I’ll be updating this page with my notes on the true-crime books I’ve been reading, digging into stories about killings, heists, scams, spies, and other very bad (or at least slightly illegal) things from which I’ll try to draw some helpful life lessons.
A homeless man is found shot dead in an abandoned building. The word most often used to describe such people in these books is “tramp,” and I thought for a moment that Maigret and the Tramp would have been a better title for this one but then remembered that it had already been used.
As with the previous tramp, the victim here just walked out of his marriage and his old life, only to end up as a Parisian crime statistic some twenty years later. The mystery unravels in the usual perfunctory manner of the later Maigret novels. As a reader, Simenon doesn’t even let you play along because he just skims over any necessary information. Indeed, at one point I was surprised to find Maigret looking for a suspect who he described as very tall and thin with a long face and blue eyes. When I went back I couldn’t find where Maigret had got this description from, as the suspect had only been described as looking “very upright” by the first witness. A second witness, at least in his initial interview, doesn’t mention seeing anyone with the victim at all, but Maigret later calls him back in to identify the suspect. I feel like I missed something here, and probably did.
In any event, it doesn’t matter because a clue like that – a tall, thin man with blue eyes – doesn’t mean anything to a reader until you come to a later description of a character as a tall, thin man with blue eyes. At which point you know that’s the guy. Throw in the fact that this suspect and his wife sleep in separate bedrooms (always a bad sign in Maigret’s world) and the detective chief inspector has got his man. It’s all automatic and not very interesting, which by this point shouldn’t come as any surprise.
Murder Book: A Graphic Memoir of a True Crime Obsession
By Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell
Page I bailed on: 165
Verdict: Wasn’t my thing. Every artist has their own style, and since Campbell has risen to what I reckon is the top of her profession – a cartoonist for The New Yorker – then it’s pretty clear hers is working for her. But for me the slapdash drawing, which extends to lettering that in places is so sloppy I had trouble reading it because the letters were so poorly formed or spaced, didn’t seem expressive of much. It fits with all of the verbal tics and mannerisms of a generational voice, but that’s the best I can say for it. And that voice, while I could understand it, was something I didn’t relate to. The ironic self-awareness that comes with mocking millennials and their narcissism, while very much indulging the same, gets on my nerves. The whole genre of true-crime memoir does that too.
I want to emphasize though that in saying it’s not my thing I’m not saying it’s bad. I just didn’t feel like I was the target audience here. This feeling began on the first page, where Campbell welcomes us to her Murder Book by saying that you (the reader) must have bought it because you love murder, are a murderer, or are “trying to understand why your wife/girlfriend/daughter/niece/aunt/partner loves murder.” She says this because the audience for true crime is “mostly female.” Which is kind of off-putting, if you’re a man.
After a while, the whole “Fuck the patriarchy!” bit (yes, she says that, or yells it in bold caps) became tiresome and then started to grate. When Campbell mentions how Ted Bundy approached his victims and introduced himself using his real first name it’s presented as evidence of “how confident men are.” Huh? That’s a man thing? And why was Bundy successful at picking up women? Not because he was good-looking and intelligent but because he played to their sympathy and “Women, partly because most of us are decent human beings and partly because we’re socialized to be helpful, want to help those in need.” Campbell gives this another wink by saying it’s a “blanket statement, I know,” but it’s something you still hear a lot and I don’t really get it. Men aren’t socialized to be helpful or to want to help those in need? When Bundy presents himself as a security officer to another victim she goes along with him because “Women are taught to trust authority, not to question it.” It was just after this that I gave up and didn’t even bother skimming the rest. Women still hold views like this in the 2020s? Campbell’s obsession with the 1970s may go a lot deeper than she thinks.
Stellan Skarsgård working overtime.
Over at Alex on Film I’ve been looking at the two attempts made at an Exorcist prequel: Paul Schrader’s Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist and Renny Harlin’s Exorcist: The Beginning. What a two-car pile-up. Schrader was first man up, but the studio hated what he did and told Harlin to fix it. He ended up making an entirely new movie, which the studio didn’t like any better so they got Schrader to rejig his version.
It’s interesting to look at the two movies side by side just to see what two very different directors did with the same basic material. Both movies are terrible, but I can’t think of any other examples of something like this happening.
(1) Yes, Lear is more sinned against than sinning. But only just. Throughout the twentieth century critics started judging him more harshly, and that’s a turn we may not have seen the back of.
He really doesn’t start off well. We begin with an exercise in flattery, the pre-eminent sin of court life back then (whenever then was) as it is now. Today I think we may be less likely to feel sympathy for the old guy. Lear is a familiar type: enjoying living in a bubble of privilege maintained by his wealth, power, and celebrity. In olden days this was an exalted condition pretty much exclusive to royalty. The monarch or lord of the manor could surround himself with people who would only tell him what he wanted to hear. When, late in the play, Lear complains that “they told me I was everything: ‘tis a lie, I am not ague-proof,” he seems doubly shocked in a way that’s startling. Is he put out because his courtiers lied to him, or to find that he is not ague-proof? Either way, he must have been pretty far gone to have put any stock in such flattery. Admittedly he’s quite old, and has probably lived in this bubble his entire life, but still. I think today the lesson would be the familiar one (to us) that you’re in trouble when you start believing in your own publicity.
Then again, why not? If you have enough money you can afford to buy your own version of reality. Lear’s house, Lear’s rules. It’s wrong to think of Lear as being entirely foolish here. He has a plan for the succession, it’s just that he’s not used to being crossed. Then the problems start when the plan comes apart in a way he hadn’t anticipated. The illusion machine stops being greased and the posse of riotous retainers instantly disappears. This is the madness that Lear fears: not that the world will stop making sense but that his world will stop making sense, will indeed fall to pieces.
This strikes me as being a message that’s still very much relevant to our own time, and one that’s just as disturbing today to think about. Put simply: wouldn’t it be better to maintain the illusion, even knowing it to be all a lie, and self-awareness be damned? This is the lesson of Plato’s parable of the cave. We all live in a world of make-believe, after all. Cordelia is just ruining it for everyone, and upsetting Lear’s actually rather careful plans for the succession, by not playing along.
This gets to the question of how much Lear actually believes in all of this court bullshit. “Thy truth then be thy dower,” is how he condemns Cordelia. I wonder if “thy truth” is related to what we mean today when we say people speak “their truth.” In any event, he’s saying that if that’s the way she wants to play it then she doesn’t get a cookie. So much for the truth. Cornwall is even more cynical when faced with Kent’s plain speaking:
This is some fellow
Who, having been praised for bluntness, doth affect
A saucy roughness, and constrains the garb
Quite from his nature. He cannot flatter, he:
An honest mind and plain, he must speak truth!
And they will take it, so: if not, he’s plain.
These kind of knaves I know, which in this plainness
Harbour more craft and more corrupter ends
Than twenty silly ducking observants
That stretch their duties nicely.
This actually echoes something Lear says in the first scene where he refers to Cordelia’s “pride, which she calls plainness,” but takes it even further. I wonder what’s worse: to not believe that people can speak truth, or to rage against it when they do? Cornwall’s way of thinking is more dangerous to the social order because nobody can be trusted (except to lie out of self-interest), while Lear’s is more dangerous to himself because it leaves him exposed when reality comes knocking. Either way, I think Lear comes off looking worse. He’s a spoiled old fool in the first act, and even out on the heath seems a bit too much like a child having a tantrum. Someone who rides on a tiger can never dismount, and if you live in a bubble you can never leave.
(2) Why so much interest in sexual matters, expressed in such lurid terms? This doesn’t seem to me to be a play about sexual passion at all. The only lusty ones on stage are the “murderous lechers” Goneril and Regan, and their feelings toward Edmund are not reciprocated as he’s indifferent to which of them he’ll end up with. But then there’s Edgar. As Poor Tom he implies, I think, that he’s lost his mind to syphilis, his downfall the result of having lived a life of dissolution (one who “slept in the contriving of lust, and waked to do it”). This is also connected indirectly to Gloucester. When Edgar reveals himself to Edmund at the end he says that “The dark and vicious place where thee he got [that is, where Gloucester begot Edmund, presumably in a brothel] / Cost him his eyes.” This may be another indirect nod to syphilis but it’s also just Edgar being moralistic again and looking to find some way to interpret what happened to Gloucester as effect following cause. I don’t think we need to follow his lead and draw the conclusion that some critics do: that Gloucester’s blindness is the wages of sin (in his case the physical sin of lechery). But aside from Edmund having been begotten between unlawful sheets some twenty or more years earlier where else is Gloucester’s lechery in evidence? This isn’t Ibsen’s Ghosts. (Marjorie Garber is one critic who has it in for Gloucester, saying that he has “been established in the play as the ‘old lecher’.” But the words “old lecher” are only a bit of figurative language used by the Fool and are not necessarily directed at Gloucester.)
Lear is more direct and forceful in his language, raging right up to the end about animal lechery. Below the waistline there’s only hell: “there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous burning, scalding, stench, consumption. Fie, fie, fie! Pah, pah!” This reminds me of Hamlet always being distracted by thoughts of his mother and Claudius romping in incestuous sheets (he even repeats the “Fie on’t! O fie!”). Hamlet’s father has to warn him about tainting his mind in this way. But to return to what bugs me: we expect this kind of language from Othello given the kind of things Iago is whispering in his ear, and even to some extent Hamlet, but why does Lear go down this road?
Such imaginings are the ravings of an unbalanced mind. Hamlet and Lear are getting carried away and finding in the language of runaway lust a sort of mental release valve. Claudius, Goneril, and Regan are villains who need to get their comeuppance, but their greatest sins aren’t lechery (and there’s no indication Lear is aware of his daughters’ chasing after Edmund anyway). Hamlet thinks Claudius a satyr but there’s little to no evidence for that, and he even acknowledges that the heyday of his mother’s blood is tame and humble so that she isn’t being driven by her hormones. Hamlet’s the only one who sees things in these terms, just as Lear is. And in many ways I find Lear’s raging about sex even stranger. I saw an interview with Ian McKellen where he was talking about playing Lear and musing over the same thing. He likened it to his elderly mother-in-law’s fascination with sex just before she died, and found it to be true of other old people as well. Is there anything more to it than that? Anthony Burgess speculated that the screaming against lechery (“totally without pretext in the plot”) might have been connected to Shakespeare suffering from venereal disease. Perhaps. In any event, I don’t think Shakespeare wants us to believe that bad people are all bad in the same predictable, bestial ways.
(3) In a footnote in his book on Shakespearean Tragedy A. C. Bradley dips a toe into the matter of linking Shakespeare’s biography to the writing of King Lear and draws the following tentative conclusion: “Shakespeare during these years was probably not a happy man, and it is quite likely that he felt at times even an intense melancholy, bitterness, contempt, anger, possibly even loathing and despair.”
Shakespeare changed his sources to give the play its unhappy ending, one that mocks the idea of poetic justice. This was so shocking and ahead of its time that for a couple of hundred years it had to be cleaned up. But it was obviously quite deliberate because that notion of poetic or divine justice is directly invoked only to be slapped down again and again. This really was a point Shakespeare was insisting on.
I don’t think Shakespeare believed in poetic justice outside of what would play well. He seems to have had a cynical view of how justice works. It crops up here in several places. Lear himself talks about how if “change places, and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?” Only “Place sins with gold / And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks.” Goneril has learned well from her father, and when confronted by Albany with proof of her own evil she can be dismissive: “the laws are mine, not thine: Who can arraign me for’t.” That’s not a question.
Justice, like truth, is something everybody expects can be bought.
Over the years I’ve been posting on words I’ve come across that I didn’t know but found kind of interesting. Here’s a list (not alphabetical, but in order of posting) that I’ll keep updating as I go along:
Catena and Pulvinate
Lethiferous
Equitation and Toxophilite
Oscitant
Azoic
Graticule
Dehiscence
Raddled
Pococurante
Gurning
Gulosity
Daven
Taradiddles
Virga
Shiver
Hassock
Infandous
Grawlix
Cataphonic
Lingamic
In Ben Macintyre’s A Spy Among Friends there’s the following description of the double agent Kim Philby gradually coming undone while stationed in Washington in the 1950s:
Philby was only thirty-eight but looked older. There was already something raddled in his handsome features. The eyes remained bright, but the bags beneath them were growing heavier, and the lunches at Harvey’s were taking a toll on his waistline.
At first blush I thought “raddled” must be a misprint for “rattled.” But somehow that seemed unlikely so I looked it up and found that there really is a word raddled that means old and worn-out or “confused . . . often associated with alcohol and drugs.” Since Philby was prematurely aged and drinking epic amounts at the time the word fit perfectly.
Nobody know where raddled comes from. Its first use in English may have come in a 1694 translation of Rabelais that described “a . . . fellow, continually raddled, and as drunk as a wheelbarrow.” Whatever that means. It may derive from “raddle,” which is a red ochre used for marking animals. From there, to be “raddled” came to refer to an overapplication of rouge. I don’t know how it then made the leap to meaning broken-down, confused and discomposed, but it blends in nicely with “addled” and “rattled.” Well played by Macintyre.
Over the past month I’ve been rewatching Ezra Edelman’s outstanding 2016 ESPN documentary series O.J.: Made in America. If you’ve never seen it, take this as a recommendation. It’s 7.5 hours but never flags for a minute.
For anyone old enough to remember it, the O.J. Simpson trial (which ran for nearly a year, ending in October 1995) really was the trial of the century. You can’t overstate how big it was. In 1996 I was actually in Los Angeles during the subsequent civil trial and even that was a media circus, though nowhere near as big a deal. I went to the courthouse one day and drew a ticket to get in to watch it, but wasn’t selected.
Revisiting all of this today, I was surprised at how the racial divide foreshadowed what was coming own the pipe in terms of American politics. What I’m referring to is the polarization and rejection of a shared reality. As Jeffrey Toobin puts it in the documentary when describing Johnnie Cochran’s address to the jury, “the heart of the summation was ‘whose side are you on?'” The point being that the jurors, who were mostly Black, were angry at the police and wanted payback not just for Rodney King but a whole history of racial injustice.
This felt very similar to the “jury nullification” of the Trump impeachments. The question wasn’t Trump’s guilt or innocence. The reporting I’ve heard is that there were no Republicans in the Senate who didn’t believe Trump had done everything he’d been accused of. The question was “whose side are you on?” Once you’d chosen your side, the verdict could be taken for granted. There was no need to build a case or present any evidence. The votes were already locked in.
There are other connections too. Like the celebrity angle and the way the media transformed the trial into spectacle and entertainment. It’s become fashionable among political historians to cite Newt Gingrich and the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, the same year Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered, as signaling the beginning of a slide into increased anger and polarization in American politics. Looking back, I think the Simpson trial was representative of the fracturing to come.
Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe
By Niall Ferguson
Page I bailed on: 140
Verdict: There was a time when Niall Ferguson was worth bothering with. I thought The Pity of War was really good. But latterly he’s just become a right-wing hack and propagandist. I don’t care for his politics, but leaving that aside, what’s worse is the fact that he’s just churning these books out now on schedule while seeming to have totally lost the ability to write. Doom was a COVID book and it’s nothing but a slapdash and glib collection of bits and pieces thrown at the reader only to let us know how widely Ferguson has read. Or browsed. Or had some research assistant browse. I wasn’t buying any of it. It just comes off as non-stop name-dropping and a cheap display of superficial learning in search of a coherent argument.
This is an index of my notes on books I tried to get through but did not finish (DNF). They’re not all bad books, or books that are all bad, but I had to pull the plug on them for various reasons.
Put another way: as I get older I’ve begun looking at the size of the to-be-read pile and realizing that the numbers don’t add up for reading everything I still want to. So here are some of the titles that got dropped along the way.
The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control by Steven Hassan
Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe by Niall Ferguson
End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin
Extreme Killers: Tales of the World’s Most Prolific Serial Killers by Michael Newton
A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum by Emma Southon
Fools on the Hill by Dana Milbank
The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider by Michiko Kakutani
Hell Town: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer on Cape Cod by Casey Sherman
Introducing Postmodernism: A Graphic Guide by Richard Appignanesi and Chris Garratt with Ziauddin Sardar and Patrick Curry
The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem by Marcus J. Borg and Dominic Crossan
Manhunters: How We Took Down Pablo Escobar by Steven Murphy and Javier F. Peña
Murder Book: A Graphic Memoir of a True Crime Obsession by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell
Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser
Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson
There Is No Ethan: How Three Women Caught America’s Biggest Catfish by Anna Akbari
Wild Massive by Scotto Moore
Alex Good 