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.

True Crime Files

Marvel Comics: Timeless Tales

/ Alex Good / 15 Comments

Marvel Comics: Timeless Tales

Marvel Comics got its start (at least as Marvel Comics) in 1939. This slim volume collects a bunch of all-new genre homages to celebrate their 80th anniversary (in 2019), and is a real treat for fans of the Marvel brand.

We kick off with a spooky psycho-thriller from Crypt of Shadows. Then War is Hell, Journey into Unknown Worlds, Love Romances, Gunhawks, and Ziggy Pig – Silly Seal. I think the titles speak for themselves as to what you can expect, but if you’re wondering, the genres covered are horror, war, SF, romance, Western, and humour.

I thought the first story, written by Al Ewing was the best. I had to go back and read it again to understand what was going on. It’s a complicated narrative involving hypnotic states, but I think in the end it all made sense, which is something I appreciated. Also good were the two stories in Journey into Unknown Worlds. There was nothing fancy about them, but they delivered.

The other genres sampled are ones that haven’t maintained the popularity they once had. War comics and Westerns aren’t so big today, and I think romance titles have mostly disappeared. And I wonder why. Romance novels are still popular, aren’t they? Could romance comics not survive the attention of Roy Lichtenstein?

That’s a point worth dwelling on. Some genres, like SF and horror, can hold up under an ironic gaze. But for war, Westerns, and romance I think it’s harder. Which is why those stories here get cross-genre, ironic treatments. There are twist endings and supernatural elements that I doubt were that common in the originals. One of the romance stories takes place in a steampunk future, and another has a robot falling in love with an alien. The war stories are both strange tales and the Western takes a weird turn at the end as well. Then there’s Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal . . .

I have to admit I don’t know anything about these characters. As I understand it they were the basic comic odd couple, with Ziggy being the smarter one and Silly being the unbeatable goofball. I doubt they were as grown-up as they are here, however, as Silly has become a celebrity while Ziggy is stuck renting prostitutes and throwing up all over his flophouse apartment. Finding out that Silly has put him in his will, Ziggy travels with him to Latveria, home of Doctor Doom, in the hope that the Doctor will kill Silly for being a friend of the Fantastic Four. But that’s not how things work out.

Deadpool has a cameo here and that feels right because the humour is pretty adult and meta. Very Howard the Duck, if you remember that. Again it seems as though this material can’t be done straight today so there have to be layers of irony. At one point the co-writer, Frank Tieri, even puts in an appearance at a back-alley comic-con.

All of this goes down easy, but it’s still worth noting what sort of an homage this is. The genres really aren’t timeless, and these tales are very much of our time.

Graphicalex

Marple: Evil in Small Places

/ Alex Good / 12 Comments

This is the first story in an anthology of new Marple stories written by twelve different authors. I think they must have been specially commissioned by the Christie Estate (Agatha Christie Limited), as the estate holds the copyright, Christie’s name is displayed most prominently on the cover, and the back flyleaf has Christie’s photo and pocket bio. This despite the fact that there isn’t a word in the book that was written by her.

That isn’t something that should put anyone off, however. A lot of franchise fiction is better than the originals. Almost any new James Bond adventure, for example, beats the pants off Fleming’s stuff. And the fact is (or at least in my strongly-held opinion it is) that Christie’s Marple stories weren’t very good. So a line-up of new stories written by bestselling authors is actually something I was looking forward to.

I wasn’t disappointed by Lucy Foley’s entry. It moves quickly, has a nice clue-I-didn’t-notice in the middle, and comes with a good twist at the end, though readers will probably twig to something being off about the killer early on and know that a rug-pull was coming up.

While reading I caught myself smiling at the way Miss Marple and her friend Prudence have to make their way through a dark wood with the aid of a flashlight (or “torch,” as they like to say over there). The reason I got a kick out of this is because we’re told it’s “only about five o’clock or so but it felt much later.” This might seem early for it to be fully dark out, but it’s mid-November (two weeks after Guy Fawkes’ Night) and England runs out of daylight quickly in the late fall.

What made this more interesting though is that Miss Marple gets very technical about the matter of what time it was when she’s interviewed by the police inspector later. He says she was walking through the woods in the evening and she takes exception to this: “You see, it wasn’t the evening. It was a little past five o’clock – though at this time of year, when it gets dark so quickly, it’s so easy to forget.” No, for her “it’s so important to get these things right,” and the fact is she was cutting through the woods in the afternoon.

Was she right? I did some research and it seems as though “evening” is said to begin at either 5 or 6 o’clock. It is only a loose measurement of time that varies in usage, but is usually connected to the setting of the sun. So I don’t know if Jane was correct, and even if she did have a point I don’t think she was right to make an issue out of it. She wants to insist on words being nailed down to a precise meaning so as to avoid being misleading, but I don’t think this was a hill to die on.

The story treats the subject faithfully, which is something that was probably written into the contract. Miss M isn’t fighting alien bodysnatchers or Jack the Ripper’s love child. She’s the familiar Victorian lady (that’s how she thinks of herself, anyway), schooled in human nature, who prefers knitting to just about anything. She also wonders, through experience, “if there aren’t more terrible things happening in England’s villages and hamlets than in its metropolises.” Well, there certainly are whenever she’s around!

Marple index

Deer crossing

/ Alex Good / 16 Comments

“As if the earth in one unlooked-for favour
Had made them certain earth returned their love.”

My sister took this picture of a pair of guests who appeared in her driveway on the weekend. You know it must be spring!

Daredevil: Supersonic

/ Alex Good / 8 Comments

Daredevil: Supersonic

This volume is the sequel to Chinatown. Chinatown was so called because it was set in Chinatown. I’m not sure why this one is called Supersonic. It consists of three stories and the third one has Ulysses Klaw as a giant “kinetic living audio wave” so maybe that was it.

Charles Soule is the writer in charge again, though each of the three stories has a different artist. The last is illustrated by Vanessa R. Del Rey, who I last encountered in The Empty Man, where I said her drawing style was not my thing. I didn’t think it worked any better here. Her art just puts me off.

I didn’t care for the stories much either. The first has Daredevil battling Elektra, because she’s been brainwashed into thinking she had a child that Daredevil abducted. Weird. And it doesn’t go anywhere because her brainwashing is fixed and she just leaves at the end to find out who did it to her, and why.

The second story starts off well, with Matt Murdock crashing a high-stakes poker tournament in Macau. He’s able to beat a telepath because the telepath’s ability to “see” the other players’ hands doesn’t work with Murdock because he’s blind. That said, Murdock’s strategy of just going off of other players’ cues while not knowing any of the cards he’s holding himself doesn’t strike me as a likely winner. In any event, it turns out what he’s really after is a briefcase full of valuable information that he teams up with Spider-Man to steal. Again though I felt like things ended abruptly, leaving me wondering what the point was. Daredevil mentions how everyone has lost their memory of his secret identity but doesn’t say how it happened (you’ll have to wait for an explanation of that). Then Spidey warns him about going through a “black-costume phase” (like Spider-Man did), but even though Daredevil’s uniform has changed I haven’t got the sense that Soule was changing the character much. This isn’t dark Daredevil, or even dark-er.

Finally, the third story has Klaw turning New York into a city of sonic zombies. Daredevil and Echo (who is deaf) team up to stop him. And finally there’s a coda with long-time adversary the Gladiator descending deeper into criminal psychopathy.

I didn’t like any of this as much as I liked the Chinatown storyline. Blindspot shows up briefly in the fight with Elektra before being disabled. I like how Daredevil tries to protect him, recognizing when a challenge is out of his league. As happened when fighting the Hand in Chinatown. Overall I thought there were some good ideas here that just needed more development. The emphasis on action over plot is something I’m usually OK with in a superhero comic, but in this case I thought Soule was just coming up with hooks or concepts and not turning them into stories with any legs.

Graphicalex

Housing market update

/ Alex Good / 12 Comments

Over the last couple of weekends I’ve been walking about the neighbourhood looking at some open houses. There are a lot of open houses. I think this is because it’s a buyer’s market right now and people aren’t buying. And the reason they aren’t buying is because every buyer is a seller (or at least most buyers are), and nobody wants to try to sell their own home in this market. It’s a vicious cycle.

The houses I was looking at looked very nice from the outside, which is a big reason why this is one of the “most established and sought-after neighbourhoods” in my hometown (to use real estate talk). The homes here are, however, all around 50 years old, built in the 1970s, and not all of them have been well maintained. Here are three general observations I had.

(1) Sellers are still expecting 2022 prices. 2022, in case you were wondering, was a year when housing prices peaked around here, after enjoying a run where they were going up nearly 30% annually. Honest! I was getting agent flyers in the mail all the time back then with the sales backing those numbers up. Of course everyone knew this was a bubble and couldn’t last, but the four detached homes I toured were all listed at between $1.2 and $1.5 million. This is the kind of price they might have fetched in 2022; it’s not likely they’re going to get that today. But it’s hard for people to accept that the biggest asset they own has depreciated by 25-30%.

(2) All of the homes were showing their age inside. And by that I mean three of the four were outright dumps (the one “good” one had spent over $7000 on staging though, so that’s something to take into consideration). I was surprised that even for an open house three of them hadn’t been recently cleaned. But aside from making a bad first impression I saw a lot of stonework that needed replacing. Floors that needed replacing. Windows that needed replacing. Kitchens and bathrooms that needed replacing. Add in the fact that the layouts were old and in some cases downright bizarre and I think you’d be looking at renovations starting at around $200,000 for each of them. Starting at. Because while home prices have been falling, renovation costs sure haven’t!

I can’t help thinking how all these pretty homes are just facades, rotten on the inside. But that’s true of many things in life.

(3) All four homes had basements set up as legal multi-bedroom rental units. On the one hand this makes sense because the location is close to the university and for the last couple of years there’s been a lot of demand for student housing. On the other hand, well . . . (1) it’s quite a nice neighbourhood, or was, and turning it into a student ghetto seems shortsighted, and (2) the university is getting on top of the housing shortage and I think three or four years from now there’s going to be a lot less demand. Which still leaves you living in a home that’s set up with basement apartments.

Sticking with the basement apartments, it really made me think about what is changing. This used to be a fairly affluent neighbourhood. But the understanding now seems to be that nobody can afford to buy these places anymore without renting them out. So you’re not buying a home, you’re buying a boarding house or apartment building. Or put another way, your home is no longer just an investment (and remember when we started criticizing people for treating their homes as an investment?), but an income-generating asset.

Are there that many people comfortable with this? As I say, all four of the homes I went through were set up for this. Closer to my house someone just recently built a second house, basically a shed, in their backyard that I assumed was a sort of granny flat. But it turns out the owner is moving into it and renting out the main house to two different families. Which I guess makes business sense, but how many people want their home to be a business, or side hustle? Being a landlord is a job. If you need the money, sure. But again, these are very pricey homes. We’re not talking about people living on the edge.

Or let’s look at it another way. Most real estate people will tell you that putting an in-ground pool in your backyard does nothing to increase your property’s value. In fact, it may even decrease it. Because it’s a great selling point for people who want a pool, but for everyone who doesn’t (which I think would be around 75% of homebuyers) it’s pretty much a deal-killer. Pools are a ton of work and expense, for no return if you don’t swim. And in this part of the world you’re only going to want to use it for a few months a year anyway.

Well, I think the same goes for these basement apartments. They’re great if you want to rent out your basement, but for everyone else I would think they’re a massive negative. And none of these apartments were nice because when these houses were built nobody dreamed of renting their basements, and no matter how nicely you trick them out you still wouldn’t want to live down there. Personally, I didn’t even want to look at them after I’d seen the first couple. They were that depressing.

Actually, I came away from all of these open houses feeling depressed. It’s not just that these homes are overpriced, but they’re old, in bad shape, and being used in ways that nobody ever imagined them being used. I feel like that’s a pretty good description of a lot of our infrastructure, both physical and human, today.

Chew Volume One: Taster’s Choice

/ Alex Good / 25 Comments

Chew Volume One: Taster’s Choice

This is the first volume in the award-winning Chew series, written by John Layman and illustrated by Rob Guillory. And you could tell right away it was going to be great.

Why? I’d start with the terrific world-building. We’re in a world sort of like our own but with a slightly off-kilter history. Sometime previous to the action described, the world has suffered through an outbreak of what authorities determine was an avian flu, though some suspect that calling it bird flu was part of a cover-up for something more nefarious. In any event, tens of millions of people died and one of the results is that chicken is now a black-market menu item while the rest of us have to make do with synthetic substitutes like Poult-free and Chickyn. In the U.S. one of the most powerful government organizations now is the F.D.A., which still stands for the Food and Drug Administration. One of their top agents, Mason Savoy, is what’s known as a cibopath: someone who can, just from tasting food, be given a vision of its entire prehistory. Example: take a bite of an apple and know what tree it came from, what pesticides were used on it, and when it was picked.

And with a bite out of a corpse, a cibopath can tell how said corpse met its end.

There aren’t many cibopaths. One day Tony Chu, also a cibopath, is enlisted by Savoy into the F.D.A. and together they go on various adventures fighting secret gangs and investigating other mysteries. Tony also falls in love with Amelia Mintz, who is a food columnist and also a saboscrivner, which means she can describe food so accurately that her readers have the actual sensation of tasting the meals she writes about. As with Tony’s cibopathic abilities, this is a kind of superpower in the Chewiverse.

It’s nutty, very gross, and lots of fun. The best thing about it though is Guillory’s art, which is a buffet of caricature figures (Savoy’s tank-like torso and spindle legs being the prime example) and bone-crushing action. I actually slowed down to enjoy the different elements in the many fight scenes, they were so good. Guillory’s art is the perfect complement to the weird world Layman conjured, and had me feeling both full at the end and looking forward to more.

Graphicalex

DNF files: Fools on the Hill

/ Alex Good / 5 Comments

Fools on the Hill

By Dana Milbank

Page I bailed on: 38

Verdict:  Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank’s previous book The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party did a decent job giving an account of the historical process that culminated in the triumph of the Trump MAGA movement. This book is more like a reporter’s notebook though, and is mainly just a collection of pieces on the clown show that Congress turned into in the 2020s.

But if you follow politics you probably already know more than enough already about figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, George Santos, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, and all the other “hooligans, saboteurs, conspiracy theorists, and dunces” who attracted so much media attention. And it didn’t take long before I got tired of the litany of outrageous pronouncements made by these whackos on social media, and the scandalous behaviour of this lunatic fringe. One question still in need of answering is how much of this is just performance and how much is the expression of sincerely held beliefs (read: psychosis). Though I suspect that at this point the performance may have created its own alternative reality, making the question moot.

So this is another DNF that isn’t a bad book but that I just didn’t feel any need to stick with for 350 pages, especially as I skimmed ahead and didn’t see where Milbank was coming to any new or profound conclusions about what was going on. “This is no way to run a country and certainly no way for a democracy to function,” he says at one point when talking about the outsized influence the crazies have. “But this is our current reality.”

Except the book came out at the beginning of 2024 and the “current reality” was about to get a lot worse.

The DNF files