Katherine Addison's Blog, page 41

UBC: Farrell, Swift Justice

Swift Justice: Murder & Vengeance In A California Town by Harry Farrell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Swift Justice is the dissection of a double-headed atrocity: the kidnapping and horrific murder of Brooke Hart, and the equally horrific lynching of his murderers by the citizens of San Jose. It's compelling, cleanly-written, and even-handed. Farrell offers as many perspectives as he can and is clearly doing his best not to pass judgment on the choices and ambiguous motivations that allowed the lynching to happen.

There isn't really much doubt that Jack Holmes and Harold Thurmond murdered Brooke Hart. The discrepancies in their stories are the sort of discrepancies that are bound to surface (each man insisted the other was the one who actually had the (missing) gun), and Jack Holmes' insistent claims that he was innocent and that his confession was tortured out of him are exactly the sort of thing a guy like Jack Holmes would say, especially to his father and (semi-estranged) wife. I'm not buying. And given the picture Farrell paints, I don't think Harold Thurmond was capable of the kind of sustained lying that would have been necessary to incriminate an innocent Holmes.

With all that said, and given that what Holmes and Thurmond did was unforgivable (kidnapping for ransom where the victim is dead before the ransom demands have even been made is peculiarly horrible, and the circumstances of Brooke Hart's death--the callous, deliberate brutality; the fact that it's impossible to tell whether the pistol whipping, the fall from the San Mateo Bridge into San Francisco Bay, or drowning was the actual cause of death; the horrible fact that Brooke Hart lived long enough to call for help but not long enough to be found and rescued--make it impossible to feel any kind of sympathy for Holmes and Thurmond), the lynching is unforgivable in its own right. Farrell's description of the death of Jack Holmes chilled me to the bone.

As Farrell points out, Thurmond and Holmes are unusual for victims of lynching in that they were white men. And--if proof were needed that lynching has nothing to do with justice--there was barely a whisper of a wisp of a question about what was going to happen to them if due process of law was served. These weren't men who had been pronounced innocent against a community-wide belief in their guilt. They hadn't been pronounced anything. They hadn't even been arraigned. And Farrell makes it very clear that there were back up plans on all sides to make sure that Thurmond and Holmes did not wiggle off the hooks the law had in them. The lynching came from a completely different set of motivations, ones which Farrell points to but never quite discusses when he talks about California history and the never quite articulated idea of "frontier justice." The people of San Jose--not a majority, but certainly a diverse cross-section from university students to pillars of the business community to roughnecks and petty criminals--were denying the right of the law to deal with Thurmond and Holmes. And the conspiracy of silence--a conspiracy that was so strong fifty years later that there were only four men Farrell could name as being part of the lynch mob: two teenagers who were stupid enough to brag about it, one adrenaline-junkie ("a man irresistibly drawn to any scene of violence, disorder, bloodshed, or fire--an affinity that would later make him one of San Jose's most visible news photographers" (220)) who simply admitted it, and Jackie


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Reminder: Con or Bust

The Con or Bust auction ends tomorrow at 4 p.m. EDT. The items I am offering are:

A Companion to Wolves, The Tempering of Men, and An Apprentice to Elves (which I am, semi-facetiously, calling the Iskryne edda), by Elizabeth Bear and me, in hardback, signed by me.
The Goblin Emperor, in paperback, signed by me.
The Bone Key, trade paperback, 2nd edition, signed by me.

There are hundreds of other items, each more fabulous than the last. Browse quickly!

UBC: Dean King, The Feud

The Feud: The Hatfields and McCoys, The True Story by Dean King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This is a well-written, entertaining and (relatively) easy to follow history of the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. (I say "relatively" only because the material itself is so confusing that no account can possibly be an easy read.) King has assembled an impressive array of primary sources and it's only toward the very end, after the execution of Ellison "Cotton Top" Mounts, that the book slips and starts to read like a collection of anecdotes instead of a history---which is to say that King stops assessing his sources and merely relays them.

King does a good job of showing the links between the fortunes of the two families and the late nineteenth-century despoliation of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky: timber and coal and corruption (holy buckets the corruption) run like leitmotifs through the opera-worthy goings-on: betrayals and murders and star-crossed lovers and shoot-outs and biased trials and one execution. And under it all, like the beat of a big hollow-voiced drum, the aftermath of the Civil War keeps unspooling.

For the most part, Jacobean revenge tragedy (my academic specialty) has only the most fleeting of acquaintances with verisimilitude, but in this one way, life and art are indistinguishable: revenge may feel like a solution in the short term, but in truth it does nothing except compound destruction with destruction. No one wins. No one triumphs. There is no kind of satisfaction in the three-on-one murder of Ellison Hatfield or in the "executions" of his murderers (and don't forget the innocent Bud McCoy, murdered in mistake for his brother Bill). Only by the cockeyed internal logic of the feud does the cold blooded murder of Alifair McCoy make any kind of sense, but the judicial execution of her murderer, Cotton Top Mounts isn't a fair answer, either. The only people who "win" are the ones who survive long enough to outlive the dying-snake paroxysms of their family enmity, and even then, there was no survivor who had not lost a sibling, a parent, a child, or a spouse (or any combination of the above) to an absolutely pointless exchange of violence. And that's not winning, either.



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UBC: McLaughlin, The Postcard Killer

The Postcard Killer: The True Story of J. Frank Hickey by Vance McLaughlin

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



McLaughlin has two problems:
(1) He has no idea of how to organize his facts to make a coherent and followable narrative. (Yes, o text editor, I know that "followable" isn't a real word. Hush.)
(2) He tries to present Hickey as a serial killer a la Jack the Ripper or Ted Bundy, and his evidence, while it doesn't disprove the idea, doesn't support it, either. He has a man who clearly murdered three people and who may have murdered god knows how many others. The police of Buffalo, Lackawanna, Boston, Cleveland, Whiting and pretty much every point in between had lists of unsolved murders and disappearances they wanted to question J. Frank Hickey about. But he didn't confess, and the only thing they actually had to go on was that he was the kind of person who would have done it, not any real evidence that tied him to any of the crimes.

So. J. Frank Hickey was a horrible little man who raped and murdered at least two children and then blamed it all on the demon rum. Oh and then started sending taunting postcards to the parents of his final victim, leading to the discovery of the child's body (concealed, like Francis Saville Kent, in the vault of an outhouse) and ultimately to the discovery of Hickey himself. The evidence of his life indicates that he was both a sociopath and an alcoholic. He committed his first murder in 1883, when he was eighteen (unlike the others, this one had an adult victim and was not sexually motivated). He spent his adult life drifting from job to job (he learned very quickly that it was much better to quit before his erratic behavior got him fired) and preying haphazardly on boys. His second confessed murder was in 1902 and the third in 1911. I absolutely 100% agree that it seems likely Hickey committed other murders that could never be pinned on him, but discussing him as if we know for a fact things we can only speculate about makes me suspicious and untrusting, like a mule faced with a tarpaulin.

Hickey was not executed. The jury could not agree on whether he was sane or insane in the legal sense, and the judge, reprimanding them like a pack of schoolboys who'd broken a window pane and wouldn't 'fess up, told them pretty much flat out that he wouldn't dismiss them unless they reached a verdict. McLaughlin seems to feel that Judge Brown didn't mean it that way, but I read what the man actually said and I agreed with the jury: I do not feel justified in discharging you. It seems to me if you could consider with rational and common sense the logical phases, stripped of their undue excitement and passion, or anything preventing the application of the ordinary rules of common sense, that you ought to be able to agree. [...] It is too distressing a thing to send out to the world that a jury of Erie County could not agree in a case of this kind, and I am not going to send you out (McLaughlin 165). What recourse did the poor jury have? They battled grimly on, sane vs. insane, until someone suggested a compromise on second-degree murder. None of them believed in it, but they were all beaten down to the point of accepting it as a compromise.

And then--how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless judge--the judge reprimanded them for that, saying: Ordinarily it is quite the uniform practice to extend the thanks of the court to the jury for their care and consideration in reaching a conclusion. [...]The public and the court do not feel satisfied with this result. For those of you who have earnestly endeavored to provide a different result, the court extends the most appreciative and sincere thanks for your efforts.
Hickey spent the last nine years of his life in prison--which at least meant that he could not find any more boys to prey upon.

McLaughlin's narrative is hard to follow and surfacey. He wants to analyze Hickey, throwing around modern psychiatric and criminal profiling terminololgy, but he doesn't, for instance, spend any time talking about the more distressing contents of the postcards Hickey sent George Joseph, thereby bowdlerizing his own research before anyone else has a chance to complain. This book should have been fascinating, but was only disappointing.



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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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