Katherine Addison's Blog, page 22

Bear & Addison, The Cobbler's Boy

So Elizabeth Bear and I are self-publishing The Cobbler's Boy, a short novel about Christopher Marlowe. (The working title was, Kit Marlowe, Boy Detective, which doubles as the elevator pitch.) Pre-orders are open!

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UBC: Thomas, Hear No Evil

Hear No Evil: Politics, Science, and the Forensic Evidence in th by Donald Byron Thomas

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Oh, I don't even know.

This is a giant book of JFK forensics, and I found it fascinating, but I also found it impossible to judge how much I should believe. (I'm very leery of getting into the assassination research because it's such a slavering mess of wargs and goblins.) Thomas does believe there was a conspiracy; he does believe there was a shooter on the grassy knoll. I found him very convincing, but I'm pretty easy that way. Until I've read enough to find my feet, I tend to believe whoever I've most recently read.

So YMMV.

Thomas DOES do a good job of laying out what the evidence actually is (and noting the gaps where the evidence used to be, of which there are many). He resolutely does not speculate about who might have been backing the conspiracy. And he supports his theory with a lengthy discussion of the acoustical analysis of the open dictabelt (I feel like I should be capitalizing everything: The Grassy Knoll, The Open Dictabelt, The Plaid Shirt, etc.). He's also prone to sarcasm, which I admit I like.

So if you're interested in the assassination, or if you just like reading about forensics, this is a great book. But I don't know how to judge it in relationship to its subject. I don't know how much to tell you to believe.



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Milo (2006-2018)

We put Milo to sleep this morning. We'd been planning for later in July, but this last heat wave hit him really hard, and his trainer and I agreed that it was time.

I owned him eight years almost exactly to the day.

He's buried in a pasture on the farm where he spent his entire adult life. He was much loved and will be sorely missed.

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UBC: Silvester & Rule, Underbelly

Underbelly : A Tale of Two Cities by John Silvester

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


So Underbelly is an Australian true crime television series. I don't know exactly how this book connects to it (I found it in the used book store & picked it up because Australian true crime), so I'm just going to review the book without further reference to the show.

Silvester & Rule have a flippant, ironic, gossip-mag tone which highlights the resemblance of the events they discuss to a gruesome Clockwork Orange soap opera, with complicated and constantly shifting allegiances between drug dealers, hit men, fixers, and police officers (Sydney was breathtakingly corrupt for, apparently, most of the 20th century), most of whom end up either dead or in prison (or one followed by the other). Also, defects of its virtues, it makes the book feel shallow, although it's more than apparent that the authors know the ground they're covering extremely well, mostly through interviews with the various players (Silvester's bio says he's been a crime reporter in Melbourne since 1978).

Not anybody's masterwork, but definitely worth reading.



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UBC: Gonzales, Deep Survival

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
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UBC: Wambaugh, The Blooding

The Blooding by Joseph Wambaugh

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


So, this is not one of Wambaugh's better books. It doesn't have the inspiration that infuses The Onion Field, and it doesn't have that breezy almost-satirical edge that I find amusing in Fire Lover and Echoes in the Darkness. It's rote Wambaugh, the crimes, the local color, the sympathetic portraits of the police officers. He's still a good writer, and this is a perfectly competent true crime book, but there's nothing that makes it feel like it isn't made of interchangeable parts.

It's interesting because it's about the murders of Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth and the massive hunt for their murderer, Colin Pitchfork, who has the distinction of being the first person convicted of murder on DNA evidence. So from a crimino-historical perspective, worth reading. But part of my brain was muttering the whole time, Dude, you can do better than this and we both know it.



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UBC: Beran, Murder by Candlelight

Murder by Candlelight: The Gruesome Slayings Behind Our Romance with the Macabre by Michael Knox Beran

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


So on the one hand this is a engaging and well-written discussion of (1) the murder of William Weare by John Thurtell, (2) the murder of Hannah Brown by James Greenacre, (3) the murder of Lord William Russell by Francois Courvoisier, and (4) the murders of the Marrs and the Williamsons by person or persons unknown.

On the other hand,

(1) The style is distinctly breezy, just barely this side of callous.
(2) Beran is possessed of a sort of more-recondite-than-thou hipsterism which I found intensely annoying.
(3) He is gratuitously disparaging of detective fiction, and when he swings his stick at Dorothy Sayers, is clearly completely unaware of the fact that she was a theologian.
(4) What he really wants to talk about is Thomas Carlyle and Thomas de Quincey.
(5) He quotes William Roughead's judgment of de Quincey, "that he resembled the character in Scott's The Antiquary, Sir Arthur Wardour, who disdained a 'pettifogging intimacy with dates, names, and trifling matters of fact," a 'tiresome and frivolous accuracy of memory'" (194), without seeming to be aware that it is also a judgment on himself.

So if you're interested in Carlyle and de Quincey and want what amounts to an extended--and, give credit where credit is due, entertaining--footnote on their works, this is by all means the book for you. If not, I think I would recommend other works on these same murders first: Judith Flanders, The Invention of Murder, James & Critchley, The Maul and the Pear Tree, Borowitz, The Thurtell-Hunt Murder Case.



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UBC: Wambaugh, Echoes in the Darkness

Echoes in the Darkness by Joseph Wambaugh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I had to do a fast google just to be certain that this was true crime and not a novel, because holy tap-dancing cats. No summary can convey the convolutions of the plot to kill Susan Reinert and the extraordinary efforts made to bring her killer(s?) to justice. Wikipedia tells me that the second alleged killer's conviction was overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct, which doesn't entirely surprise me, even though Wambaugh's unabashedly pro-cop and pro-prosecution narrative does its best to make Jay C. Smith's conviction look like the only logical conclusion. (I think Smith might have done it, but the evidence is so hinky that, no, not beyond a reasonable doubt.)

Wambaugh is a great writer if you like his breezy in-your-face style (noticeably absent from The Onion Field), which I admit I kind of do. Certainly, this was a fast and compelling read. If nothing else, it shows you what happens when you get two sociopaths in close proximity in the same very small community.



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UBC: Heilbroner, David

Death Benefit by David Heilbroner

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This one is the novel John Grisham should have written. A corporate lawyer looks into a death benefit claim as a favor to a woman in his church and ends up uncovering a serial killer with at least four murders under her belt: her three-year-old daughter, her second husband, her mother, and a hapless young woman who could be persuaded to make her murderer her life insurance beneficiary. Forensic Files has an episode about this case, "Financial Downfall," in which for some reason the victim's name is changed (from Deana Wild to Donna Hartman), even though the murderer's name is not, and the book (names unchanged) came out the year before. (They even re-enact the photographs and get the critical one wrong, wtf Forensic Files?) I swear I've seen another true crime TV episode about Deana Wild's death, but I can't remember which show. It was also apparently made into a TV movie, Justice for Annie.

The emphasis of episode and book are quite different. Forensic Files is all about the camera disc and its fifteen incriminating pictures; Death Benefit is all about the unraveling of Virginia Hoffmann Coates Rearden McGinnis' web. Both are fascinating.



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Milo

For anyone who hasn't seen this elsewhere.

Milo has Recurrent Airway Obstruction (the heaves) and chronic laminitis (founder). Either one of these will kill him eventually, and horribly, and in the meantime, he's going through waves of being unable to breathe and/or in too much pain to walk. The only way to really deal with RAO is with steroids, and steroids are what made him founder in the first place. Both our regular vet and a second opinion vet agree that there's nothing more we can do.

We will be putting him to sleep sometime this summer, before we get to August, which has become his worst month.

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