Over at Alex on Film I’ve posted my picks for the best (and worst) movies of 2024. Since I only watched one 2024 movie that I thought was really good things were kind of predetermined.
TCF: Women Who Murder
Women Who Murder: An International Collection of Deadly True Crime Tales
Ed. by Mitzi Szereto
The crimes:
“Down in the Ditch: Joanna Dennehy, Serial Stabber” by Charlotte Platt: a woman in southern England goes on a murder rampage with some help of from a pair of friends.
“Ruth Snyder: The Original Femme Fatale” by Ciaran Conliffe: in 1920s New York an unhappily married woman kills her husband in order to be free to marry her lover. After a sensational trial she ends up in the electric chair.
“Innocence Taken: The Murder of Karissa Boudreau” by Mike Browne: a Nova Scotian woman kills her daughter when the girl becomes an obstacle in her mom’s new relationship.
“Mahin: Monster or Victim?” by Mitzi Szereto: an Iranian woman drugs and strangles other women in order to steal their jewelry. She was in need of money as her husband was a worthless layabout and she had a disabled daughter.
“Twisted Firestarter” by C L Raven: a difficult woman in Wales deliberately burns down the house she rents an apartment in, killing the people (two adults, three children) in the apartment upstairs.
“On the Courthouse Steps: The Trial of Susan Smith” by Cathy Pickens: reflections on the famous 1995 trial of Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who drowned her two children in a car she rolled down a boat ramp into a lake.
“Angela Napolitano: ‘I Am Not a Bad Woman’” by Edward Butts: an Italian immigrant woman living in northern Ontario kills her abusive husband with an axe.
“The Strange Case of Keli Lane” by Anthony Ferguson: a young woman with a thing for concealing her pregnancies apparently kills her fourth baby, though she maintains her innocence and the baby’s body is never found.
“Jolly Joseph: The Kerala Cyanide Serial Killer” by Shashi Kadapa: an Indian woman finds her path to social advancement made easier by poisoning everyone who gets in her way.
“Women Fight Back” by Tom Larsen: a pair of stories about (feminist?) women killing macho men in Mexico.
“Beauty and Beast” by Ily Goyanes: the life and trials of the sadistic Nazi death camp warden Irma Grese.
“Anno Bisesto, Anno Funesto” by Alisha Holland: Katherine Knight slaughters her on-again, off-again partner and cuts his corpse into pieces.
“Dead Woman Walking” by Joan Renner: in 1950s California the mama of a mama’s boy pays to have her son’s pregnant wife murdered so she can keep him all to herself.
“Mona Fandey: The Malaysian Murderer” by Chang Shih Yen: a money-hungry Malaysian witch doctor cuts an aspiring politician’s head off with an axe as part of a ritual meant to make him invincible.
The book:
For some reason women who kill have always been of special interest. As Mitzi Szereto puts it: “There’s something infinitely fascinating about women who commit murder. It pushes our buttons.” I remember when I was just starting out as a book reviewer in 1997 one of the first assignments I had was a joint review of Caleb Carr’s Angel of Darkness and Patricia Pearson’s When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence. And just recently, for the True Crime Files, I reviewed Harold Schechter’s Fatal, which spent a lot of time in the early going talking about the differences between male and female serial killers.
Well, there’s nearly thirty years between those two bookends and I’m pretty sure the subject came up several times in-between. It does push our buttons.
I don’t think there’s any particular argument being put forward here about women who murder. Szereto canvases some of the usual talking points in her Introduction, like the differences (real or imagined) in opportunity and motivation, but mainly does so to show that they’re no more than general rules at best. So when Ily Goyanes kicks off her account of the sadistic Nazi Irma Grese by saying “When a woman kills, it is almost always for one of three reasons: financial gain, revenge, or pleasure,” we almost automatically think of exceptions. Exceptions that we wouldn’t have to go far to find, as there are several provided in this anthology. Sometimes, for example, and not to worry about being too precise about it, women who kill are just nuts.
Instead of advancing any kind of general argument, and as with the previous Szereto anthology I reviewed, The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns, the main emphasis here is on the “international” angle. There are stories from the U.S., Iran, India, Mexico, the U.K., Malaysia, Canada, and more. Yes, there are women who kill featured in all of them. But some are young and some are old, some poor and some well off, and their motives for murder have a similar variety, ranging from self-defence to psychopathy. In some cases it’s not even clear how responsible they were or what exactly they did. On that latter point, in her Introduction Szereto name-drops “Britain’s baby-killing nurse, Lucy Letby,” and in the first story Charlotte Platt also refers to Letby as “the serial killer nurse who killed seven babies and permanently injured six others.” Since this book was published in 2024 this is something they could say, as Letby had been convicted, but there are a lot of questions being asked about that case now. Canadian readers of a certain age may remember the investigation into the series of baby deaths at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children in the early 1980s and what a mess that turned into. I imagine there will be a fair few books coming out on the Letby case before long and it’s possible what we know about it will have to be revised.
Because the crimes recounted literally span the globe, one thing I found interesting was noting what seem to be cultural universals. To take just a few:
Investigating a serial killer case in Iran, the police ran into what, to Western eyes, will seem a very familiar problem:
As is the case in crimes such as these, people began to crawl out of the woodwork, all claiming to have important information that will help solve the crimes. Qazvin police receive several tips a day from supposed eyewitnesses, including melodramatic accounts from “victims” who say that they too, were taken by the killer, but had fought back, narrowly escaping death. Having no choice but to follow every lead, police investigate these claims, only to find that they’re bogus. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for people to invent stories or to provide false evidence to police.
Even in Iran. For some reason that surprised me.
Meanwhile, in India, another familiar script played out, that of state corruption. Need a forged will? Anything is possible “provided government officers, land registrars, and other authorities are willing to cooperate.” Need to stymie a police investigation after an autopsy report indicates poisoning? Perhaps the police sub-inspector can be bribed with money or “something more.” No matter where you live, you don’t have to be a particularly careful killer if you grease enough wheels.
Finally, the Mona Fandey trial was apparently a factor in speeding up the process of abolishing jury trials in Malaysia. I don’t think that’s likely to happen in the West (getting rid of juries, I mean), but the reasons for Malaysia taking this step may strike close to home. The Fandey trial was a circus, fueled not just by the bizarre nature of the crime but by the local celebrity of the people involved. As a result, it was a test case for the proposition that “the jury could be influenced by emotions and the media when reaching their verdict.” Better, Malaysia decided, to leave these matters in the hands of a judge.
This is the sort of information I enjoy learning about in an international anthology, and I found a lot of it here. Also, many of the individual crimes were ones I’d never heard of, probably again due to where many of them occurred. And finally the writing is mostly pretty good, with only a few duds in the line-up. Given that these are all new pieces of writing, I credit the job Szereto did in pulling them together.
Noted in passing:
“The Strange Case of Keli Lane” really was strange. Lane was a championship water polo player who got pregnant a lot as a young woman. One would have thought (that one being me) that pregnancy would have put a bit of a crimp in her training, especially as she didn’t want anyone knowing she was pregnant. This is something that’s hard to hide when wearing a swimsuit, but Lane was apparently built differently and perhaps people didn’t want to say anything. I’m not sure what the explanation was. But this part really surprised me:
It also transpired that Lane played in a grand final match while nine months pregnant. Anyone who knows water polo will be aware that it is a brutal sport. There is no way heavily pregnant woman should have taken part in such a match.
I second this. Water polo is a brutal sport, with a lot of grabbing and kicking going on below the water. It isn’t safe at all for a pregnant woman. But leaving aside how anyone nine months pregnant wouldn’t have shown wearing a swimsuit, or whether a woman in such condition should have taken part in such a match, the question I had was how she could have participated. This wasn’t some intramural match. Lane was playing at an elite national level. How could she even keep up?
Katherine Knight didn’t just kill her partner. She butchered him and cut his body up into steaks. In doing so she used tools and skills she’d become familiar with in her job at a slaughterhouse. This makes for an interesting digression. An academic study
found that counties in the United States that have a slaughterhouse, and are therefore home to slaughterhouse employees, have measurably higher crime rates, leading to more than twice as many arrests as a county without one. In fact, for every one thousand slaughterhouse employees in a factory, the surrounding area’s arrest rate can be expected to increase by 1 percent. Violent and sexual crimes also occurred at higher rates for slaughterhouse workers than those in similar industries, such as mechanics, truckers, and steel workers.
It’s believed this is due in part to the normalization of the extreme violence inflicted on animals – all in the name of the “greater good.” An employee may think: “I am killing this animal to feed the people,” with the violent methods being approved by their boss, their company, and their state. But the lines blur when these employees go home. Society has approved of, and even paid for them to kill, and, for some, the species becomes irrelevant.
I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it seems likely that some degree of desensitization occurs working in such places. Tobe Hooper was on to something.
Takeaways:
Why do women kill? Pretty much for all the same reasons men kill. They tend to use different methods, but things end up the same.
Superior Spider-Man Team-Up: Versus
Superior Spider-Man Team-Up: Versus
As the Marvel Universe began splintering every which way a lot of familiar names came in for makeovers. The Hulk, for example, turned Red and Grey and took on a host of different personalities on different Earths and different timelines. But I think Spider-Man probably had the most variations, to the point where it’s hard to speak of Spider-Man in the singular at all.
Superior Spider-Man, in case you were wondering, is the name adopted by the webslinger after Doctor Octopus switches bodies with Peter Parker (who then expires in Doc Ock’s body). But Doctor O doesn’t want to be a bad guy anymore, intending instead to become a better superhero and better guy all around than the old Peter Parker/Spider-Man. Hence, “Superior.”
Normally a premise like that would have lost me right away, but Superior Spider-Man is actually an interesting character. Doc Ock is a real snob and it’s fun to listen in on his interior monologues running down everyone he meets. What’s more, the storylines here are pretty good. In the first, Spidey is chasing down a body-hopping version of Carrion, which means taking out all the superheroes Carrion temporarily inhabits. In the second he grudgingly joins forces with his clone, the Scarlet Spider, to do battle with the Jackal and his army of genetically-modified critters. And in the third a creature possesses a young lady studying in the Cloisters, turning her into a being of pure electricity who gives herself the name Fulmina and who has the power to knock civilization all the way back into her beloved Middle Ages. Spider-Man has to juggle fighting her with beating back an alien invasion of NYC.
You’ll note that each of those storylines involves a lot of fighting, and the comics here deliver in that regard. And the way the fighting is represented is great, being both dramatic and easy to follow. The series used different artists for every issue and they all knew how to bring the action.
But the best part is the writing. The dialogue feels real, whether it’s just the usual banter or something more developed. I particularly liked the argument between Spidey and Fulmina. As noted, she wants to take humanity back to medieval times, a world with “days measured by the hours of the sun . . . nights softened by the glow of candlelight.” Spidey accuses her of being a tyrant, and she responds that she’s not a tyrant but someone “freeing humanity from the tyranny of progress to devote themselves to poetry . . . to prayer . . . to song . . .” Spider-Man has to consider this, but returns later with his put-down of the good old days:
So you can roll back the centuries, and restore the world of the Middle Ages? A world without the clamor of industry, the pace of technology, the blare of the media? A world without the lockstep conformity of the modern world . . . the onerous duties of citizenship . . . the burdens of personal freedom . . . a world of poverty and plague, crude, primitive medicine . . . rampant superstition . . . brutal class divisions . . . incessant, internecine warfare . . . You want to return us to this?
As Spidey talks a medieval scene plays out in the background slowly being taken over by the specter of death. It made me think of the medieval poem about the three kings and the three dead. Meanwhile, Fulmina objects that he’s “twisting it all around . . . making it ugly.” And she’s right. But he is too.
I’m not saying there’s anything profound in all this, but I did think Fulmina one of the more compelling and original villains Marvel has come up with in recent years and the rest of the stories here are at the same high level. It’s a good comic.
Bookmarked! #72: Pandamonium
I know I had a panda bookmark a little while ago, but this is one that my friends just brought me back from China and I wanted to post it right away. It has a ruler on one side because you never know when you might want to underline something. Not that I would ever do that. The little pendant is bamboo so that the panda will have something to eat. Or at least that’s what I was told.
Book: Confucius and the World He Created by Michael Schuman
Holmes: A Study in Scarlet
I have several editions of A Study in Scarlet lying around. I particularly like the one with illustrations by Gris Grimly, where the distortions favoured by that artist give a grotesque flavour to Victorian caricature. But for this most recent re-read I was using the Penguin Classics version. In the Introduction, Iain Sinclair makes something out of the idea that Holmes and Watson constitute “the division of a single being,” which I wasn’t all the way on board with. Nevertheless it did make me reflect on how this is a book representing a profound doubleness. In terms of its origins, it was both the launch of the most famous detective in the history of mystery fiction and very nearly stillborn, with the manuscript being rejected several times before finding a home in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887. Where it was well enough received for there to be calls for a sequel, though there was nothing to indicate the sensation Holmes would later become.
The most obvious split that defines the novel though is the one that happens right at the mid-point, as the “reminiscences of John H. Watson MD” are pitched and we’re sent back in time and transported to another continent to get filled in on all the Utah back story. This gives the narrative a strange feel that I can’t relate to many other works of the period. The book literally breaks in two.
A couple of things stand out about this. In the first place, the ballad of Lucy Ferrier and her lover Jefferson Hope seems to have been something Doyle only came up with to pad the story enough to make is salable. Most of it could have been lost without damaging the story in any way, which might have suggested to readers at the time that the proper vehicle for a Holmes tale going forward would be the short story.
Cuts would have helped here because the other thing you can’t really miss is the sharp drop in the quality of the writing. The first part of the book, introducing us to Holmes and Watson and their London “cesspool” environment, crackles with life. Compare that to the dull travelogue we’re yanked away to, a land of “snowcapped and lofty mountains, and dark and gloomy valleys. There are enormous plains, which in winter are white with snow, and in summer are grey with the saline alkali dust.” Among the wildlife “The coyote skulks among the scrub, the buzzard flaps heavily through the air, and the clumsy grizzly bear lumbers through the dark ravines, and picks up such sustenance as it can amongst the rocks.” Raised in such an inhospitable environment, Lucy grows up to be the flower of Utah: “The keen air of the mountains and the balsamic odour of the pine trees took the place of nurse and mother to the young girl. As year succeeded to year she grew taller and stronger, her cheeks more ruddy and her step more elastic.” And so on. I find almost all the Utah stuff to be unreadable. And indeed Holmes himself seems to have objected to it, later complaining in The Sign of the Four of the “romantic tinge” given the case by Watson in his write-up.
(As an aside, Mormons didn’t, and still don’t, appreciate how they were presented here and to some extent I can understand. But overall I thought that given the time and the place, Doyle didn’t go as hard on the Latter Day Saints as you might have expected him to. He actually presents the pioneer generation as heroic manly men, and it’s only later that he describes their community has having descended into a tyrannous theocratic police state.)
So that’s the kind of doubleness I mean. Pulp at its worst and pulp at its best, and at its best it’s great literature and doesn’t need to make any excuses. Once Doyle was free to lose the melodramatic Western ballast he was going to be off to the races. He wasn’t fully inventing the detective story, but further developing conventions already in place, like the eccentric detective, his equally odd companion (how strange that Watson is totally without family of friends anywhere in England), and his showing up the bumbling police investigators. All these elements were already there in Poe’s Dupin stories, and it’s maybe the anxiety of influence that has Holmes call Dupin “a very inferior fellow.”
I think Doyle was still finding his feet here and there are some missteps. For me, a few things stand out about the story that I’ll just mention quickly.
(1) How weird is the relationship between Drebber and Stangerson? Drebber beats his rival out for the hand of Lucy and then Stangerson becomes his personal secretary as they travel about together? That seems like another novel in itself right there.
(2) What’s with Hope’s obsession over Lucy’s wedding ring? After she dies he visits her body and takes the ring from her finger, snarling that “She shall not be buried in that.” One can understand his feeling this way, as the ring represents her marriage to Drebber, which is what kills her. But then Hope holds on to it even after showing it to Drebber before killing him (which was his express purpose for taking it in the first place) and goes so far as to place a special value on it as his sole memento of Lucy. I would have thought he’d want to destroy it. I am not the first person to wonder about this, and the only explanation I can come up with is that Doyle needed to use it as a clue later. As it turns out, Hope’s attachment to the ring turns out to be his undoing.
(3) I find it hard to credit that after years of pursuit (and I love how Hope has to keep taking time off to do odd jobs that will pay for his obsession), the avenging angel would let Drebber’s life come down to a coin flip. Indeed, when offering Drebber his choice of pill at the end (one pill is poison, the other harmless) he even volunteers his own death: “Let the high God judge between us. Choose and eat. There is death in one and life in the other. I shall take what you leave. Let us see if there is justice upon the earth, or if we are ruled by chance.”
The point, I think, was to paint Hope in a more sympathetic light. He isn’t a killer mad with vengeance but an instrument of the divine will. “There is no murder,” he insists to Drebber. And in the end Hope will be executed by that same “higher Judge” who has “taken the matter in hand”: summoning him “before a tribunal where strict justice would be meted out to him.” Which is another bad reflection on the police. You don’t want to leave such matters to the British justice system.
(4) The novel ends with Watson quoting some lines in Latin from Horace about a rich man not caring if people hate him as long as he has gold in his vault. This is meant as a response to Holmes’s chagrin that the police are getting the credit for catching the killer when Holmes did all the work. But it strikes me as inappropriate. When has the public hissed at Holmes? Where is the money in Holmes’s strongbox?
And so the game was afoot. And by the game I don’t mean Holmes as foxhound sniffing out impossible mysteries but Watson’s mission, declared even before he meets the great man, of solving the mystery that is Sherlock Holmes. That would end up taking quite a while.
On the hunt with Holmes
An index to my reviews of the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (and others).
A Study in Scarlet
The Sign of the Four
A Scandal in Bohemia
The Red-Headed League
A Case of Identity
The Boscombe Valley Mystery
The Five Orange Pips
The Man with the Twisted Lip
The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
The Adventure of the Speckled Band
The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb
The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
Silver Blaze
The Yellow Face
The Stockbroker’s Clerk
The Adventure of the Gloria Scott
The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual
The Reigate Squires
The Crooked Man
The Resident Patient
The Greek Interpreter
The Naval Treaty
The Final Problem
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Deuterocanonical Works
The Army of Dr. Moreau by Guy Adams
The Breath of God by Guy Adams
The Case of the Man Who Was Wanted by Arthur Whitaker
The Counterfeit Detective by Stuart Douglas
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes by Loren D. Estleman
The Ripper Legacy by David Stuart Davies
Sherlock Holmes and the Christmas Demon by James Lovegrove
Sherlock Holmes: The Final Problem illustrated by Hannes Binder
The Sleuths by O. Henry
The Stolen Cigar-Case by Bret Harte
The Unique “Hamlet” by Vincent Starrett
The Web Weaver by Sam Siciliano
The Zombie Night Before Christmas
The Zombie Night Before Christmas
Along with “peak zombie,” the early twenty-first century saw the mass zombification of classic literature, the seminal text being Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The Zombie Night Before Christmas was published a year later, and what I was reading was the 10th anniversary edition, though I don’t know if they made any significant changes.
What we have here is most of Clement C. Moore’s classic poem – whose original title was “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” and which Moore may not have written – mixed in with some references to rotting corpses and flesh-hungry zombies. Basically the world has been overtaken by the zombie apocalypse and now everyone is a zombie, but still going about living their normal lives. For some reason, however, nobody has told Santa about this turn of events (he knows if you’ve been bad or good, but not if you’re still alive). So on Christmas Eve he’s in for a rude surprise, and soon finds himself on the run from the hungry dead.
To be honest, I felt kind of sorry for Santa in this one. He manages to avoid an initial zombie attack by landing on a roof, but then gets jumped by a zombie as soon as he comes down the chimney. Again, I don’t know why he’s bothering at this point, seeing as he knows the situation. But anyway, he’s bitten and then “A blink of his eyes / and twist of his head, / Soon let me know / he was now living dead.” And all his reindeer too.
It’s a cute little book and a bit of fun. But maybe they needed to take a freer hand with the poem to come up with something really new. Either that or just illustrate the original text with zombies. Mad Magazine used to do adaptations like that, and it’s an approach that might have worked here. This sort of tries to have it both ways, and the result is more a light work of whimsy than a deathless Christmas classic.
TCF: The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns
The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns
Ed. by Mitzi Szereto
The crimes:
“Snowtown” by Anthony Ferguson: a bank building in a dusty Australian town becomes the storage facility for the “bodies in barrels” serial killers, and subsequently becomes a dark tourism destination.
“A Tragedy in Posorja: When ‘People’s Justice’ Goes Horribly Wrong” by Tom Larsen: a lynch mob storms a police station in Ecuador, killing three people falsely believed to be child kidnappers.
“About a Boy” by C L Raven: in the 1920s a teenage boy kills a couple of little girls in a Welsh town.
“Twenty Cents’ Worth of Arsenic” by Edward Butts: a woman in a small town in Ontario is convicted of poisoning her husband.
“I Kill for God” by Mitzi Szereto: a mentally disturbed man goes on a shooting rampage in Washington state, killing six people and injuring several others.
“The Summer of ‘The Fox’” by Mark Fryers: a spate of home invasions and rapes terrorize the English town of Leighton Buzzard in the summer of 1984.
“Who Killed Gabriele Schmidt: The True Story and the Mystery Surrounding a Forgotten Murder” by Alexandra Burt: a young girl is killed in a town in central Germany.
“Bullets and Balaclavas: The Long, Cold Orkney Shooting” by Charlotte Platt: a teenager wearing a balaclava walks into a restaurant and kills the owner by shooting him in the head.
“The Black Hand and Glass Eye of Earlimart: A Killer’s Perspective” by Christian Cipollini: a hitman tells the story of his murder of a small-town drug dealer.
“Crime Has Come to Penal!” by Iris Leona Marie Cross: a brutal home invasion and murder in Trinidad.
“The Voodoo Preacher” by David Brasfield: in 1977 a minister is shot dead while attending a funeral in Alexander City, Alabama.
“La Bella Elvira: Murder in the Tuscan Hills” by Deirdre Pirro: a young woman is killed in postwar Italy.
“The Doctor, the Dentist, and the Dairyman’s Daughter” by Paul Williams: a young woman dies in a town in Wales and a local doctor is suspected of her murder in what might have been an abortion gone wrong in 1884.
“In the Home of the Cannibal” by Joe Turner: an aspiring cannibal advertises online for a willing victim, and finds one.
“Nameless in Van Dieman’s Land” by Stephen Wade: the 1996 Port Arthur massacre.
The book:
As with a lot of these themed anthologies you’re led to ask what the significance of the connecting idea is, and how it might influence the way we think about crime in general.
In the present case, are these stories of small-town crime just meant to show the “dirty fingerprint,” in the language of Mitzi Szereto, on the “postcard images of picturesque town squares, parades down Main Street, bake sales, [and] church socials”? To reveal the dark side of places where it’s assumed “people look out for each other” and a time when “neighbor helped neighbor and people and property were treated with respect, and no one had to worry about locking doors”?
Well, Miss Marple had a thing or two to say about how crime and the universality of human evil undermines that vision of small-town life. I think we have to dig deeper.
So for starters, what is a small town? Does it depend on where the town is located? To take the first two stories, the current population of Snowtown, Australia is 356. The population of Posorja, Ecuador is 15,000. From what I could gather, they are very different communities. And it’s also the case that a lot of the crimes described here didn’t take place in small towns. Snowtown, for example, was only a place the killers stored the bodies of their victims, and many of the other killers we meet lived in homes outside of towns, in semi-rural areas.
We also span the globe in this book, with what are Australia’s two most notorious crime stories providing bookends, a couple of trips to Germany, one to Italy, two stories from Wales, a few set in the U.S., and some exotic locations like Trinidad, Orkney, and Canada also in the mix.
And what of the passage of time? Is the myth of the idyllic small town inextricably linked to “the values of the past, [and] the ‘good old days’”? Here as well the stories cover a lot of ground, being culled from headlines drawn from anywhere in the last century and a half. What does a small town in Wales in the 1880s have in common with a small town in Trinidad in 2018? Are small towns everywhere and at any time that much the same?
It’s an interesting question, but to be honest I don’t think it’s one this volume is all that interested in addressing. Instead, this is pretty much just a pot-pourri of crime stories characterized mainly by its geographical diversity. And that is in turn one of the more interesting connecting threads. The first story introduces us to the idea of “dark tourism”: the international rubberneckers of the true crime world. For the most part the towns here are not regular tourist destinations. I think Port Arthur might be the only place normal people would care to visit. But if you’re a reader of true crime and don’t like to travel you should enjoy this sampling of off-the-beaten path locales. If nothing else, you’ll learn a bit along the way about places you might not know anything about. I know I did.
Is dark tourism wrong? Years ago I remember my father and I going for a drive to see where Albert Johnson Walker lived in Paris (Ontario), but I think that was mainly because it was near where my father grew up. Most such places don’t have much to tell us though, or relate very much to the crimes they witnessed. The only stories where I thought place was really relevant were the lynching in Ecuador (with the background of that country’s indigenous justice movement), the home invasion in Trinidad (an island paradise that has become “a crime-ridden hellhole”), and the walk-through tour of Armin Miewes’s dilapidated farmhouse — or rather mansion (43 rooms?) — with Miewes’s pornography still left lying around years later. That struck me as weird.
Another connecting thread, and one less welcome, was the first-person voice adopted by many of the authors. I’ve mentioned before how much I don’t like this development, and how the “true crime memoir” is a sub-genre I avoid like a case of the clap. These stories don’t go that far, but many have a memoir flavour. To give you some idea of what I’m talking about, here’s a sampling of first lines:
I remember a sense of eeriness and palpable shame.
In 1984, as a six-year-old child, I moved to a small town in the South of England, where I would remain for the next twenty years.
We all have a story to tell about the summer of 1983: I was on vacation; I visited my grandmother; I took the train to Paris. I have told my very own story numerous times over the past thirty-seven years, a story that has morphed into the very reason I write about crime.
I had been temporarily resident in London, England, for eleven years and was fearful of returning to my home country.
It was a roasting Alabama day in June of 1977. I was three years old and living in a house down the street from the House of Hutchinson funeral home at the moment a vigilante shot Reverend Willie Maxwell in the face in front of two hundred mourners.
I went to this place as a tourist. I came away from it a true crime writer.
I wish non-fiction writers didn’t do this so much. In some very special situations it works, but most of the time I just want to say to them “It’s not about you.”
That said, I really enjoyed this collection. The international flavour (something that Mitzi Szereto’s anthologies tend to specialize in) was a plus, as was the fact that aside from a few of the more notorious cases, I wasn’t familiar with the crimes being discussed. Also, the fact that several of the crimes were either unsolved or their resolutions still open to dispute, added a bit of an edge. There were a couple of real clunkers, as you’d expect from a collection of what are all-new pieces, but overall the quality of the writing was pretty high.
Noted in passing:
In the story “Crime Has Come to Penal!” a married couple, along with the husband’s mentally ill adult brother, are brutally murdered (shot, throats slit) in their home. In the house at the time were the couple’s two children: a four-year-old girl and her infant (eight-month-old) brother. The rotting bodies of the adults were not discovered for four days, and in that time the little girl “cleaned the infant, changed his diapers, and bottle-fed him with milk from the open can that was found on the living room floor. She also gave him juice and snacks.” To be sure, both kids were in bad shape when they were discovered, but the girl did keep her brother alive.
That’s an impressive little girl! But the author points out that just a few months earlier a similar case had occurred in California, when a four-year-old girl cared for her two-month-old brother for three days following the murder-suicide of their parents.
Damn. Those are some resourceful four-year-olds!
Ranging as far afield as we do here, I picked up some proper geographical nomenclature. It is, for example, no longer considered correct to refer to the Orkney Islands as the Orkneys. The islands now simply go by the collective name of Orkney. I didn’t know that. I also didn’t know that residents of Trinidad and Tobago are known as Trinbagonians (or “Trinis” for short).
The bodies in the Snowtown case were put in barrels of hydrochloric acid, which didn’t have the desired effect of dissolving them but instead preserved them. Apparently what the killers should have used was sulfuric acid. The author chides them for being not too bright, but I would have probably made the same mistake. I’m not a chemist!
Takeaways:
When it comes to the violent expression of our basest emotions, human nature is pretty much the same everywhere.
Archie Horror Presents Chilling Adventures
Archie Horror Presents Chilling Adventures
As you know if you’ve been reading any of my previous posts, I’m a fan of the Archie Horror imprint. I think they’ve done a lot of really creative work and been successful in expanding the Archie brand in ways I wouldn’t have thought likely. That said, Chilling Adventures is a total dud.
The idea here was to present a horror anthology, with a bunch of short stories from a variety of authors and artists. According to the editor’s introduction the model was supposed to be something like EC’s Tales from the Crypt, which I can see, but I think the more immediate reference might have been The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror. And if that’s the comparison being made I think Chilling Adventures suffers by it. In fact, I can’t think of any comparison it doesn’t suffer by.
The blame can be laid squarely at the feet of the writers. Normally in a variety-show effort like this you can expect a mix of good and bad. Here I had trouble identifying anything that was good. Pretty much everything on tap was either tired and clichéd or confusing. Sometimes both. There’s a gesture at a frame story as Madame Satan gets bored with ruling hell and takes up being a high school principal. Archie gets trapped in a killer video game. Veronica is possessed by a demon dress. Jinx (Sabrina’s “familiar”) rescues a bunch of stray animals from a sorcerer. Jughead (the werewolf version) fights Krampus. Shape-shifting aliens land in Riverdale. Some of this might have been interesting, especially given the talent assembled, but it’s just a dull mess that never got any better as it stumbled along. Were they in a rush? Uninspired? I don’t know, but nothing here worked for me.
Bookmarked! #71: This Is Not a Pipe
This is not a pipe. It’s a pipa (琵琶) or Chinese lute. But actually it’s not a pipa either. It’s a bookmark in the shape of a pipa. Some friends just returned from a visit to China and they brought me back a bunch of bookmarks. More coming soon!
Book: Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750 by Odd Arne Westad
Alex Good 