the balcony and broke her precious neck. Charles O’Neil, would that we had but had the sentencing of thee — there would have been another neck broken. We yearn for a law making temporary insanity a capital offense.
And Edmund Pearson, the first dean of American crime writing:
A noose was put around Brockmann’s neck, and he was pulled aloft from a tree branch or whatever was the nearest support. After a moment or two he was let down and given a chance to confess. He protested his innocence — and he probably spoke the truth….
And the great Damon Runyon, who’d go on to write Guys and Dolls, writing about a blonde and her lover who happened to kill — you guessed it — her husband:
She is not bad looking. I have seen much worse. She is thirty-three and looks just about that, though you cannot tell much about blondes.
There’s a chunk of Herbert Asbury’s classic Gangs of New York (yes, the film began life as a book). Edna Ferber on the trial of the alleged killer of the Lindbergh baby. Jim Thompson, the noir novelist and author of The Killer Inside Me, in a piece written in the voice of a homicide detective. Meyer Berger’s 4,000-word account, written in just two-and-a-half hours for The New York Times, of America’s first mass murderer: “Unruh fired into the closet where Mrs. Cohen was hidden. She fell dead behind the closed door, and he did not bother to open it.” Jack Webb — yes, the star of “Dragnet” — on the Black Dahlia murder. Robert Bloch — he’d write Psycho — on a sicko who robbed graves for a dozen years.
For the murder buff — and especially the young murder buff, who wasn’t around when many of these crimes were committed — the last two hundred pages are gold. The murder of eight nurses in Chicago by Charles Speck. Gay Talese on Charlie Manson’s gang: “Then one day a school bus carrying hippies arrived at the ranch and parked in the woods, and young girls approached Spahn’s doorway and tapped lightly on the screen, and asked if they could stay for a few days.” Truman Capote’s chilling conversation with one of Manson’s gang. The killing of Johnny Stompanato by Lana Turner’s daughter. James Ellroy, on his mother’s killer: “My mother went out drinking Saturday night… A group of Little Leaguers discovered the body.”
The book ends with Dominick Dunne’s Vanity Fair takedown on the Menendez brothers, who shotgunned their parents in their Beverly Hills home. Just the right ending. In an afterword, Dunne writes:
The trial went on for months. Erik and Lyle Menendez, the young killers, became romantic figures in the televised proceedings. In cases of high crime, I’ve never made any attempt to present a balanced picture. This was no exception. I was appalled by the lies I heard defense attorneys tell in the courtroom. I became despised by Leslie Abramson, the lead defense attorney. I couldn’t have cared less.
You can say: Wow, we’ve come a long way since the cool and dispassionate crime writing of old. But then, so has crime. Dunne, again:
Kitty and Jose Menendez had been gunned down several months earlier in a fusillade of fourteen twelve-gauge shotgun blasts — five to the head and body of the father, nine to the face and body of the mother….
Dan Stewart, a retired police detective hired by the family to investigate the murders, gave the most graphic description of the sight in the television room. “I’ve seen a lot of homicides, but nothing quite that brutal. Blood, flesh, skulls. It would be hard to describe, especially Jose, as resembling a human being….”
If you like this stuff — and so many do — this book will have you up late for weeks.
To buy “True Crime: An American Anthology” from Amazon.com, click here.
