Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

By Caroline Fraser

Page I bailed on: 28

Verdict: It might not be a bad book but it wasn’t what I was expecting or what I wanted. Given the title, which drops murder, crime, bloodlust, and serial killers, I was expecting something in the true crime vein. But it only comes at this indirectly.

More specifically, it’s a book that addresses the amount of serial killer activity in Washington State in the 1970s and ‘80s. Think names like Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway (the Green River Killer), Randy Woodfield (the I-5 Killer), or any of the other bad people you’ll find in books by Ann Rule, who made a career out of covering this beat. Fraser gives these killers a context that is meant to give some explanation for their appearance at this time and in this place. It begins by talking about something called the Olympic-Wallow Lineament, but we’re immediately told that “Nobody knows what it is.” After reading Fraser I had to do an Internet search to find some better explanation. I came away just as confused. Then we get a chapter on the building of a couple of bridges: the famously doomed Tacoma Narrows Bridge and the Mercer Island floating bridge. Interesting if you’re into bridges, or engineering in general. I wasn’t sure what it had to do with serial killers. After this, skimming ahead, we turn to the smelting industry and the pollution it caused. I think this is where Fraser is hanging her hat, making a connection between lead poisoning and an increase in headline murders.

Maybe she’s onto something, but I’d lost interest and was just turning pages. Fraser’s prose is overgrown with literary flourishes, like the one that begins on page 28 (not coincidentally, the page I bailed on):

Let us linger for a moment in that frothy postwar fizz of euphoria, when people are eager to swallow the cost of progress. How bad can it be, after the world has gone to war? It is a time of celebration.

Just for a moment, if you will, let us float across the country in that effervescent bubble of champagne elation and planetary subjugation and heedless sexual entitlement to look down from our cloud somewhere above Philadelphia and witness the conception of a noteworthy child.

Wait, are we in a bubble or a cloud? Either way, no thanks.

Also, as a child of the region Fraser can’t resist introducing a memoir angle into the proceedings, which as you may know by now is something I despise in true crime writing. This needs to stop.

In any event, as far as explainers go, I think Rule addressed the same subject in her books and for a sharp analysis of why this period became a “golden age” of serial killers I’d recommend Peter Vronsky’s American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years. Fraser’s speculations on pollution being partially at fault could have been the subject of a magazine article, but they feel lost in a grab-bag book of this size.

The DNF files