An Indispensable New True Crime Title

Before the American economy collapses, before your credit card is rejected because your bank has run out of money, there is one more book that you, the avid true crime fan, really ought to grab. It will provide countless hours of absorbing reading and help take your mind off the fact that you've lost your job, your car has been repossessed, and everything else you still own is on the lawn of your foreclosed home.

The book is True Crime: An American Anthology [Amazon; B&N], edited by genre master Harold Schechter. In the book, Schechter collected fifty true crime essays written by Americans concerning cases famous and obscure, essays selected purely on the basis of the quality of thought and expression.

The spine itself is one of the most impressive features of this book, because it was published by the nonprofit Library of America. That outfit is arguably the most prestigious publisher in the USA today. Its thin catalog features the works of the most famous and idolized American poets and authors, like Katherine Anne Porter, Philip Roth, and Philip K. Dick. And, whaddaya know, page six of of its Fall 2008 catalog features a true crime title that stands up in such heady company.

Did you know that Benjamin Franklin wrote true crime stories? Abraham Lincoln? Mark Twain?

The anthology of the best American true crime writing of all time also features some of my personal favorite authors, some names you will know as well -- Edmund Pearson, Theodore Dreiser, Miriam Allen deFord, Truman Capote, Albert Borowitz, Ann Rule, and Dominick Dunne. As Schechter puts it, "Some of our country's preeminent writers have produced work in the genre....  [Most people are] simply unaware of the great range of important American writers who have contributed to the field....  True crime has produced genuine artists of distinction."

The full table of contents appears on the publisher's site, as does an interview with the editor. "My hope," Schechter says, "is that True Crime will not only lead to a reappraisal of the genre but will be a revelatory experience for readers who--largely out of intellectual snobbery, I fear--have turned a blind eye to the outstanding writing its finest practitioners have produced."

I've read and relished every one of the fifty  selections in the collection. I have a bad habit of dog-earing and underlining impressive passages in the books I read, and this one now looks like a freshman geology textbook for all the highlighting I've done to my copy. Two of the selections stood out for me. I surprised myself by relishing and rereading the work of Cotton Mather. The excerpts from his Puritan execution sermons had me contemplating not only the interesting Puritan view of sin and murder but Reverend Mather's mental health as well (surely he was compulsive and manic - and his writings are incredibly emotionally evocative).

I also particularly relished an account of Cleveland's torso murders. Now, normally I don't "go" for the more gory stories, but John Bartlow Martin's long essay on the case hypnotized me. Like an impressionist painter, Martin created a portrait of a city gripped by terror with a noteworthy economy of words:

The citizens of Cleveland were uneasy. Six of the Butcher's victims had turned up in less than nine months. The police received hundreds of phone calls, worthless tips of spiteful neighbors, alarms of nervous citizens, baseless theories of the unbalanced -- a woman who said an elderly West side doctor was "acting queer," some railroaders who saw a man "putting something in a sewer," boys who found a woman's skeleton near the Nicel Plate (it was a family keepsake), a man who'd found a human skull and intestines on a city dump (medical school specimens).

True Crime: An American Anthology is the ultimate rebuttal to critics of the genre and a special treat for those of us who have always known that our favorite literary classification produces genuine works of art.

Comments

[Fiz]

Oooh, a book, I must buy it! Except some total retard has cloned both my cards and I can't use them now! Have a good weekend, everyone.

[Mark Daniels]

Looks great. Schechter has become quite the true crime historian, and I'm glad to see the focus on the more "serious" or "literary" writers.

My sister and I are both big readers. Just yesterday she asked what I was reading, and when I told her I've read eleven books in a row which were "turn of the century" true crime, I sensed a dismissive attitude in her nod. "Oh." But, as you know, there IS good writing in the genre beyond the sensationalist pop stuff. Maybe someday we'll no longer have to defend our reading tastes; Schechter seems determined to bring that day to us sooner rather than later.