Sarah Monette's Blog, page 13
March 13, 2016
Things I Know about Writing on August 29, 2008
[Storytellers Unplugged, August 29, 2008; found via the Wayback Machine via an awesome reader]
I missed July because I was so far down in novel revisions that I simply forgot about it--I didn’t even notice it was July 29th until August 2nd, if you see what I mean.
Nine days ago, I turned in Corambis. My brain promptly shut down. (This phenomenon is not uncommon among novelists. Elizabeth Bear calls it “post-novel ennui.”) I’m still waiting for it to boot up again.
So.
What do I know about writing?
I know that it’s hard.
I know that if it was easy, it wouldn’t be fun.
I know that learn by doing is the only game in town.
I know that the only way out is through. And there aren’t any shortcuts. Anything you think is a shortcut is just going to get you in worse trouble.
I know that most of the cliches of writing advice--write what you know, omit needless words--work better as koans, as meditations, than they do as advice.
I know that fiction is all lies.
I know that you have to tell your lies as if they were truth. Lots of circumstantial evidence and telling details. And conviction.
I know that in the end, it turns out that those lies are all there to point the way toward the truth. Or a truth. Or some truth. If we could just tell the truth straight out, it would save a lot of time. But on the other hand, telling lies is fun.
I know that even now, when there isn’t so much as a drop of creativity left in me, I’d rather be writing than not.
I know that my creativity will come back--it’s like stalactite formation: slow but inexorable--and that pretty soon the whole gaudy gruesome carousel will start up again.
I know that writing never stops challenging me. And if it ever does, I’ll know I’m doing something wrong.
And I know, even when I hate it as sometimes I do, that writing is the best damn job in the world.
I missed July because I was so far down in novel revisions that I simply forgot about it--I didn’t even notice it was July 29th until August 2nd, if you see what I mean.
Nine days ago, I turned in Corambis. My brain promptly shut down. (This phenomenon is not uncommon among novelists. Elizabeth Bear calls it “post-novel ennui.”) I’m still waiting for it to boot up again.
So.
What do I know about writing?
I know that it’s hard.
I know that if it was easy, it wouldn’t be fun.
I know that learn by doing is the only game in town.
I know that the only way out is through. And there aren’t any shortcuts. Anything you think is a shortcut is just going to get you in worse trouble.
I know that most of the cliches of writing advice--write what you know, omit needless words--work better as koans, as meditations, than they do as advice.
I know that fiction is all lies.
I know that you have to tell your lies as if they were truth. Lots of circumstantial evidence and telling details. And conviction.
I know that in the end, it turns out that those lies are all there to point the way toward the truth. Or a truth. Or some truth. If we could just tell the truth straight out, it would save a lot of time. But on the other hand, telling lies is fun.
I know that even now, when there isn’t so much as a drop of creativity left in me, I’d rather be writing than not.
I know that my creativity will come back--it’s like stalactite formation: slow but inexorable--and that pretty soon the whole gaudy gruesome carousel will start up again.
I know that writing never stops challenging me. And if it ever does, I’ll know I’m doing something wrong.
And I know, even when I hate it as sometimes I do, that writing is the best damn job in the world.
twofer
When Last We Left Our Heroes
[Storytellers Unplugged, July 07, 2009; retrieved via the Wayback Machine by an awesome reader]
The thing about writing a post every month (or every couple months--mea culpa) is that you-the-reader tend to get hit with whatever I’ve been thinking about more or less in the background of my day to day life. This time, it’s series novels.
There are two different kinds of series in genre fiction. One, on the Tolkien model, is a single story split up over multiple volumes.* George R. R. Martin is doing fabulously well with that kind of series right now. (Please note: Martin’s success is the exception, not the rule.) The other, which I think of as the mystery model, is a set of stories, all with the same protagonist(s), but with little or no continuity from novel to novel. Ngaio Marsh wrote that kind of series. So did Emma Lathen and Ellery Queen and Edmund Crispin and a whole host of other Golden Age detective story writers. At the far end of that spectrum is someone like John Dickson Carr, whose continuing character, Gideon Fell, is actually almost always a secondary character. Carr wrote standalone mysteries which happened to feature the same detective.
The advantage to the mystery model, from the publishing point of view, is that it caters to the vast yearning for same-but-different that drives a lot of people’s reading habits. You can pick up any book in the series--first, fourth, fourteenth, thirty-seventh--and have roughly the same reading experience. It doesn’t matter if two, five, and nineteen are out of print, because only the completists will care--or even be able to tell. Each book benefits from the sales record and reputation of the other books, but no book is dependent on the other books. This is very much not the case with the Tolkien model, where if you can’t find volume three, reading volume four is an exercise in frustration. And if you’ve read volume four, your incentive to find volume three is sharply diminished, because you already know what’s going to happen. In the mystery model, what happens in volume three has little or no bearing on volume four, and vice versa, so reading one has no impact on your desire for the other--except for feeding the same-but-different demon.
I completely understand why people like the mystery model. I like it myself when I find an author who’s good enough at it. And I equally completely understand why publishing likes the mystery model. It’s as close as you’re going to get to a sure thing in an industry ruled by caprice and intangibles.
My problem is, a mystery model series is the last thing on earth I want to write. They’re popcorn reading, and their indeterminate nature--you have to have enough closure that the story stands on its own but either (a.) leave enough minor threads loose that the next book can tie on or (b.) have frictionless characters who don’t change from book to book--means that even very excellent mystery model series aren’t much more than popcorn reading. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy Emma Lathen and John Dickson Carr and Ngaio Marsh and their ilk, and I respect their craft. But they’re not what I want to write. You have to live with a book you’re writing for a lot longer than a book you’re reading, even if you write fast (which I don’t), and, while I enjoy visiting, I couldn’t live in such a self-limiting form.
I’m ambitious. I aspire to art. I want to write great novels, not just excellently crafted entertainment. This may be a case of “aim for the stars, get to the roof” but it’s still better than aiming for the roof and only getting halfway up the stairs. The four books of the Doctrine of Labyrinths are all deeply dependent on each other, and I have always thought of that as a feature, rather than a bug. (It was in fact my puzzlement over reviews describing it as a bug that led me to understand, finally, that my definition of a series was only one of two possible definitions, and not the preferred definition at that.)
I’m going to be writing standalone novels for a while, I think. Aside from the publishing drawbacks, writing a Tolkien model series is exhausting. But when and if I do write another series, at least I’ll know what I’m getting into.
---
*This is very literally the Tolkien model, since--As You Know Bob--Tolkien conceived of The Lord of the Rings as a single novel. Most post-Tolkien series have at least some closure at the end of each individual volume: each installment is more or less a novel on its own.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
[Storytellers Unplugged, August 07, 2009; retrieved via the Wayback Machine by an awesome reader]
Apparently, this month I have nothing to say.
Except for a follow-up to last month’s post, in two parts:
1. I have no idea what I mean by “art.”
2. Despite all my bitching about open series (series in which every book is an entry point and every book can be read separately from the others), closed series (a la The Lord of the Rings) have no inherent virtue or “artistic” value, just as standalone novels don’t. I still think that the form of open series makes it difficult, if not impossible, to do certain things (which, last month, I described as “art”), but those things are not the only way to define art. The perfect counter-example is P. G. Wodehouse, whom I do not have the brass-faced effrontery to deny is an artist.
I hope that next month I will have real content to give you.
Where Do We Go from Here?
[first published on Storytellers Unplugged, February 7, 2009; dug out of the Wayback Machine by an awesome reader]
I’m in kind of a lull right now. The page-proofs of Corambis have gone back to New York, so I’m officially done, not only with that book, but with the four-volume series (Mélusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, and now Corambis) that I’ve been working on, in one way or another, since approximately 1993. That’s a big project and a big chunk of my life (even if I didn’t know when I started that it was going to be four books and fifteen years long), and so I suppose it’s really not surprising that I find myself metaphorically standing here, squinting at the signposts, frowning at the map, wondering where I go next.
I don’t know that I’m done forever with Felix and Mildmay and the world of Meduse, but I know that I’m definitely done for now. I need a new direction. I need new worlds to conquer. And at the same time, my mule team say they needs a goddamn break. They need a vacation, for crying out loud.
The mule team, of course, is the subconscious and the right brain and the place where the creativity wells up, the thing we don’t have any good words for. That part of my brain is tired. It’s not drained–I’m still getting new ideas–but, honestly, the idea isn’t the hard part. Turning the idea into a story, and making that story complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. That’s the hard part. And the mule team don’t want to do it. They want to lie around in the shade and drink iced tea.
And for now, I’m willing to let them. We could all use a breather.
Maybe by the time they’re ready to pull again, I’ll have figured out which way is up on the map
I’m in kind of a lull right now. The page-proofs of Corambis have gone back to New York, so I’m officially done, not only with that book, but with the four-volume series (Mélusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, and now Corambis) that I’ve been working on, in one way or another, since approximately 1993. That’s a big project and a big chunk of my life (even if I didn’t know when I started that it was going to be four books and fifteen years long), and so I suppose it’s really not surprising that I find myself metaphorically standing here, squinting at the signposts, frowning at the map, wondering where I go next.
I don’t know that I’m done forever with Felix and Mildmay and the world of Meduse, but I know that I’m definitely done for now. I need a new direction. I need new worlds to conquer. And at the same time, my mule team say they needs a goddamn break. They need a vacation, for crying out loud.
The mule team, of course, is the subconscious and the right brain and the place where the creativity wells up, the thing we don’t have any good words for. That part of my brain is tired. It’s not drained–I’m still getting new ideas–but, honestly, the idea isn’t the hard part. Turning the idea into a story, and making that story complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. That’s the hard part. And the mule team don’t want to do it. They want to lie around in the shade and drink iced tea.
And for now, I’m willing to let them. We could all use a breather.
Maybe by the time they’re ready to pull again, I’ll have figured out which way is up on the map
March 11, 2016
UBC: Mauriello & Darby, The Dollhouse Murders
The Dollhouse Murders: A Forensic Expert Investigates 6 Little Crimes by Thomas MaurielloMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Not to be confused with The Dollhouse Murders.
I found this book frustrating, although others might not. Because they (and I have no idea who, between Mauriello, his co-author, and his publisher, came up with the idea) decided to discuss the six scenarios in the book in the format of stories, they don't provide the kind of analytical detail (either forensic or anthropo-/sociological) that I want. Because these aren't stories, but disguised classroom exercises, their didactic purpose precludes any of the kind of character and/or plot development that make stories satisfying. I also find the conceit of "the Detective" and his shifting cast of forensic technicians, medical examiners, uniformed police officers, and (infinitely annoying) "the partner" obtrusive and just a little bit cutesy.
With that said, the idea behind this book is awesome. In his classroom, Mauriello uses six dollhouse dioramas, each of a different crime scene, to get his students to understand the way the different branches of forensic science intertwine and cooperate in processing a crime scene. Each scenario demonstrates what a lead detective does, and for anyone interested in true crime and/or mysteries, I admit that the story format does give a sense of how the forensic and detectional (which is so not a word, I apologize) work flows from the time a crime is discovered. Despite the title, not all of these little scenarios are murder, and each takes place in a different setting with different challenges, so--as one would expect from a didactic exercise--you get a broad spectrum of what forensic police work can be asked to do.
Flawed, but interesting.
View all my reviews
February 27, 2016
UBC: Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints
The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity by Peter R.L. BrownMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
127 pages about Christianity in late antiquity (c.a. AD 300-600) and the increasing devotion to (specifically) martyred saints and their physical remains. Brown talks about shrines and pilgrimages and burials and exorcisms and relics, and it is all fascinating. 4 of 5 stars only because I've read The Body & Society: Men, Women & Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity--long long ago in an undergraduate history class--and that book sets the particular bar for Professor Brown kind of high. This is a lovely book, full of affection for the rather difficult men (Augustine of Hippo, Gregory of Tours, Paulinus of Nola) who are our guides to the growing adoration of the saints in the transition from the Rome-centric culture of the Empire to a much more dispersed relationship of interdependent loci of Christian worship/life of the mind.
Brown is absolutely explicit and open about the fact that this book leaves out enormous chunks of Roman/early-medieval culture: he's talking about the upper class male intellectuals who created and transmitted the theological core of hagiophilia ("love of the saints"--I don't know if that was previously a word, but I need it to be right now). He discusses "women" and "the poor" (and we can talk about the infinite drop-down list of problems with the way he conceptualizes the two as monolithic and discrete categories some other time) only anecdotally--so if what you really want is social history, this is not the book for you. I found it both a pleasure to read and a useful introduction to the intellectual end of a fascinating phenomenon.
There's also a thing in here that, if I were still teaching undergraduate English, I would totally use for an upper-level course on pilgrimages and quests:
By localizing the holy in this manner [martyrs' shrines], late-antique Christianity could feed on the facts of distance and on the joys of proximity. This distance might be physical distance. For this, pilgrimage was the remedy. As Alphonse Dupront has put it, so succinctly, pilgrimage was "une thérapie par l'espace." The pilgrim committed himself or herself to the "therapy of distance" by recognizing that what he or she wished for was not to be had in the immediate environment. Distance could symbolize needs unsatisfied, so that, as Dupront continues, "le pèlerinage demeure essentiallement depart": pilgrimage remains essentially the fact of leaving. But distance is there to be overcome; the experience of pilgrimage activates a yearning for intimate closeness. For the pilgrims who arrived after the obvious "therapy of distance" involved in long travel found themselves subjected to the same therapy by the nature of the shrine itself. [...] For the art of the shrine in late antiquity is an art of closed surfaces. Behind these surfaces, the holy lay, either totally hidden or glimpsed through narrow apertures. The opacity of the surfaces heightened an awareness of the ultimate unattainability in this life of the person [i.e., the saint] they had traveled over such wide spaces to touch. (Brown 86-87)
There is so much in this passage if, as I am, you are predisposed to map the structure of the pilgrimage onto other texts. I'd really like discussions of how MacGuffins and P.R.O.s (Priceless Ritual Objects: Edward Gorey's term) do and don't map onto saints' relics; the way The Lord of the Rings is an anti-pilgrimage: Frodo has to get to Mount Doom (pilgrimage), but it's to rid himself of the unholy (I feel perfectly okay using that adjective for the Ring in this context) rather than to approach the holy; the difference between a quest and a pilgrimage and how those differences affect the structure of a work (Odysseus is on a pilgrimage to reach his home; Aeneas is on a quest to find somewhere to call home); why fantasy, as a genre, is so invested in the therapy of distance; the effect of the quest-structure used, for instance by the movie version of The Wizard of Oz, wherein the quester goes through perils and trials only to discover that what she's looking for was at home/on her feet the whole time; the definition of "home," for that matter, and what its value is as a place of pilgrimage and/or quest object. And the potential reading list: The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Lord of the Rings, Don Quixote, Pilgrim's Progress, Growing Up Weightless (because we need to start teaching John M. Ford), The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Supernatural, To the Lighthouse if I want to get
If you are interested in this odd little corner of history, this book is absolutely worth finding.
---
*I really like Virginia Woolf (although more for her nonfiction than her fiction), but I have run out of patience with the artificial divide between "literary" and "popular" fiction that the soi-disant literati of the early twentieth century created in Anglophone literature. And I'm afraid she'd be a pain in the ass to teach. Ditto, come to think of it, for Mervyn Peake. Gormenghast would be awesome conceptually, but oh my god a nightmare about a plague in the classroom. Also, try though I do to overcome it, I really dislike him.
**If anyone wants to try and actually teach this course, you have 100% permission to steal my idea.
View all my reviews
February 21, 2016
UBC: L. Perry Curtis, Jr., Jack the Ripper & the London Press
Jack the Ripper and the London Press by L. Perry Curtis Jr.My rating: 3 of 5 stars
It feels weird to be saying a book's problem is its commitment issues, but that's the best way I can sum up Jack the Ripper and the London Press. The book provides a useful overview of the press coverage of the Whitechapel murders: which papers took what stance (and had which political leanings) and how detailed they got in their description of the "abdominal mutilations." But it neither (a.) has a strong theoretical basis to talk about why (in fact, Curtis frequently seems hostile to theory, about which more below) nor (b.) really digs into its subject the way "Ripperologists" do (I put that word in quotes because it's easier and shorter than saying "popular and amateur historians writing about the Whitechapel murders" but it's also derogatory in a way I don't endorse or condone.) So even though Curtis has clearly done a metric ass-ton of research, the book feels superficial. It could be giving a lot more bang for its buck.
Part of Curtis' problem with theory is that the theorists he engages with most consistently are feminist historians. This sounds, I know, like a strength, but it is amply evident that Curtis has little to no sympathy with those feminists' theoretical project. This is not to call him misogynist, exactly, but to provide an example: in discussing Judith Walkowitz' mistaken assertion that there were riots in the East End, he says, "No doubt such sensational assertions enliven academic monographs of the cultural studies genre" (259), which is just . . . me-OW. He consistently presents the most embarrassingly ridiculous extremes (e.g., Jane Caupti's assertion that the hydrogen bomb is "'the precise macrocosmic parallel to the crimes of Jack the Ripper'" (Caputi quoted in Curtis, 258)) or (as with Walkowitz) the most egregious mistakes, and the language he uses is always faintly impatient, just palpably derogatory. He contrasts them with (male) historians whose views are more "restrained" and "empirical"--although he notes further down the page that his "restrained" and "empirical" (male) historian is following Foucault, which makes me wonder (aloud, to my husband) if he's on crack. (My husband's answer: "Yes.") Curtis treats the feminist theorists in the way academic historians generally treat "Ripperologists."
I will totally grant that the feminist theorists he quotes are not doing a very good job of engaging with the Whitechapel murders, but it would be so much better if he said that and then (again) talked about why, instead of using them throughout the book as straw-men (straw-persons?). Because I think there is a problem in the collision of feminist cultural history and Jack the Ripper, and I don't think it's that the feminist theorists are being silly, even though that's how Curtis makes them look.
And on the other hand, he doesn't engage with his primary sources in the way I wish he would. His most interesting chapter is on letters to the editor, and even there, he gives a statistical overview and quotes highlights, but he doesn't provide any serious analysis--partly because he doesn't have any kind of a theoretical argument underpinning his presentation of his data. He doesn't even have the kind of historical argument that Andrew Cook presents so badly in Jack the Ripper.
It's hard to come to grips with Jack the Ripper on any academic front--because the Whitechapel murders have been so sensationalized? because the amateur historians have made it embarrassing for academic historians to engage with the subject? because we don't know who did it, so we can't measure our theories against his reality? because we don't have a successful model for intellectual engagement with (a.) serial murder, (b.) sexual murder, (c.) serial sexual murder? I know I always break out Patricia Cline Cohen at this point in the discussion--and it's not fair to Curtis, whose book was published in 2001--but she is truly the best example I have found thus far of using feminist analytical techniques on "true crime" subject matter.
Curtis's subject material is interesting in and of itself, and he presents it clearly, but he doesn't provide anything that would make this book more than an assemblage of data. Which is a pity.
View all my reviews
February 14, 2016
Addendum to review of The Maul and the Pear Tree (P. D. James & T. A. Critchley)
[original review, along with The London Monster (Bondeson) and The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper (Jakubowski & Braund, eds.)]
[Goodreads (review & addendum)]
Having reread The Maul & the Pear Tree for what I think is at least the third time, I can offer a better explanation of why I don't believe James & Critchley. When you read carefully and attentively, it becomes painfully clear how much of their theory about the murders is based on pure, airy speculation. Their argument is full of scaffolding: "probably," "there is little doubt," "there is no reason to suppose," "may well have been," "it is virtually certain." They present many of their hypotheses as rhetorical questions, which--by assuming the reader's answer--make it easier for the hypothesis to pass as fact. And they treat a number of their speculations as if they are, in fact, proved rather than merely proffered.
When you clear away all the rhetoric, their theory (William Ablass and a confederate who was possibly Cornelius Hart) isn't really any more plausible than the theory that Williams was the sole killer. (Saying that your chosen murderer is a "psychopath" only pushes the problem of motive one tier back: if he's a "psychopath," by which you mean a person who kills indiscriminately and without motive, why are these the only two brutal butchering murders he's committed?)
Crime solving, like criminological historiography (i.e., true crime writing), and like both prosecution and defense in the American judicial system, is trying to find a story--a narrative linked together by cause and effect and strong enough to hold up when inspected by both common sense and fault-finding scrutiny--that will fit the facts. The more facts you can incorporate, the stronger your story will be. The Ratcliffe Highway murders resist narrative--the only way to make a story out of them is to follow De Quincey and assume that Williams was a sort of Iago-like villain, doing evil simply because he could. (Or follow James & Critchley and assume Ablass as our Iago.) And even that isn't really satisfactory.
Stripped down, the problems of the Ratcliffe Highway murders go like this:
1. The evidence available at this remove is spotty at best, so any theory you present is going to be tentative and full of hypotheticals:
(a.) Our forensic evidence is based on the observations made and recorded by untrained observers (not necessarily even doctors) in December 1811. QED.
(b.) The rest of the evidence is eyewitness testimony and hearsay. James & Critchley were writing before the UTTER USELESSNESS of eyewitness testimony had been demonstrated, but as a reader in 2016, I have to admit that most of what we've got is either inadmissible or would be torn to shreds by any defense attorney whose law degree was worth the paper it was written on.
2. The murderer or murderers butchered the entire Marr household (Timothy Marr, his wife Celia, his apprentice James Gowan, and the 3 month old Timothy, Jr.--sparing the servant Margaret Jewell because she had been sent to buy oysters) on the night of December 7 and John Williamson (yes, the alleged murderer is John Williams, and one of his victims is John Williamson--real life gets to be confusing like that), his wife Elizabeth, and their servant Bridget Harrington (sparing the Willliamsons' granddaughter Kitty Stillwell and their lodger John Turner, who were lucky enough to be in their bedrooms abovestairs) on the night of December 19. Nobody before and nobody after. Why the Marrs? why the Williamsons? There is evidence that strongly suggests both households were reconnoitered before the attack (in the Marrs' case, if Hart was in on the job, possibly for as much as a week), so they're not just random crimes of opportunity. James & Critchley try to show why Ablass might have had a grudge against Williams, and they try a little sub rosa substitutive rhetoric to make it look like the grudge against Williams could be translated to a grudge against Marr, but they can't suggest a motive for murdering the Williamsons. So if the murderer was "sane," what motive did he have, not just for the murders, but for the overkill involved--literally in the case of the Marrs' baby? And if he was ".insane," a "psychopath," why are these the only two killing sprees he went on?
3. Some of the evidence against Williams was clearly manufactured by the grudge-holding John Harrison (the entire story of the French knife is as full of holes as a chain-link fence), but that only means that some of our evidence is beyond untrustworthy into outright falsity--but we don't know which evidence. Some of Harrison's testimony? All of Harrison's testimony? How about the other lodgers? What about the terrified and equivocating landlady, Mrs. Vermilloe? At what remove from Harrison can we start trusting that our witnesses are doing their best to tell the truth?
4. Real life murders can never be made into a clean narrative. There are always inconsistencies, gaps in the timeline, demonstrable facts that make no sense. I find that I can't judge, in this case, which facts have to be incorporated into the narrative and which facts can be dismissed as bogeys, sundogs, and (to quote my favorite X-Files episode) the planet Venus. Because all of the facts look crazy.
To my knowledge, nobody has written about the Ratcliffe Highway murders since James & Critchley. If I were a true crime writer, I would take that challenge.
[Goodreads (review & addendum)]
Having reread The Maul & the Pear Tree for what I think is at least the third time, I can offer a better explanation of why I don't believe James & Critchley. When you read carefully and attentively, it becomes painfully clear how much of their theory about the murders is based on pure, airy speculation. Their argument is full of scaffolding: "probably," "there is little doubt," "there is no reason to suppose," "may well have been," "it is virtually certain." They present many of their hypotheses as rhetorical questions, which--by assuming the reader's answer--make it easier for the hypothesis to pass as fact. And they treat a number of their speculations as if they are, in fact, proved rather than merely proffered.
When you clear away all the rhetoric, their theory (William Ablass and a confederate who was possibly Cornelius Hart) isn't really any more plausible than the theory that Williams was the sole killer. (Saying that your chosen murderer is a "psychopath" only pushes the problem of motive one tier back: if he's a "psychopath," by which you mean a person who kills indiscriminately and without motive, why are these the only two brutal butchering murders he's committed?)
Crime solving, like criminological historiography (i.e., true crime writing), and like both prosecution and defense in the American judicial system, is trying to find a story--a narrative linked together by cause and effect and strong enough to hold up when inspected by both common sense and fault-finding scrutiny--that will fit the facts. The more facts you can incorporate, the stronger your story will be. The Ratcliffe Highway murders resist narrative--the only way to make a story out of them is to follow De Quincey and assume that Williams was a sort of Iago-like villain, doing evil simply because he could. (Or follow James & Critchley and assume Ablass as our Iago.) And even that isn't really satisfactory.
Stripped down, the problems of the Ratcliffe Highway murders go like this:
1. The evidence available at this remove is spotty at best, so any theory you present is going to be tentative and full of hypotheticals:
(a.) Our forensic evidence is based on the observations made and recorded by untrained observers (not necessarily even doctors) in December 1811. QED.
(b.) The rest of the evidence is eyewitness testimony and hearsay. James & Critchley were writing before the UTTER USELESSNESS of eyewitness testimony had been demonstrated, but as a reader in 2016, I have to admit that most of what we've got is either inadmissible or would be torn to shreds by any defense attorney whose law degree was worth the paper it was written on.
2. The murderer or murderers butchered the entire Marr household (Timothy Marr, his wife Celia, his apprentice James Gowan, and the 3 month old Timothy, Jr.--sparing the servant Margaret Jewell because she had been sent to buy oysters) on the night of December 7 and John Williamson (yes, the alleged murderer is John Williams, and one of his victims is John Williamson--real life gets to be confusing like that), his wife Elizabeth, and their servant Bridget Harrington (sparing the Willliamsons' granddaughter Kitty Stillwell and their lodger John Turner, who were lucky enough to be in their bedrooms abovestairs) on the night of December 19. Nobody before and nobody after. Why the Marrs? why the Williamsons? There is evidence that strongly suggests both households were reconnoitered before the attack (in the Marrs' case, if Hart was in on the job, possibly for as much as a week), so they're not just random crimes of opportunity. James & Critchley try to show why Ablass might have had a grudge against Williams, and they try a little sub rosa substitutive rhetoric to make it look like the grudge against Williams could be translated to a grudge against Marr, but they can't suggest a motive for murdering the Williamsons. So if the murderer was "sane," what motive did he have, not just for the murders, but for the overkill involved--literally in the case of the Marrs' baby? And if he was ".insane," a "psychopath," why are these the only two killing sprees he went on?
3. Some of the evidence against Williams was clearly manufactured by the grudge-holding John Harrison (the entire story of the French knife is as full of holes as a chain-link fence), but that only means that some of our evidence is beyond untrustworthy into outright falsity--but we don't know which evidence. Some of Harrison's testimony? All of Harrison's testimony? How about the other lodgers? What about the terrified and equivocating landlady, Mrs. Vermilloe? At what remove from Harrison can we start trusting that our witnesses are doing their best to tell the truth?
4. Real life murders can never be made into a clean narrative. There are always inconsistencies, gaps in the timeline, demonstrable facts that make no sense. I find that I can't judge, in this case, which facts have to be incorporated into the narrative and which facts can be dismissed as bogeys, sundogs, and (to quote my favorite X-Files episode) the planet Venus. Because all of the facts look crazy.
To my knowledge, nobody has written about the Ratcliffe Highway murders since James & Critchley. If I were a true crime writer, I would take that challenge.
February 6, 2016
UBC: Andrew Cook, Jack the Ripper
Jack the Ripper by Andrew CookMy rating: 1 of 5 stars
For someone who sneers at Ripperologists for bending facts to suit their crazy pet theories, this is a guy with a crazy pet theory and no compunction whatsoever about bending facts. He won't even use one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous quotes correctly:
Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle proffered on a number of occasions that the process of elimination was the most effective way to shed light on a conundrum. When you have progressively eliminated, piece by piece, the impossible and the improbable, whatever you have left is likely to lead towards an answer. (Cook 161)
How the quote actually goes is, of course:
"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? (Doyle, The Sign of the Four, Chapter 6, emphasis in original)
Cook has in fact reversed the meaning: Holmes specifically and emphatically tells Watson that you have to accept the improbable, not eliminate it. This does not suit Cook's argument, since he's claiming it's too improbable that all, or even most, of the Whitechapel victims were killed by the same man (and therefore there's one "psychopath" and an undetermined number of "copy-cat killings" (Cook 199), because apparently the only reason people haven't been going around disembowelling prostitutes left and right is because they hadn't realized they could get away with it until the Ripper showed them how--and that's not improbable in the least). So he paraphrases and misrepresents, "twist[ing] facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts" (Doyle, "A Scandal in Bohemia"). And this run-in with Sherlock Holmes unfortunately serves as an accurate metonymy for the book as a whole.
Cook uses evidence badly and very selectively, claims things are evidence that aren't, presents as strokes of genius ideas that are common fare in the better class of Jack the Ripper books. He speculates egregiously. His source citations are pretty much useless, and he almost never bothers to cite his secondary sources at all. And he infuriates me by citing Victorian doctors' ideas about "lunatics" as if they have any relation whatsoever to the current understanding of mental illness. (Hint: no.) His authority on psychopathology is a book published in 1941.
But what irks me most about this book is that there's an actual interesting and important idea buried in all the nonsense. Cook argues (almost certainly following someone else, although I don't know who) that the Dear Boss letter and postcard were a hoax perpetrated by the Star in order to boost sales. He even supplies evidence to suggest that the actual writer was a reporter named Frederick Best. He certainly convinces me that the Star's editor, T. P. O'Connor, was exactly the sort of man who would think it was a splendid idea. And, of course, it was the Dear Boss letter that gave Jack the Ripper his name. I even agree that once you've postulated that "Jack the Ripper"--the idea of a single fiend in human form slashing his way through the fallen women of Whitechapel--was the creation of a couple of venal newspaper men, it's reasonable to go on and reassess the evidence of the murders to see what kind of pattern you get. But Cook does this reassessment excruciatingly badly, to the point that even when I agree with him, I reflexively disbelieve him. (I'm absolutely willing to entertain the idea that Elizabeth Stride doesn't belong in the sequence of Ripper murders--except when I'm told to by Andrew Cook.) And what he doesn't do is pay any attention to the genuine and attestable series of copy-cat crimes going on in the fall of 1888: the hoax letters to the police and the newspapers, all purporting to be from Jack the Ripper.
Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell is a fascinating book about those letters, and I would love to see more attention paid to them. A book seriously about copy-cat crimes (the psychology and the history and how many actual proven examples there are) and the letters (including the hoax--and were there letters to the police before the Dear Boss letter? I think there were, but I can't remember for sure) and whether you can apply the same idea to the Whitechapel murders would be awesome. This is really not that book.
I'm giving Jack the Ripper one star because there are those pieces of a good book buried in the bad rhetoric and bad argumentation supporting yet another crazy pet theory. But I don't recommend it.
View all my reviews
February 2, 2016
UBC: Steven M. Gillon, Lee Harvey Oswald: 48 Hours to Live
Lee Harvey Oswald: 48 Hours to Live: Oswald, Kennedy, and the Conspiracy that Will Not Die by Steven M. GillonMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Unfortunately, this book reads like a cheap knock-off of Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin: trying to do the same thing for JFK's assassination that Sides did for MLK, but without either Sides' attention to detail or his ability to make all his disparate strands of narrative into something coherent.
I also admit, I got off on the wrong metaphorical foot with Gillon because he starts the book with an anecdote about Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy, Jr. (Castro tells JFK Jr. off the record that he, Castro, could never have allowed Oswald into Cuba), and he says in the endnote, "John, who was a close friend, shared this story with the author shortly after John's return from Cuba" (168). Anecdotes--leaving aside the New Historicist rhetorical maneuver of using an opening anecdote to give an essay thematic structure--are not evidence, and even if they were, this one isn't evidence of anything except that Castro, in 1997, still felt guilt and anxiety about JFK's death. Gillon has a wild hare that he chases--his speculation that Cuban intelligence agents working in the Cuban embassy in Mexico may have encouraged Oswald in his plan to kill Kennedy--which this anecdote ostensibly is (not) evidence for, but honestly, it feels like the point of the anecdote is in that endnote: "John, who was a close friend..."
And let's not even get me started on how pretentious it sounds, in a book published in 2013, to refer to yourself in the 3rd person as "the author."
So, yeah, Gillon rubbed me the wrong way, but that's not why I say this book isn't very good.
It isn't very good because it doesn't do what Hellhound on His Trail does. The narrative is surfacey and careless (was Oswald's rifle rolled in a blanket in his garage or in a carpet? Gillon switches in the space of a line (63); there are some awful malapropisms: "the Dallas police had set up no parameter and lax security around the jail" (60) (that's also not the only thing wrong with that sentence); Gillon makes gestures at tracking (as an example) Jacqueline Kennedy the same way Sides tracked Coretta Scott King, but he never follows through), and for a book that purports to be a timeline of the last 48 hours of Oswald's life, it's astonishingly bad at providing clear signposts about what happened when and in what order.
I don't actually know a great deal about the Kennedy assassination, beyond what "everybody knows," so I can't judge how well Gillon does at addressing all of the facts, or whether his debunking of various conspiracy theories holds water itself. I do appreciate the fact that the debunking is there.
The book left me with an untidy, dissatisfied feeling. Granted, its subject matter is untidy and dissatisfying--but an incoherent subject does not automatically result in an incoherent book, and really, the more incoherent the subject, the harder the writer should be trying--not to make the subject coherent, but to make his/her own project coherent. I've used The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York and The Murder of Helen Jewett as a compare-and-contrast pair, and this book pairs with Hellhound on His Trail in the same way. The gap between them is the gap where good historiography does or does not happen.
View all my reviews
January 29, 2016
technically not UBC, since I've read it before: Kleiger, The Trial of Levi Weeks
The Trial of Levi Weeks: Or the Manhattan Well Mystery by Estelle Fox KleigerMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is not a great book. Kleiger is good at pointing out inconsistencies in the testimony, but her writing style is flat and unengaging and she has no particular thesis. If you are going to have great wads of 18/19th century trial transcripts in your text, you need to have something to offset them, and Kleiger doesn't.
Gulielma Sands (guessing from various misspellings, her name was pronounced Julie-Elma--or, given how frequently her nickname Elma is transcribed as Elmore, Julie-Elmer) is yet another in the sad sisterhood of Helen Jewett, Sarah Maria Cornell, Grace Brown, and--I strongly suspect--Mary Cecilia Rogers: the women whose murders fall into the category I have flippantly labeled why buy the cow? Chester Gillette was executed, but Richard Robinson, Ephraim Avery, and Levi Weeks (leaving aside the mysterious murderer of Mary Rogers, who got clean away) were all acquitted, despite the evidence against them. (Crucially, I think, Gillette was only marginally of a higher class than Brown and had very little social capital to cash in, whereas Robinson, Avery, and Weeks were all much better connected than their unfortunate victims.)
Weeks' trial is notable for, aside from the wretched job done by the prosecution, the fact that his lawyers were Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, four years before Burr killed Hamilton in a duel. Burr and Hamilton bring all their rhetorical cannons to the task of persuading the jury that (1) Gulielma Sands was a young woman of ill morals and melancholic disposition, probably conducting an affair with her uncle; that even if, refusing to be distracted by the uncle, you think you need to inquire into her death anyway, (2) she killed herself (by beating herself up and throwing herself in a well); that even if you are so ill-bred as to insist that she was murdered, (3) their client is a young man of sterling reputation, about whom no one has ever said a disparaging word; that even if you are not convinced that that means he can't have murdered the young lady, (4) he has an alibi (supported by his brother! How can you doubt?); that even if you are skeptical of the alibi, (5) the witnesses for the prosecution are all lying or confused or just plain wrong, and most of their evidence is immaterial anyway (even if there was a horse, which learned counsel take leave to doubt, it certainly can't be proved that it was a horse belonging to Levi Weeks' brother--that same brother who is providing the alibi); and even if you persist in questioning Levi Weeks' innocence, (6) no one can prove Gulielma Sands left her house in his company; and (7) [triumphantly] therefore no one can prove he murdered her!
(Our definition of "prove" here is very very narrow, since on the evening that--Sands had confided to her aunt and cousin--Weeks was going to take her to be secretly married, shortly after Sands had gone upstairs to get ready to leave the house, Weeks left the sitting room, whereupon Sands' aunt heard someone descend the stairs (from the upstairs location of Sands' bedroom), heard considerable whispering in the hall, and heard someone(s) leave. Thereafter, neither Weeks nor Sands were to be found in the house. But that doesn't prove anything.)
And because the Assistant Attorney General was about as much use as a tennis racquet is to a duck, it didn't prove anything. Weeks was acquitted--although he was pretty bluntly found guilty in popular opinion, which may have been the reason for his leaving New York: he ended up a successful architect in Natchez: Auburn, with its absolutely astonishing completely free-standing spiral staircase, is the brainchild of Levi Weeks.
Levi Weeks died young, at 43, but it's still a better ending than Gulielma Sands got.
View all my reviews
