Sarah Monette's Blog, page 11

UBC: Schecter, Man-Eater

Man-Eater: The Life and Legend of an American Cannibal by Harold Schechter

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I first heard of Alfred Packer in The Thin Man. For reasons that I admit aren't entirely clear to me, Hammett interrupts his own narrative at one point to provide the complete precis of Packer's crimes given in Duke's Celebrated criminal cases of America. According to Schecter, Hammett's claim was that he did it to pad an overly skinny book, which I don't believe for a second. Gilbert asks Nick more than once about what you might call hidden crimes like cannibalism and incest. Which may, now that I'm thinking about it, have some relevance to the thing that happened to Gilbert's sister Dorothy when she was a child, the thing she wants to confess to Nick, and Nick won't let her. (I love Nick for this, because Dorothy is clearly trying to shift both the attention and the genre of the narrative away from Nick and the detective novel and toward Dorothy herself and the gothic or the romance, with Dorothy as the heroine of a Mary Roberts Rinehart novel, and Nick just says, nope, not right now, and keeps going.)

However. This is not a discussion of The Thin Man.

Duke's version of Alfred Packer is, not surprisingly, wrong in many of its particulars, and Schecter's principal goal is to correct this and many other versions of Packer's story. One of the problems he runs into is that Packer's story is much too malleable (Packer himself told at least three different versions himself) and there's very little hard evidence: enough to prove that Packer's companions were murdered and eaten, not enough to prove that Packer, though indisputably the cannibal, was the murderer and not poor Shannon Wilson Bell. Schecter does have the important bit at the very end of his discussion, the piece I always look for in true crime books and only have about fifty-fifty odds of finding, where he pulls back and assesses. Schecter's opinion is that Packer was the murderer, but that there were mitigating circumstances, including the temporary insanity of starvation and the effect of Packer's epilepsy, which is itself hard to assess at this remove.

Schecter is competent enough in putting his facts together; my problem with him is that he fails to make Packer in any way interesting. The only life in this narrative is brought there by Leonel Ross Campbell, a.k.a. Polly Pry, and her reprobate bosses at the Denver Post. There does seem to have been a kind of negative charisma to Packer, as even Polly Pry admitted on their first meeting, although she quickly changed her tune, but a book the central events of which are murder and cannibalism should be more compelling than this book, which is competent and certainly readable but which, like Packer himself, remains flat and uncharismatic. It's a book that should be interesting and isn't.



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Con or Bust!

1. complete hardback Iskryne edda, signed by me.
A Companion to Wolves, The Tempering of Men, and An Apprentice to Elves, all in hardback, signed by me. Starting bid, which has been met, $100.

2. The Goblin Emperor, paperback, signed by me. Starting bid, which is still waiting, $15. Up to $22! (Wednesday, May 25, 11:40 AM CDT)

3. The Bone Key, trade paperback, 2nd edition, signed by me. Starting bid, still unmet, $25.

Plus more than 150 other wildly diverse items!

Con or Bust season

A reminder: Con or Bust is open for donations right now. The auction will start Wednesday, May 25, at 12:01 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time.

I dug all the way to Narnia into the very back of the closet, and will be contributing several items. I'll tell you what they are when we're a little closer to T-zero.

If you have not heard of it before, Con or Bust is a truly excellent event/institution that helps fans of color attend sff conventions, and people offer some amazing items. Bid if you can, donate if you can. If you can't do either, you can still contribute by boosting the signal.

UBC: Maclean, The Esperanza Fire

The Esperanza Fire: Arson, Murder, and the Agony of Engine 57 by John N. Maclean

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



I need to make a caveat before I start: I am not comparing this book to Young Men and Fire because Young Men and Fire exists in a special category all its own. I find it literally incomparable, and it is therefore manifestly unfair to hold any other book up to that standard.

That said, The Esperanza Fire is an excellent book. Maclean know how to tell a story; he knows how to organize his facts; he moves effortlessly back and forth along the timeline from the start of the Esperanza Fire to the aftermath of Oyler's trial for murder (proving, by the way, that it can be done, and done excellently). His prose style is both unobtrusive and graceful, and he pays careful attention to all of the hydra-like heads of the fire, the fight against it, and all of the snaking investigative heads that sprang up from the severed neck-stump of the first flaming head. (Okay, wow. That metaphor really got away from me. Sorry. And, yes, I know the irony that the Hydra was defeated by fire.) He doesn't try to pretend knowledge he doesn't have (he no more than speculates, based on the evidence that remained, about what happened at the Octagon House; he makes no pretense of presenting any of the dead men's points of view). And he is compassionately impartial, presenting conflicting testimony and offering a rational judgment of the more likely narrative without villifying or excoriating anyone.

He tells the story of the first disastrous morning of the Esperanza Fire vividly and clearly, showing how close the firefighters at the Tile House and at the Double-Wide came to sharing Engine 57's fate, showing how much of their survival was because of the whim of the fire, not because they were braver or smarter or better prepared than the men who died.

For me, this book also emphasized how much we need firefighters, how much we owe to people who are willing to do that job. (I say this as someone who would crack like a hollow egg under that kind of pressure). So if you, Gentle Reader, are a firefighter, thank you.



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tag team action

CAT A: OH MY GOD BIPED I AM STARVING
CAT B: ::sleeps::
CAT A: STARVING DID YOU HEAR ME
CAT B: ::sleeps::
CAT A: I AM ABOUT TO PERISH UTTERLY
CAT B: ::cracks one eye::
CAT A: UTTERLY
CAT B: ::goes back to sleep::
CAT A: ... utterly ...
ME: All right, all right, already.
[Cat A and I go downstairs and I put Cat A's food down]
CAT A: HALLELUJAH
[I leave the room for a minute to make a cup of tea and return]
CAT A: ::rampages merrily overhead::
CAT B: ::gives me a look and goes back to eating Cat A's food::

UBC: Montillo, The Wilderness of Ruin

The Wilderness of Ruin: A Tale of Madness, Fire, and the Hunt for America's Youngest Serial Killer by Roseanne Montillo

My rating: 3 of 5 stars




This book is kind of a mess.

It's about Jesse Pomeroy, Herman Melville, and the Great Boston Fire of 1872, and the biggest problem I had with it is that none of the three has anything very much to do with the other two. This kind of historical writing, the New Historicist anecdote technique expanded to book form, is kind of in vogue right now--it's all postmodern and shit--and when it's done well, it can be extremely illuminating. But to make it work, the reader has to be able to follow the subterranean connections between topic A and topic B, and the closest Montillo ever really came to that was the horrifying moment when I thought she was going to try to argue that Billy Budd is about Jesse Pomeroy. She didn't, thank goodness, but she never really made it clear why she was trying to juxtapose Pomeroy and Melville, nor what the Great Boston Fire had to do with either of them. Nor any of the other things that felt like random digressions.

Montillo also has difficulty--or I have difficulty with Montillo--over organizing her facts (I always think of Harriet Vane giving testimony at the inquest in Have His Carcase when I trot out this complaint). She loops back and forward through her chronology, which--again--can be really effective when done well (e.g., Son of the Morning Star: General Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn), but it takes unwavering control and pinpoint precision. And, I'm thinking, a lot of practice. In this book, it just means that it's difficult bordering on impossible to get a clear sense of the order in which events happen. And since one of her themes is the progression of Pomeroy's crimes, that is kind of a problem.

Now, I can see, because I've had a lot of practice, the connection she wants to make between Melville and Pomeroy, which is the emerging and evolving Victorian understanding of insanity--something she argues Melville was obsessed with and something that is visibly relevant to Pomeroy (was he insane? legally? medically? morally? what do any of those ideas even mean?). And, okay, yes, Pomeroy was living in Boston in 1872--I think? Again, I don't have a good sense of the timeline. The Great Boston Fire occurred on November 9, 1872 (with a follow-up on November 11 when the broken gas mains exploded). Jesse Pomeroy was sentenced to the state reform school September 21, 1872 and was released (four years early) in February 1874 . . .

. . . Okay, wait a minute. This doesn't even make sense. Pomeroy was sentenced to the reform school September 21, 1872 (p. 51). The Great Boston Fire happened November 9 (p. 77). Pomeroy was released February 6, 1874 (p. 101). Horace Millen was murdered and Jesse Pomeroy arrested April 23, 1874, "some five weeks after Katie Curran went missing" (p. 93). But Katie Curran disappeared "March 18, 1873, nearly four months since the deadly fire had devastated downtown Boston" (p. 91). This isn't merely a typo, although the book is riddled with errors (I will give one example, that of Captain George Pollard, "who had manned the Essex on its faithful journey when a whale rammed and sunk the ship" (228). How the near-homophone of "faithful" got used in place of "fateful" I do not know, but it is not the only place in this book where a word like the correct word--but, crucially, not--made it into print.) If Katie Curran went missing "four months since the deadly fire," she did go missing in 1873. But Pomeroy wasn't living in Boston to murder her until February 1874, more than a year after the Great Fire. So, okay, the timeline problems aren't just me. But, to make a long story short, Pomeroy wasn't living in Boston at the time of the Great Fire. He was in Westborough. Melville (whose timeline doesn't actually synch with Pomeroy's at all: Moby-Dick, where she's trying to pull the threads together, was published in 1851; Billy Budd, the other option, was left unfinished at Melville's death in 1891) was in New York.

There's lots of interesting stuff in this book, but it feels thrown together at random. There's nothing that actually pulls it together into a cohesive whole. It's just the interwoven, but not clearly connected, stories of Jesse Pomeroy, Herman Melville, and the Great Boston Fire of 1872. I found myself wishing she'd just picked one and stuck to it. My vote is for Pomeroy.

The next time someone tries to tell you Jack the Ripper was "the first serial killer," whatever they may mean by that, kindly point them at Jesse Harding Pomeroy, who has the Ripper beat by fourteen years. And the thing about Pomeroy, aside from the part where he spent 50 years in solitary confinement and came out no less sane than when he went in, is that between the interviews he gave before he was sentenced and the letters he wrote and the autobiography published in the Boston Sunday Times, you can get a weird sense of who he was (which you can't for the Ripper). Watching him trying to figure out how to tell the right lies to get judged legally insane makes it absolutely clear that he has no idea why what he did was wrong and only sort of understands why he might be considered insane for torturing and murdering a small boy. Pomeroy was a psychopath, using the strict definition of the term, and one thing I will applaud Montillo for is the careful accuracy with which she uses words like "psychopath" and "monomaniac." She balances the modern definition with the Victorian definition in a way that, through the example of Pomeroy, makes them both easier to understand. She shows very clearly that the Victorian model of sanity vs. insanity was simply not capable of dealing with a person like Pomeroy (or, for that matter, with poor Herman Melville, whose family spent years telling him to stop writing because they felt it was driving him insane; although Montillo doesn't cite "Bartleby the Scrivener," her description of Melville's dutiful, conscientious, hopeless performance of his job at the Customs House makes it all too clear where Bartleby comes from). The modern model has better words, delicate and precise enough to distinguish between mental illness and personality disorder, and Montillo demonstrates very clearly that Jesse Pomeroy was a psychopath by the modern definition--something his contemporaries had no word for.

Obviously, I would be interested in a much more in-depth exploration of that conceptual gap, both in the sense of how the words we use mold what we can and cannot say with them, and in the sense of what Pomeroy himself was, how he thought, what his understanding was of his self and his actions. This is not that book because that's not Montillo's project. She's trying to make a thematic connection between the whiteness of the whale and the whiteness of Pomeroy's right eye (she occasionally uses the word "albino," which of course has its own freight of negative symbolism--which she does not address at all), and although she doesn't succeed--the transition between Moby Dick as symbol of evil and Pomeroy as someone who creates evil jars instead of meshing. You can see the problem in what I wrote as well--the two registers of (1) the symbolism within Melville's novel, i.e., the symbolism Melville invested in a figment of his own imagination and which other people, very belatedly, well after Pomeroy was stashed away in the Massachusetts State Prison, started to find meaningful as well; and (2) any attempt to make a meaningful pattern out of Jesse Harding Pomeroy, to fit him into any kind of moral schematic of good and evil (and there's a whole 'nother problem there about whether morality has any useful meaning at all in contemplating Pomeroy), can't be brought together without trivializing or misrepresenting one or both sides. And she can't show, no matter how much she wants to, that anyone contemporaneous with Pomeroy thought of linking Melville's symbolism with him. (I was a little surprised that nobody apparently brought up "The Tell-Tale Heart," because that was certainly what I was thinking about in reading descriptions of Pomeroy's white eye.

SO, although Montillo doesn't succeed--I never buy into the pattern she's trying to show me--it's an interesting attempt, even if I did periodically find myself thinking, Why is this chapter about Herman Melville? And I appreciate the care with which she treats Pomeroy, the precision of the language she uses.

But, honestly, I still don't understand what the Great Boston Fire has to do with any of it.



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UBC: Bates, The Poisoner

The Poisoner: The Life and Crimes of Victorian England's Most Notorious Doctor by Stephen Bates

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge. Palmer and Pritchard were among the heads of their profession."
--Sherlock Holmes, "The Speckled Band," Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
(The Annotated Sherlock Holmes I.257 [the accompanying illustration, btw, has them reversed: Pritchard is the one with the beard; Palmer is clean-shaven])



I'm starting with this quote because (a) it is likely the only time most people in the twenty-first century will have heard of William Palmer and Edward Pritchard, and (b) it's so freaking odd because it's 100% wrong. Neither Palmer nor Pritchard were "among the heads of their profession." Palmer (executed 1856), a surgeon (which wasn't quite the same thing as a doctor in Victorian England), had never been more than a small town GP and wasn't even practicing when John Parsons Cook died, and Pritchard (executed 1865) bought his diploma as a Medicinae Doctor from the University of Erlangen without ever having studied there. And even with the diploma, he, too, was nothing more than a family doctor and nothing to write home about. So, given that Watson notes Holmes' encyclopedic knowledge of crime more than once and thus we cannot believe that Doyle wants us to believe that Holmes is wrong, we have two choices: (1) Doyle, an infamously sloppy writer, didn't bother to check his facts, or (2) Holmes is wrong on purpose, because he's trying to point Watson at a clue. Both Palmer and Pritchard were poisoners, and they both poisoned (or were strongly suspected of poisoning) their friends and loved ones, just as the dreadful Dr. Roylott has poisoned one step-daughter and is trying to poison another. I also find it odd that the Annotated Sherlock Holmes, which is usually all over this kind of thing, doesn't even have a note trying to reconcile what Holmes says with the historical data. My suggestion #2 is pretty much the party-line the A.S.H. would have preached.

I don't have an answer, but that line is certainly where I first heard of Palmer and Pritchard--certainly the reason I was curious about both of them--so I thought I should at least observe that it leaves a notably misleading impression.

There's an account of Pritchard in Classic Crimes. The Poisoner is about Palmer. Bates is trying very hard to be fair and impartial. The case against Palmer was mostly circumstantial, bolstered by some somewhat suspect pieces of witness testimony and the appalling performance of Alfred Swaine Taylor. It's not that Palmer wasn't guilty (his own behavior is the most damning evidence available), but like Luetgert (Alchemy of Bones: Chicago's Luetgert Murder Case of 1897), he did not get a fair trial.

Even trying his damnedest, Bates can't reach any conclusion other than that Palmer murdered John Parsons Cook. For money. Most of which he couldn't commit fraud fast enough to get his hands on. Palmer may not have murdered his own brother (Walter), but as Bates points out, he didn't need to. He just needed to give Walter access to enough alcohol that he could drink himself to death at the age of 32. And then collect on the staggering amount of money he'd managed to insure Walter's life for--which he promptly applied to his even more staggering debts and did not even come close to paying them off. Bates does an excellent job of explaining just how deeply Palmer was in debt (his crimes, which are mostly fraud with some murder thrown in, are all aimed at paying off the money-lenders) and just how futile all his efforts were to extract himself, since he never once tried to give up horse-racing, which was the root cause of all his financial troubles.

This is a very good book, clearly written and easy to follow through the thickets of Palmer's lethal folly.




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UBC: Hodel, Black Dahlia Avenger

Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder by Steve Hodel

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Steven Hodel sets out to prove a number of things in this book:

1. His father, Dr. George Hill Hodel, was an abusive, controlling, sadistic, egotistical whack-job, with a thing for incest, pedophilia, and Asian girls, who was criminally involved in an abortion ring, every illegal depravity you can think of, and also tax evasion.

2. His father, with his friend and henchman Fred Sexton, killed Elizabeth Short.

3. There was a serial killer preying on women in Los Angeles in the 1940s.

4. This serial killer murdered Elizabeth Short.

5. THEREFORE, George Hill Hodel and Fred Sexton, together and separately, were this serial killer, and continued their "work" on into the '50s and even the '60s.

6. The person who killed Elizabeth Short, aside from being George Hill Hodel, serial killer and tax evader, was the person who sent all communications to either police or press about any of these killings and also left the words written in lipstick on Jeanne French's dead body.

Okay. So.

Hodel actually convinces me of (1) and (3) and I'll put an option on (2) even if I don't entirely buy it. (4) I have serious doubts about. (5) and (6) I'm not touching with a ten foot pole.

The basic problem with Hodel is that all of his logic looks like this:

1. George Hill Hodel was a sadistic whack job.
2. The serial killer was a sadistic whack job.
3. Therefore, George Hill Hodel was the serial killer.

Or:

1. (a.) The newspaper editor who talked once on the phone to a man who claimed to be the Black Dahlia Avenger described his voice as "soft" and "sly," the voice of an "egomaniac" (271)
(b.) This man's claim was true.
2. (a.) Many witnesses across the various crimes described the suspect they saw with the victim as having a "suave" and "cultured" voice. (271)
(b.) Therefore, the serial killer had a "suave" and "cultured" voice.
3. George Hill Hodel had a suave, cultured, and distinctively arresting voice.
4. THEREFORE, the man on the phone, the Black Dahlia Avenger (i.e., the murderer of Elizabeth Short), the serial killer, and George Hill Hodel are all the same man. (Because no other man in Hollywood could possibly have a suave and cultured voice.)

Hodel consistently assumes that things that are probably (or even only possibly) true ARE true. He consistently proceeds as if stating something to be true makes it true. Evidence for his premises is taken as evidence for his conclusion. (E.g., further evidence that Fred Sexton was a child molester is taken as further evidence that he was a serial killer). Anything that that does not disprove his thesis is proof of its truth. And he has the special conspiracy theorist's version of the argumentum ex silencio: the absence of evidence is proof that someone destroyed the evidence and THEREFORE is proof that his thesis is true. He takes an all-or-nothing approach to witness and victim testimony that I find singularly unhelpful, my prime example being his sister Tamar, who at 14 was the victim of statutory rape, incest, and abortion (like I said, I totally buy that George Hill Hodel was an abusive whack-job) and who also got caught up in the DA's panting eagerness to pin something on Dr. Hodel. It's clear from what Hodel says that Tamar was being bullied into testifying, and probably being coached on what to say, so that while I believe her initial claim, that she ran away from home because her father forced her to have an abortion after himself impregnating her, I just can't exclude the possibility that the DA's men were tampering with the witness for her subsequent testimony. This is not to say that Tamar was a pathological liar--the (successful) defense position--just that she was 14, in a cataclysmically horrible place (being the star witness in your father's trial for incest is not ANYBODY's idea of a good time), and being leaned on pretty hard by the DA. Without corroboration (real corroboration, not Hodel's version), I don't feel comfortable believing 100% of what she said. But for Hodel you either believe her entirely (prosecution) or disbelieve her entirely (defense). He doesn't allow for any middle ground.

And then there's the part where he simply assumes that something he has not proven is true, and proceeds with his argument as if its truth were incontrovertible. For example. On p 325, discussing another of the possible victims, Jean Spangler, Hodel says, "Spangler, while working on a movie set at Columbia Pictures with actor Robert Cummings, told Cummings that she 'had a happy new romance' and was having the time of her life. She did not tell Cummings her new boyfriend's name." And then, six pages later, "Or perhaps things are exactly as they appear on the surface, and Jean Spangler, as she represented to Robert Cummings, did meet Father only a few days before her kidnap-murder" (331). But that's not how things appear on the surface, since p. 325 tells us explicitly that Spangler did not tell Cummings her new boyfriend's name. Hodel, having suggested the possibility that Spangler was killed by George Hill Hodel, is now simply forging ahead as if it were true and had been proven conclusively to be true.

After a couple of these maneuvers, it became increasingly impossible for me to trust Hodel or to believe anything he told me.

And it's a pity, because two of his theses I think are true and worth pursuing in different ways. (1) That George Hill Hodel was a criminally abusive parent and husband, as well as being up to his eyeballs in the corruption of 1940s Los Angeles. (2) That there was a serial killer active in 1940s Los Angeles and at least some of the horrifying slew of unsolved rape/murders can be laid at that unknown man's door. (1) is the memoir Hodel (pretty clearly) needed to write to come to terms with his relationship with his father, with his siblings, and with his mother. (2) would have made a fascinating piece of true crime writing, even if it never came to any definitive conclusions. (Notice that neither of these books is about the murder of Elizabeth Short.) Or, if he really wanted to try to pursue this cat's cradle of intertwined theses, he needed to slow down, separate them out--the man who killed Elizabeth Short, the man (or men) who preyed on Los Angeles in the '40s, and the man who claimed to be the Black Dahlia Avenger have to be proven to be the same man, never mind the idea that one or more of them was George Hill Hodel--and distinguish much MUCH more carefully between things he could prove and things he couldn't.

(I see from his bibliography that he has gone on to claim his father was also the Zodiac killer. That may tell you everything you need to know.)



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UBC, Prejean, Dead Man Walking

Dead Man Walking by Helen Prejean

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Sr. Helen Prejean, C.S.J., is a polemicist.

I don't say this as a condemnation, just as something I was never able to forget while reading Dead Man Walking. This is a woman making an argument; her goal is to persuade. As a reader, I was always able to feel her persuading me as I read, and even though I agree with her--the death penalty as practiced in the American criminal justice system is an abomination and a farce--I had to keep reminding myself not to dig in my heels just because I don't like being persuaded of things.

Which is also not to say that she is not extremely persuasive. Sister Helen is an excellent storyteller, and she is always careful to keep the other side of her story in mind: the Bourques and the LeBlancs as well as Pat Sonnier, the Harveys as well as Robert Lee Willie. She's perfectly open about her own rhetorical purpose, and she's willing to show the people who don't agree with her as being good and morally upright people who are able to turn their daughter's horrible death into purpose that is not simply about supporting the death penalty, but about advocating for the rights of the families of murder victims. She's sometimes a little disingenuous, but I never felt she was dishonest.

The movie conflates Pat Sonnier and Robert Lee Willie, which I think does a disservice to the moral complexity of the book. Sonnier, who expresses remorse and accepts responsibility for his terrible crime, who loves his brother fiercely enough to forgive him and (in a sense) to die for him, who is open to and accepting of Sister Helen's message. Who is enough of a man (unlike Willie, the narrative suggests) to drop his machismo and admit his emotions. Sonnier, who thanks Sister Helen for loving him, is just about the perfect poster child for her purpose.

Willie is not. He is not remorseful; he shifts responsibility to the other guy. (Willie & Sonnier are interesting mirrors of each other; both had a partner in crime, and both received the death penalty while their partner got life. Sonnier, in something that was either a clusterfuck or a very shrewd manipulation on Eddie Sonnier's part, confessed; Willie says consistently that it was all Vaccaro's fault, that Vaccaro did it. The closest he gets to admitting culpability is saying that he shouldn't have followed Vaccaro's lead.) He clearly likes Sister Helen, but he's resistant to being molded and he maintains his exaggerated machismo to the end. No confessions, no mention of love (except of course for his mother), no sign that there's anything in him that could be salvaged or rehabilitated or that is even capable of recognizing the idea.

There's a really weird moment where Sister Helen tells him, while they're waiting for his execution, that when she first met him she thought he was a sociopath. And I said (I think even out loud), "You mean you think he's not?" She fails in her project there with me, in the sense that her project is to persuade readers that even the most hardened criminals are still, as her abolitionist lawyer friend says of Willie, "a child sitting inside [a] tough, macho dude" (119). I don't believe that about Willie--Willie makes my skin crawl, first to last--and in any case, that's not why I believe the death penalty is wrong.

I believe the death penalty is wrong for many of the same reasons Sister Helen does. E.g.:

(1) Our government, corrupt, inefficient, and even incompetent as it so often is, should not have the power of life or death over its citizens.

(2) The imposition of the death penalty in America is grossly skewed toward African-Americans, the lower classes, (reprehensibly) the mentally disabled, and towards criminals who murder whites. If we're going to claim it's justice, then it has to be administered justly.

(3) It is absolutely cruel and unusual punishment, despite the fancy footwork the Supreme Court tried to hide behind in Gregg vs. Georgia. Towards the end of the book, the father of one of Willie's victims says, "Know what they should've done with Willie? [...] They should've strapped him in that chair, counted to ten, then at the count of nine taken him out of the chair and let him sit in his cell for a day or two and then strapped him in the chair again. It was too easy for him. He went too quick" (235). What Vernon Harvey doesn't recognize, and what the narrative doesn't point out, is that that's what the torturous system of appeals and retrials and more appeals already does. Stays of execution, temporary reprieves, courts considering appeals only to reject them, the awful, awful cruelty of the power the governor has to commute the prisoner's sentence up until the literal moment the switch is thrown . . . these are torture just as much as the strappado or the rack. It shows more clearly, actually, with Sonnier, because we see more of the process and because Sister Helen (Helen-Prejean-the-author painting Sister-Helen-the-character as the raw naive newbie) doesn't truly believe Sonnier's going to die, that nothing she can do can save him, until 8:40 on the night of his execution (Sonnier officially died at fifteen minutes past midnight). This tug o'war with hope as the prize is dreadful, excruciating for the victim's family and excruciating for the man waiting to die. It's not justice.

There are any number of ethical questions that neither this book nor this review have touched, infinite delicate delineations of gray between Sister Helen and Vernon Harvey (shades of black between Pat Sonnier and Robert Lee Willie), and I do in fact applaud this book for not shutting any of those down.



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UBC: Dan Schultz, Dead Run

Dead Run: The Murder of a Lawman and the Greatest Manhunt of the Modern American West by Dan Schultz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This is a good book with some flaws.

1. It badly needed one last going over by a weapons-grade copy-editor to fix the persistent punctuation errors, the persistent confusion of "lie" and "lay," the equally persistent confusion of "may" and "might" (why do people even make this mistake? it baffles me), and the occasional use of the almost-right word.

2. It is not Schultz's fault that the narrative he's trying to tell is confusing. The crime, the manhunt, and the investigation all proceeded on different timelines, at different paces, and criss-crossing each other in knotty nodes of unanswered questions. But he makes it more difficult to follow by trying to save important information for a big reveal. (E.g., because they found Mason first, in his hypothetical reconstruction of Mason's death he posits two men whom he labels "the commando" and "the accomplice." As a reader, I naturally assumed that those two men were Mason's co-conspirators, McVean and Pilon, so that when he gets to the discovery of Pilon's body and presents his hypothetical reconstruction that Mason killed him, I got very confused. I actually had to go back and reread his reconstruction of Mason's death to notice that when he describes the two men escaping downriver in a raft, one of whom was identified as McVean, he never actually puts a name to the other guy. And isn't until much later in the book that he coyly presents the idea of a fourth conspirator. It's clear he can't name names, presumably for legal reasons, but, dude, this is what pseudonyms are for. Call him "John Doe" or "X," whatever, that's fine, but give me some kind of clear antecedent that I can use to sort things out in my head.)

3. It's clear that the manhunt was a clusterfuck from start to finish, and when he's discussing operational problems, Schultz is tactful and impartial, but he presents the evidence about who failed to do what part of their job and how jurisdictional squabbles took up a stupid amount of everybody's time and energy. The choice to sideline the Navajo Nation Police trackers, for instance, stands out painfully as a decision reached for all the wrong reasons. The contrast between the FBI behaving like the worst caricature of themselves: smug know-it-all bullies demanding first crack at evidence and witnesses, hoarding information away from all the other investigators and alienating witnesses by their antagonistic interrogation techniques: and the local cop who went in later, not treating the encounter as a battle for dominance (but instead, deliberately and cannily, offering tokens of submission), and not only got those witnesses to talk, but got information that could have been valuable if it had been elicited the first time around--that contrast also hurts. But when Schultz is talking about the parts where forensic evidence was deliberately ignored in order to maintain the story that Mason, Pilon, and McVean were all suicides, suddenly it's "the police" thought this and "the police" said that, like "the police" is the monolithic shadowy reified institution that his description of the manhunt emphatically shows American law enforcement is not. (Also, above, note that while he names the local cop, the FBI agents are just "the FBI." The Colorado Bureau of Investigation agents are likewise "the CBI." So even at the operational level, he's not consistent.) His volte-face means that the book is only about half of an analysis of why the manhunt for Mason, Pilon, and McVean was such a dismal failure (that subtitle--"the Greatest Manhunt of the Modern American West"--is ironic in a way I seriously doubt anyone involved intended).

With all that said, this is in fact a good book. Schultz's narrative style is engaging and he presents a staggering amount of information without ever getting bogged down. His discussion of why McVean, Mason, and Pilon did what they did and were trying to do what (he conjectures) they intended--and why so many people in the area supported them or were sympathetic to them or actually helped them evade the law--is thoughtful and careful, both in its discussion of the culture of the American West, the specific beliefs of the conspirators (the way that reactionary white men have worked themselves around to believing that they are the oppressed never fails to boggle my mind; see also Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith), and the weird ethical clash between the scale of right vs. wrong and the scale of government vs. the individual that ends up with people sincerely believing that shooting a police officer in cold blood is the right thing to do. He makes frequent reference to the legends of the "Old West," particularly those who have come to have a Robin Hood like mythology around them: Billy the Kid, Jesse James, especially Butch Cassidy, who hid from the law in the same canyons that these modern conspirators use. I don't know if it's intentional, but McVean, Mason, and Pilon make very tawdry hero-outlaws (just as the real outlaws of the "Old West" were more like the Clantons of Tombstone ill-repute than Newman (Cassidy) and Redford (Sundance)). I found myself wondering, if they'd actually succeeded in what Schultz hypothesizes their intent was, to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam--and it's important to remember that, despite the certainty with which Schultz presents his theory, it's still only speculation--they would still have been regarded as heroes by anyone. (Probably, the answer is yes, because our species is like that.)

There's a lot of Peter Pan in Robin Hood, and Schultz's examination of the short lives of Jason McVean, Bobby Mason, and Monte Pilon brought that out very strongly for me. These were men who were resisting taking on adult responsibilities, who were trying to carve out a space where, Lord of the Flies-like, they didn't have to answer to anyone, where they could quite literally play with guns and have camp-outs and never have to deal with the ambiguity, ambivalence, and confusion that--like it or not--is inherent in being a sapient, self-aware adult in modern (quote-unquote) civilization. I am repulsed by most of their beliefs, but even so I can feel the draw of the freedom they imagined they were winning. (Sherwood Forest=Neverland=Cross Canyon)

But their ideals were ugly and violent and narcissistic and led not to freedom but to murder, both as murderers and (if Schultz is correct) victims. After Dale Claxton was gunned down on McElmo Bridge, Pilon lasted maybe a couple of days, Mason a week, and McVean an unknown number of years (probably five or more). McVean was probably happy before karma caught up to him; he was living exactly the way he told his friends he wanted to: on his own, in the desert. McVean, the ringleader (it is so very clear that Mason and Pilon were followers; McVean was the one with the ideas), the man who pulled the trigger, used up and discarded his friends like pawns sacrificed on a chess board (it's very telling to me, somehow, that when they split up, McVean went one way on his own, and his "best friend" Mason went the other way with their fat geek hanger-on: Pilon is a weirdly perfect allusion to Piggy, even though I know better to allegorize real people), and forged onward. If he felt remorse, we don't know it, and I suspect his self-repairing ideology of persecution, oppression, and millennarian righteousness (McVean believed the Apocalypse was coming; he just got tired of waiting) kept his self-esteem intact.

Obviously, I found this book very thought-provoking; for all its flaws, it has a lot to say about one of the major fault lines in American culture.

[I apologize for the gross abuse of parentheses in this review. It's a sickness. --Ed.]



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