If one examines the murders which have given the greatest amount of pleasure to the British public, the murders whose story is known in its general outline to almost everyone and which have been made into novels and re-hashed over and over again by the Sunday papers, one finds a fairly strong family resemblance running through the greater number of them...let me try to define what it is that the readers of Sunday papers mean when they say fretfully that ‘you never seem to get a good murder nowadays’...One can construct what would be, from a News of the World reader's point of view, the ‘perfect’ murder...
--George Orwell, Decline of the English Murder
George Orwell could tell a good murder from a bad one, and in his famous 1946 essay on murder, he did. The murders getting ink today might not pass Orwell's rigorous test. Here are just a few of the other true crime cases now coming out in hardcover and paperback.
Final Analysis: The Untold Story of the Susan Polk Murder Case by Catherine Crier - just came out and the reviews so far are great. Mrs. Polk stabbed Mr. Polk 27 times. She was tried twice, acting as her own attorney the second time, and was convicted.
Murder, Salinas Style This city in California now has its own true crime encyclopedia. Salinas native Lisa Eisemann's book covers 54 murders from 1950 to 1998, including the case of serial killer Winnie Freeman. For more: The Californian
Gangsters of Harlem The subtitle is The Gritty Underworld of New York's Most Famous Neighborhood, and the author is Ron Chepesiuk. He includes a chapter on "Sgt. Smack" and "Superfly," two notorious Harlem characters, who will be played on the big screen later this year by Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. From The Herald:
He interviewed cops and gangsters, some in prison or the federal witness protection program, for the second half of the book.
"For the first half of the book, I used my skills as a librarian and an archivist," Chepesiuk said. He scoured the New York Public library, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, government and legal documents and correspondence, the Winthrop and Rock Hill libraries and more.
For many years, the Mafia held its grip on Harlem: the numbers racket and Prohibition speakeasies, later heroin kingpins through the French Connection.
In the 1970s, "the black gangsters declared their independence from the Mafia during this period," Chepesiuk said. They rode in limos and bedecked themselves with diamonds and beautiful women. Among them were Leslie Atkinson -- street name "Sgt. Smack" -- and Frank Lucas -- "Superfly." A film about them starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe is scheduled for release in November, said Chepesiuk, who interviewed them for the book.
Glenn Puit's Newest The Vegas Review-Journal journalist has published his second true crime book. This one is Fire in the Desert. From recent hype:
On the morning of December 14, 2005, Las Vegas police and firefighters were called to the desert outside of Las Vegas. A 2003 Jaguar was in flames, and inside the trunk of the vehicle was the badly burned body of a young Las Vegas woman named Melissa James. The 28-year-old had suffered a horrifying fate — she was restrained, her face was covered with duct-tape, and she was set on fire.
The disturbing discovery prompted a massive police investigation, and within hours, detectives were standing at the front doorstep of two of the nation’s most recognized fitness celebrities — Craig Titus and Kelly Ryan.
For more, see the Clews interview with author Glenn Puit.
New True Crime Author Site Author Diana Britt Franklin has the #1 bestselling true crime book on Clews. This website includes links to all sorts of books in the true crime genre, and more people have bought The Good-Bye Door: The Incredible True Story of America's First Female Serial Killer to Die in the Chair, a very tightly written, compelling account of poisoner Anna Hahn, than any other book mentioned on Clews. The author now has a website devoted to the book.
A Bad Review, I'm Sorry A publisher kindly sent me a book to review, but I cannot bring myself to discuss it except to say -- if you have an affair with a married man, who happens to be three or four decades older than yourself, and you decide to marry him for his money, inducing him in the process to abandon his wife of fifty years and alienate his children and grandchildren, you cannot be heard to complain when he shoots you five times and leaves you for dead, because he was a cold-hearted bastard when he married you in the first place, and you are not much better, and having all this take place on an oak-encrusted southern Gothic estate does not give the tale any redeeming charm.
Finally... Pervert of the Week and First Runner Up for Pervert of the Week
So the book review...did you hate the way the book was written? Or the actors?
Posted by: Soobs | March 13, 2007 at 10:11 PM