reading books

Marple: Miss Marple Takes Manhattan

/ Alex Good / 14 Comments

Well, that title is a winner anyway. If Jason and the Muppets could take Manhattan, why not Miss Marple?

The set-up has it that Broadway, or West Broadway, is mounting an adaptation of one of her nephew Raymond’s novels, so he’s been invited to attend for the premiere and he brings along his favourite aunt – even though she has little interest in cultural matters and just wants to visit American department stores and shop for linens and a tea service.

It’s a funny idea and Alyssa Cole plays it well. The main joke being that Miss M is less a fish out of water in Manhattan than her nephew. I also like the characters and the historical setting, which ties the plot in with the Red Scare. Unfortunately, it wasn’t much of a mystery and not only is there no way to figure things out before the reveal at the end, the reveal at the end actually left me scratching my head a bit. It wasn’t as bad in this respect as the previous story in this collection, “The Second Murder at the Vicarage,” but I still didn’t think it was playing fair when it came to proper clues. This was in all other respects a better story though.

Marple index

Swinging MAD

/ Alex Good / 5 Comments

Swinging MAD

This MAD pocketbook was published in 1977 and I think all of the content is drawn from stuff that had previously appeared in the magazine in the 1970s. So we’re in a world where a mock publication called Occult Magazine looks forward prophetically to 1989, hippies weren’t a long-distant source of fun but a clear and present source of fun, and the tunes of songs like “Bless ‘Em All,” “On Wisconsin!” and “Stouthearted Men” were assumed to be so well known that readers would be able to sing along with parody versions. For the record, I know none of those songs but apparently they were very popular once upon a time. And I suppose “On Wisconsin!” is still familiar to Badgers.

This is a grab-bag collection with no one theme. Instead there’s just a little bit of everything that made MAD what it was. There’s the Don Martin Department. There are funny advertisements. There are two Dave Berg “Lighter Side of . . .” instalments. There’s a Spy vs. Spy cartoon (White Spy wins this one). And it all wraps up with one of MAD’s justly celebrated movie parodies, as drawn by the unforgettable Mort Drucker. What a line-up of talent MAD had during these years. It makes me wonder if a magazine like this would even be possible today. Since MAD itself isn’t possible today (they’ve stopped print publication) I think we know the answer to that. I’m not in love with the ‘70s, but for magazine culture you could look back on it as the end of a golden age.

Graphicalex

Ant-Man/Giant-Man: The Man in the Ant Hill

/ Alex Good / 15 Comments

Ant-Man/Giant-Man: The Man in the Ant Hill

This was a pleasant surprise. Ant-Man, or Giant-Man (a role he grew into, later taking the name Goliath), has never been one of my favourite superheroes and I wasn’t expecting much from this collection of his first appearances in Marvel’s Tales to Astonish. (Most of the early Marvel superheroes didn’t start out with their own comics, so Iron-Man, as he then was, could be found in Tales of Suspense, Thor in Journey into Mystery, Doctor Strange in Strange Tales, etc.) But I had a great time tracking the very silly evolution of the character, and his sidekick “the wonderful Wasp.”

What I mean by silly is the way a hand keeps getting waved at any questions that might be raised as we go along. Explanations are trotted out, but they’re so flimsy you just have to shake your head. Scientist Hank Pym invents a potion, later made into a pill, that allows him to almost instantly shrink to the size of an ant. I mean instantly in that he seems to just disappear. You don’t see him get smaller. I wondered how that worked. But then I wondered about a lot of things. Luckily, the explanations keep coming. How does his costume change sizes along with his physical transformations? An editor’s note: “Clothes composed of unstable molecules are able to stretch and contract as the wearer’s own body does!” How does Ant-Man send and receive messages to all the ants everywhere all over the city? He has antennae on his helmet that can transmit, receive, and “decode” the electronic impulses that all ants use to communicate. And by “communicate” I mean they can even send live video! How does he travel instantly to any place he has to be? He has a catapult that fires him wherever he wants to go, and when he gets there his ant buddies form a cushion to give him a soft landing. How does he fight bad guys when he’s the size of an ant? He keeps the same strength he had as a full-size human even when he shrinks. But then when he learns how to make himself bigger, for some reason he maxes out at 12 feet and after that he gets weaker. I’ve no idea why that happens, but here’s the explanation they give: “It’s like a sculptor rolling the clay figure of a man between his hands until it grows longer and longer! But the longer it grows the weaker it becomes, until it finally snaps!” Uh-huh.

You get the feeling in all of this that they just needed a set of rules for Ant-Man/Giant-Man to operate by, and that they weren’t too concerned that readers would stop to ask too many questions. So when the whole idea of popping a pill to grow or shrink got a bit too awkward they simply had Hank come up with a modification to his helmet that allows him to change size by controlling his “mental energy” in “mentally activated cybernetic impulses.” In other words, he just has to think about getting bigger or smaller! And not only that, he can make the Wasp bigger or smaller with the same helmet (though otherwise he has to still rely on the pills).

This final point underlines what is perhaps the most jarring thing about these comics. Coming out during the height of the Cold War (1962-64), the bad guys are often looped into the Red menace. The commies even apparently killed Hank Pym’s first wife, a story quickly told in flashback. None of that dates the action as much though as the gender roles in the relationship between Hank and Janet van Dyne (who becomes the Wasp in part to avenge her father). Hank is protective of Janet, which is something she rejects in a pseudo-feminist way. “He treats me like a scatterbrained little girl,” she protests to herself, “and I want him to think of me as a full-fledged woman . . . a woman in love!” After all, “He may go for all that adventure jazz, but I go for big, wonderful, dreamy him!” This is awful stuff, and it’s everywhere. Even when Ant-Man and the Wasp discuss matters of international importance with a room full of officials her thought bubble off to the side only reveals “Mmmm, if there’s one thing I like, it’s being in a room full of men!”

There is a lot of this, and it’s representative of a real weak spot in Marvel’s imagining of female characters at the time, which I guess goes back to Stan Lee. Lee’s stories are wonderfully inventive and a lot of fun, but he had trouble with women and imagining real relationships. For all her feistiness, Janet is a throwback to a stereotypical female model. Even after becoming a superhero she revels in a role as fashion icon, and the Wasp with her “dainty wings” and “tiny, delicate antennae” is a modern-day Tinkerbell. The fact that Hank can control her size changes by his helmet, and that she can’t grow big but only smaller, reinforces this. He’s also the brains as well the brawn, and when he gives her an air-compressor weapon that he’s invented so she’ll have a bit more firepower it’s like he’s giving a toy to a child.

So that’s the downside here. What I loved is the way the reduced scale, at least of the early stories, gave us simpler stories that were all the more effective for not being about fighting wildly powerful archvillains. Sure there are some aliens and transdimensional interlopers here, but the guys I enjoyed more are the bitter losers with a grudge against the world, like Egghead (who even retires to a flophouse after first being bested by Ant-Man), the Human Top, Trago (“the man with the magic trumpet”), and the Porcupine. I was curious whatever happened to these guys, and wasn’t too surprised that (at least in these earlier iterations) both Egghead and the Porcupine died in action in later years, while the Human Top turned into Whirlwind. They’re B-listers, after all, but no less fun for all that.

Along with this goon squad we get a lot of low-tech action that’s also the perfect foil for today’s bloated cosmic, multiverse nonsense. On two different occasions first Ant-Man and then the Wasp tie the bad guy’s shoelaces together to make him trip! At another point Ant-Man unstrings a pearl necklace and rolls the pearls across the floor to send the Protector for a tumble. Then, when the Protector sucks Ant-Man up into a vacuum bag, our hero cuts his way free and uses a fan to blow the dust from the bag into the Protector’s face, blinding him and making him sneeze (“My eyes!! I can’t see!! Ah – Ah – Chooo!!!”). That’s good enough to allow the police to capture him and take him away.

Trying to catch Ant-Man leads the not-so-supervillains to some similarly modest stratagems. I just mentioned the vacuum cleaner. Fly paper? Sure. And here’s something really nasty: take away his growth pills and toss him in a half-full bathtub! How is he going to get out of that? Or, most devious of all, how about hunting him down with . . . an anteater! Now that’s playing dirty pool! And even that’s one-upped by the Magician, who has a killer bunny! “Only the Magician could have trained a rabbit to be an obedient beast of prey! Go, my pet . . . catch those two fools for your master!” That’s not quite Monty Python level of funny, but it’s getting close.

I hope that all gives some idea of the highs and lows in this volume. Like I say, it’s silly stuff but for the most part makes a refreshing change of pace from the later excesses of the Marvel multiverse. The 1960s shouldn’t seem so long ago, but much has changed, and in these pages you can really feel some of the distance between then and now.

Graphicalex

Holmes: The Adventure of the Copper Beeches

/ Alex Good / 7 Comments

First publication in The Strand Magazine June 1892. It was apparently around this time, which was still relatively early going, that Doyle wanted to abandon Holmes. But his (Doyle’s) mother came to him with the germ for this story so the great detective’s (false) demise was postponed. I mean, how can you turn down writing a story for your mom?

I don’t think it’s a great story, as it seems to borrow a number of basic elements from previous cases without adding much. And once again there is the business of removing obstacles blocking a pair of young lovers uniting. Solving a crime, or unwrapping a mystery, is of course fundamental to the way detective fiction works, but Doyle seems to have had an atavistic attachment to an even more basic plot. That the lovers in this case manage well enough on their own, leaving Holmes to clean things up with an explanation of what’s been going on, is only a slight wrinkle in the fabric.

If you’re a collector of Holmes’s words of wisdom though you get fair service. Beginning with the opening utterance:

“To the man who loves art for its own sake,” remarked Sherlock Holmes, tossing aside the advertisement sheet of the Daily Telegraph, “it is frequently in its least important and lowest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.”

That’s an observation that I think can be extended far beyond where Holmes immediately takes it, which is to commend Watson for writing up his more “trivial” adventures rather than the “many causes célèbres and sensational trials” in which Holmes has taken part. By “low” Holmes means something intellectual, involving the processes (or art) of “logical synthesis.” I like the idea of the man who loves art for its own sake being a connoisseur of the “lowest manifestations” of entertainment the newspapers have to offer, but I realize that’s the opposite of what is meant. Unfortunately, Holmes’s lecture on high and low is mixed up quite a bit here, as he concludes that “Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales.” The pleasure of the story is here lower than the operations of logic, which is more what you’d expect him to say.

Another interesting topic of discussion comes up on the train ride to Winchester. Watson admires the green and pleasant countryside they pass through but it fills Holmes with horror.

“It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”

“You horrify me!”

“But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.”

I think in the 1890s this would have been seen as a perverse take, which is how Watson immediately responds to it. One can see Holmes’s reasoning, but even in Victorian England I’m not sure how persuasive it is. Rural isolation does leave people more vulnerable to crime. I’ve had experience of that myself. Call the cops and you may have someone come by later that afternoon. But urban living is in many ways more anonymous, which helps conceal a lot. As far as the psychological effects are concerned, again isolation may not be conducive to robust mental health, but then nothing degrades one’s love for humanity than being stuck in traffic or packed in a subway for hours every day, or living crammed into a tiny apartment alongside people who smell bad or make a lot of noise. I don’t think we can be as certain about these matters as Holmes is.

Things wrap up quickly. Holmes sees the solution as obvious, but it’s only obvious when seeing the events as a dramatic story, not as a logical system. Which sort of undercuts what he kicks things off by saying. Then Miss Violet Hunter is dismissed to head a private school, as Holmes “manifested no further interest in her when once she had ceased to be the center of one of his problems.” The young couple are hitched and sent to Mauritius. What I find most interesting is the fate of Mr. Rucastle, who survives “a broken man, kept alive through the care of his devoted wife.” And his “old servants.” And (though this isn’t mentioned) their demonic, cockroach-killing kid. I would have thought everyone would have abandoned the old miser after all he’d done. But I guess they had fewer options back in those days. People had to stick together.

Holmes index

DNF files: Murderland

/ Alex Good / 8 Comments

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

Alien: Icarus

/ Alex Good / 6 Comments

Alien: Icarus

All of these Alien comics present self-contained storylines that ran for 5 or 6 issues. There’s a sort-of through line that’s covered in the opening to each, but it’s not necessary to read them in order. For what it’s worth, this volume is a sequel of sorts to Alien: Revival, as the events of that series are briefly mentioned here. But this is a wholly separate adventure. And like all of the Alien comics (at least all the ones I’ve read) it’s another interesting and original story that reimagines the familiar monsters in a new setting.

For reasons not worth getting into a team of super-synth soldiers are sent to a radiated planet overrun by Xenomorphs in order to retrieve a Xenomorph egg that contains an experimental genetic modification that the United Systems (that would be the U.S. government, rivals of the Weyland-Yutani Corp.) believes contains an antidote to radioactivity.

So it’s off to Tobler-9 and it looks like the Xenos actually have an opponent in their own weight class, since the synths are all trained mercenaries who use their plasma rifles, bows and arrows, and samurai swords to go toe-to-toe (or claw, or whatever) with the evil critters. One synth even tears a Xenomorph’s head off with his bare hands. And you don’t have to worry about the synths getting bred in the usual way since the Xenos can’t use them for that. Alas, there are only five synths in the team and as usual an unending supply of Xenomorphs to kill, including a giant Queen and then later an insect-human-Xenomorph hybrid thing.

So that’s something a bit new, though it had been foreshadowed in one of the stories in Aliens: The Original Years. And I thought there was a higher gross-out and gore level here than in previous comics. But like I say, I found the story compelling and original. Writer Phillip Kennedy Johnson also entertains a couple of ideas that I had to think about, even if I ended up rejecting both of them. First there’s the notion that the synths can be more human (meaning, they display more empathy and altruism) than the humans. Would that be the result of their programming? Something to make them a more effective team? Or are they evolving on their own? Then, speaking of evolution, there’s the way the Xenomorphs seem to take biological cues from their hosts, at least under lab circumstances. This is what leads to the insect-human-Xenomorph hybrid. I found myself wondering how much of this was Weyland-Yutani’s efforts to create a new bioweapon and how much was “natural.” Because why would the Xenomorphs evolve when they’re already perfect killing machines?

So great fun for fans, delivering on lots of brutal action and plenty more of what you came for. There’s a simple but effective story with all the usual elements worked in effectively alongside a couple of new wrinkles. There’s been no end of criticism of the Alien film franchise, and for good reason, but readers of the comics have had nothing to complain about.

Graphicalex

Gideon Falls Volume 5: Wicked Worlds

/ Alex Good / 15 Comments

Gideon Falls Volume 5: Wicked Worlds

Sheer chaos. “Please . . . just slow down,” Dr. Xu begs of Danny when he tries to explain. “What does all of this mean? I am . . . I’m so confused.” Join the club, Doc.

Here it is in a nutshell. After the Black Barn got blown up at the end of the previous volume we’re told that it didn’t get destroyed but was instead “set free.” Whatever that means. What it seems to involve is the multiverse collapsing in on its center point, which is Gideon Falls. You see, “for some reason we can never know,” the “heart of it all” (that is, the heart of everything that ever has or ever will exist in space and time) is Gideon Falls. It was all that existed before the fragmentation into an infinite number of timelines, and now after that initial Big Bang reality is experiencing a Big Crunch back to its singular identity. Because of the darkness. Which is where the Laughing Man/Bug God comes in.

If it all sounds fuzzy that’s because it is. In this volume various characters in different parts of the multiverse (a Wild West environment, a dystopic police state) run away from zombie Laughing Men until they can regroup as the “New Ploughmen.” Which is an homage to the original bunch of Black Barn conspiracy nuts. There’s a lot of running around but it feels like running in place since you can’t even say they’re going in circles. We’re just left to understand that someone, somewhere understands what they’re doing and has arranged things to work out the way they’re meant to.

The plot itself doesn’t advance, but lots of things do happen. The main draw here though is again Andrea Sorrentino’s art. He was really off leash with this series and it’s a lot of fun seeing what he comes up with in terms of page design and layout. So enjoy that, because the story in this part is thin gruel and what there is will probably leave you scratching your head.

Graphicalex

Marple: The Second Murder at the Vicarage

/ Alex Good / 12 Comments

Oh, what a disappointment.

This is the second story in the Marple: Twelve New Stories anthology that got off to a great start with Lucy Foley’s “Evil in Small Places.” As the title indicates, it’s a sequel set several years after the first Miss Marple novel, The Murder at the Vicarage. Once again narrative duties are handled by the vicar. He and his wife have a young son now (Griselda had only been pregnant at the end of the novel), and their nephew Dennis is a probationary police constable working under Inspector Slack. As things kick off here the vicar discovers yet another body in his home, this time of his former maid, Mary. She was his maid in the novel but had run off with the ne’er-do-well poacher Bill Archer. Now both Bill and Mary are dead: he from eating poisonous fungi and she from having her head bashed in with a cast-iron omelette pan.

All of that sounds like it could be a lot of fun, but it’s not. Val McDermid is a big name in mystery fiction but I’m not familiar with her work. On the strength of this story I won’t be looking for more. It’s hard to even call it a mystery. Miss Marple just pulls a rabbit out of a hat in her quick explanation of what happened. The killers are a couple of minor characters whose names are dropped in passing in the rest of the story but who we never meet or even catch a glimpse of. The clues Miss M uses to solve the case go unmentioned. We’re only told that Miss Marple seems to be noticing things, and then at the end she tells us what it is she had noticed. So there’s no way as a reader you could even guess at whodunit. This won’t do.

Marple index

Batman/The Shadow: The Murder Geniuses

/ Alex Good / 11 Comments

Batman/The Shadow: The Murder Geniuses

I’ll grant that crossovers can get messy. And crossovers with two writers may get even messier. That said, the idea of having Batman and the Shadow joining forces must have seemed like a good fit, as they’re both dark, mysterious crime-fighters hailing from the same era (both debuted in the 1930s). Unfortunately, it’s hard to think of anything this comic series does right, at least in terms of its storyline.

I found that story impossible to follow. I don’t know the Shadow character very well, but I think even if I did I would have been lost. As far as I can figure out he’s an immortal figure or spirit from another dimension: the fabled city of Shamba-La. What is Shamba-La? Why it’s a “foothold on your plane of existence, anchored by heavy dimensional ballast.” People there live “on a higher thaumic frequency.” Got it?

Anyway, apparently the Shadow has had his eye on Batman for a while and has selected him to be his heir. But then this manga-masked super-villain from Shamba-La named the Stag (because he wears an antler headdress, you see) shows up and starts killing off all the best people in the world. This makes him the reverse Shadow, as the Shadow’s mission is to take out the worst people in the world. So Batman and the Shadow team up to defeat the Stag, who has allied with the Joker. Batman sort of gets killed but then he’s revived by going to Shamba-La and meeting Cthulhu. The Stag is finally beaten and the Shadow is stuck still being the Shadow and Batman stays on as Batman.

I may be getting something wrong in all that. I’m probably getting a lot wrong. I just didn’t know what was going on. The Stag has a backstory but he only speaks a single enigmatic line (“I am an honest signal”) over and over. The Joker is roped into action just because this is a big Batman title and they figured the Joker had to show up and do something. But this is one of his least impressive incarnations. The Shadow looks dramatic in his magic red scarf unrolling like Spawn’s cape, but honestly I didn’t understand what he was going on about most of the time. Harry Vincent and Margo Lane show up too, but just as props. I guess the art isn’t bad, but Batman’s boyish face doesn’t really go with his scarred tank of a physique and the Joker seems like a puppet figure.

I didn’t like this one. The crossover idea had a lot of potential but they needed to keep the script a lot tighter. With all the background mythology I just had the sense that things were getting away from Scott Snyder and Steve Orlando right from the start. It was fairly well received by fans though, which makes me wonder if coherence or intelligibility is something that people even look for anymore in pop entertainment.

Graphicalex

TCF: The Best New True Crime Stories: Crimes of Passion, Obsession & Revenge

/ Alex Good / 14 Comments

The Best New True Crime Stories: Crimes of Passion, Obsession & Revenge
Ed. by Mitzi Szereto

The crimes:

“I’ve Seen the Dead Come Alive” by Joe Turner: a moody teenager crosses the country to meet a girl he met online who shared his interest in “horrorcore rap.” She is less impressed with him in person and he kills her, her parents, and her best friend.

“Petit Treason” by Edward Butts: in Ontario in the 1870s a woman kills her abusive husband. Despite being an at least somewhat sympathetic case she is sentenced to hang.

“The Crime Passionnel of Henriette Caillaux: The Murder that Rocked Belle Époque Paris” by Dean Jobb: a Parisian society lady shoots and kills the editor of a newspaper, under the assumption that he was going to publish some of her personal correspondence.

“A Young Man in Trouble” by Priscilla Scott Rhoades: the driver of a Brinks armoured car decides to take off with a shipment of “bad money” (old bills slated for destruction).

“The Madison Square Garden Muder: The First ‘Trial of the Century’” by Tom Larsen: Harry Thaw shoots the starchitect Stanford White dead for having corrupted his wife.

“Facebookmoord” by Mitzi Szereto: a social media dust-up between a pair of teenage girls in the Netherlands turns fatal.

“Death by Chocolate” by C L Raven: in Victorian England a woman goes on a rampage poisoning chocolates.

“The Gun Alley Murder” by Anthony Ferguson: a disreputable bar owner in 1920s Melbourne is executed for the murder of a 12-year-old girl. Witnesses against him seem to have been mainly motivated by the offer of a reward for their testimony, and in 2008 a posthumous pardon was issued.

“The Beauty Queen and the Hit Men” by Craig Pittman: a woman has her husband killed as part of the fallout from a messy divorce.

“Because I Loved Him” by Iris Reinbacher: the Sada Abe case. A Japanese geisha/prostitute kills her married lover and cuts off his penis, which she takes with her as a keepsake.

“A Crime Forgiven: The Strange Case of Yvonne Chevallier” by Mark Fryers: a French woman shoots and kills her husband, an eminent politician, when their marriage hits the rocks.

“Bad Country People” by Chris Edwards: a bitter divorced woman enlists the aid of her family in killing her ex and his new wife.

“The Life and Demise of England’s Universal Provider” by Jason Half: the founder of a successful chain of department stores is killed by a man who claims to be his son.

“Revenge of the Nagpur Women” by Shashi Kadapa: at a court appearance, a brutal Indian crime boss is torn to pieces by a mob.

“A Tale of Self-Control and a Hammer” by Stephen Wade: a British man kills his wife with a hammer, perhaps out of jealousy but more likely because he wanted to free himself to start over with his lover.

The book:

I quite liked a couple of the other true crime anthologies I’ve read that were edited by Mitzi Szereto (Women Who Murder and Small Towns), but I felt this one came up short.

Just the title suggests a lack of focus. Crimes of passion, obsession, and revenge? That covers a lot of ground, as most crimes are either crimes of passion or committed for personal gain. And even then “personal gain” could be someone’s obsession. (A third category, mental illness or insanity, might fall into or overlap with crimes of passion too.) Then take into account that some of the cases here – like the Brinks guard driving off with bags of cash – still seem to fall outside the book’s broad remit and you basically have a true crime potpourri.

There’s nothing wrong with that, and the stable of writers that Szereto works with are capable enough, but it makes it hard to see the book as a whole as illustrating any one particular theme, even as broad as the triple-barrelled passion, obsession, and revenge. As with her other collections there’s a refreshing geographical diversity (a story each from Japan, India, Australia, and Canada, with two from France), and a number of historical cases as well. Among the latter are some celebrated crimes that I think most true-crime buffs will be familiar with, like Harry Thaw’s murder of Stanford White (the first “crime of the century”), the Caillaux affair, and Sada Abe’s mutilation of her dead lover. I didn’t think they were necessary to go over again here. Then there are a number of more contemporary stories, a couple of which – “The Beauty Queen and the Hit Men” and “Bad Country People” – that I found too involved and confusing to follow in this format. I like short true crime stories, but if the cast of characters is too big then as a reader you can quickly get lost.

There are few general observations that are new. One story, “Death by Chocolate,” even begins with the evergreen adage “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” (A quick digression. The origin of that phrase is a play by William Congreve, The Mourning Bride (1697). The actual lines read: “Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d,/ Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d.”) The point being one that most people understand and probably even have some experience of. People fall in and out of love. Nobody likes being ditched. When this plays out in cases of murder we most often see men disposing of wives so that they can move on and women taking revenge on husbands who are looking elsewhere. And while poison has been the method of choice for most women in such circumstances (“the perfect way to escape an abusive marriage . . . cheaper than divorce and easier to get away with than bludgeoning an abuser”), in modern times we see guns being used just as often.

There wasn’t much I made notes on. One item that stuck out was in the Australian case of “The Gun Alley Murder.” This was an infamous miscarriage of justice that was apparently at least partially motivated by the large reward offered. As economists tell us, humans respond to incentives. In this case a number of “witnesses” (dubbed “the disreputables” by defence counsel) provided testimony that seemed made up, either for the reward or because of a grudge they had with the defendant. This made me wonder how often rewards actually work. I think most people, if they have information relevant to the solving of a crime, bring it forward freely. In some cases the reward is meant to overcome the stigma, or risk, involved in being a snitch, though I don’t know how often that’s what’s being weighed.

What else does offering a reward do? I suppose it gets attention, but that’s it. This puts rewards in much the same boat as awards in the arts. Those are meaningless and rarely go to the best work, which would be produced anyway. So they’re basically just a form of advertising. Rewards for tips leading to an arrest may work in the same way.

I was curious as to what percentage of these rewards make a difference so did a bit of looking online. According to one report, “A review by the Los Angeles News Group involved a total of 372 rewards offered by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and Los Angeles City Council from January 2008 to April 2013 to solve violent crimes. Only 15 of these rewards were actually paid out to people who provided information that led to convictions.” That doesn’t seem very productive, though I guess you haven’t lost anything if the money doesn’t get paid out. I also found a 2019 NPR story focusing on the Crime Stoppers organization where the people interviewed called rewards “not wildly productive,” even though it’s impossible “to determine how much of a factor Crime Stoppers’ rewards play since tips and payouts are anonymous.”

It seems like we should have a better idea how well rewards work, given that, as the Gun Alley case shows, such incentives can also be abused and lead to perverse outcomes.

Noted in passing:

The sexualisation of young women is not a phenomenon of the Internet age. Evelyn Nesbit was posing for artists and photographers, sometimes in the nude, before making it as a cover girl for major magazines when she was only 16 (“or maybe younger,” as Tom Larsen puts it). Lana Turner was famously discovered when she was playing hooky from high school at the age of 15 (which I believe she later “corrected” to 16, for legal reasons). A casting director was captivated by her physique (read: her bust) and she appeared in her first film the next year in a brief role that earned her the nickname of “Sweater Girl.”

In the 1870s social hierarchies were very much still part of the law:

At that time, the murder of a husband by his wife was still known by the old English common law term “petit treason” (which also included the murder of a master by a servant, and the murder of an ecclesiastical superior by a lesser clergyman). Next to high treason against the monarch or the state, it was officially the worst crime a person could commit.

Something of this attitude persists in the greater criminal liability for shooting a police officer than killing a man on the street. We still have our hierarchies when it comes to things like insurance, health care, and the law. Some lives are worth more than others and considered deserving of greater protection.

Takeaways:

Perhaps the French are more sophisticated in their permissiveness toward men taking mistresses, but that hasn’t stopped Frenchmen paying a price for such behaviour.

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