Katherine Addison's Blog, page 47

UBC: Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I first read In Cold Blood in 1991, when I was sixteen. It terrified me then and it terrifies me now. But I'm a much more sophisticated reader now than I was then, and so I can actually talk a little bit about what makes this book so incredibly effective.

One is the narrative voice. Capote is detached, omniscient, and he understands the art of underselling. Unlike many true crime books, In Cold Blood never tries to tell its readers when to feel outraged; it leaves it up to them to do that work. It tells you what people do, and when it can, it tries to talk about why.

The second thing (and I think this is why the book's ability to terrify me remains uneroded after 25 years) is the recurrent, persistent theme of isolation. The isolation of the Clutters' farmhouse, the isolation of each of the family members in their terrible deaths, and the persistent isolation of their murderers, both physically in their cells in Garden City courthouse and on Leavenworth's Death Row (and isn't that a grisly reworking of Huis Clos? Perry and Dick stuck with only each other for eternity) and psychically (by which I mean "in terms of the psyche," not "in terms of one's psychic powers"): part of Perry's diagnosis of schizophrenia is his inability to connect deeply to other people, and Dick, for all his surface charisma and his insistence on being "normal," and for all the painfully ironic normality of his family, has no ability to reach out to other people, no shred of empathy in all his empty chrome-shiny soul. The book gives the feeling that all human relationships are precarious, that we are all isolated and vulnerable, alone beneath the wide, empty sky, listening to "the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat" (343).

In Cold Blood is not entirely factually accurate (the wikipedia entry has a section on the book considered as nonfiction), and normally I would be up in arms--I won't read Erik Larson for crimes that Capote blatantly commits: he tells us what the murder victims thought and felt, he provides passages of dialogue that he can't possibly have a verbatim source for, he moves things around to suit his narrative purpose. And certainly I would never dream of using In Cold Blood for anything that I couldn't find a corroborating source for, but either because I first read the book when I was sixteen and did not have a keen grasp on primary sources and how to use them or because the damn thing's a masterpiece, I can't help giving Capote a free pass.

N.b.: if you want to , you can Google for pictures of the crime scene(s), but you'd better be really fucking sure before you hit the search button.



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UBC: Craig Brandon, Murder in the Adirondacks

Murder in the Adirondacks: An American Tragedy Revisited by Craig Brandon

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Theodore Dreiser is so very much NOT my cup of tea. I have never read his (grandiosely titled) novel An American Tragedy and thus cannot comment usefully on its comparison to its real-life inspirations, the mysterious death of Grace Brown in Big Moose Lake, New York, in 1906.

(I say "mysterious death" because we are never going to know exactly how she died. The only witness was Chester Gillette, the man who either killed her or failed to save her, and he said first that it was an accident, then that it was suicide, and at his trial, the defense tried to claim she fell overboard in an epileptic fit. The prosecution claimed he clubbed her with his tennis racquet then dumped her in the lake.

(Yes, I know, but he really did have a tennis racquet with him.)

This is another entry in the true crime sub-genre comprised by books like The Murder of Helen Jewett, Fall River Outrage: Life, Murder, and Justice in Early Industrial New England, The Trial of Levi Weeks: Or the Manhattan Well Mystery (and quite possibly The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder, depending on your theory of how Mary Rogers met her death): women who are murdered because they have become inconvenient to their lovers. (I could describe them as "why buy the cow?" murders, but that's extremely cynical and not always accurate.) Chester Gillette got Grace Brown pregnant, but he had never had any intention of marrying her and she was very much in the way of his attempts to insert himself into the upper-class society of Cortland, New York. Later renditions of the story would metonymize this into a love triangle--Chester caught between his upper class beloved and his lower class mistress--but real life was not that tidy, nor that empathizable. Chester didn't murder Grace so that he could marry someone else; he murdered Grace so that he wouldn't have to marry anyone at all, so that he could continue flirting with and casually dating a number of girls from Cortland.

Regardless of how exactly Grace Brown died, Chester Gillette was clearly criminally culpable, whether he pushed her overboard or just sat and watched her drown. He was ready, willing, and determined to lie about it. The most horrifying part of the story, to me, is the way that Chester fled Big Moose Lake, regrouped, and kept a date he'd made on the train while he was traveling with Grace. He never missed a beat. And the more his mother, who was kind of horrifying in her own right, tried to claim that Chester hadn't meant to murder Grace, he was just a careless little boy who never thought about the consequences of his actions, the more I saw just how Chester could have become a man who could commit a murder in cold blood and walk away as if it never happened.

(Chester's mother, Louisa Gillette, was clearly, if nothing else, tone-deaf to irony. She talked about wanting to visit Minerva Brown, Grace's mother: "Of course, I shall not intrude myself if I am certain that the sight of me would be hateful to her, but I shall certainly write her a letter of loving sympathy and tell her how greatly I long to speak to her in person" (qtd. Brandon 259). "Loving sympathy" from the mother of the man who murdered your daughter? Especially given that Louisa was frantically working to get Chester a retrial, that seems a bit much.)

Murder in the Adirondacks is a perfectly adequate treatment of Grace Brown's death and Chester Gillette's trial and execution. Brandon can organize his facts (which is a real blessing in criminology); his writing is workmanlike; his thesis is weak, but he's not engaging strongly on any kind of analytical level, so that's not the handicap it could be. His weakest point is his attempt to discuss Dreiser and An American Tragedy and A Place in the Sun , but if you're reading for the true crime aspect, that won't bother you much, and if you're reading for the comparison with Dreiser, you won't need Brandon's guidance anyway.



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UBC: Scott Andrew Selby, A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin

A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin: The Chilling True Story of the S-Bahn Murderer by Scott Andrew Selby

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


First things first: Paul Ogorzow was a German railroad worker (on the S-Bahn, Berlin's commuter rail system) who attacked at least fourteen women, and murdered eight of them, between 1939 and 1941. Seven of these women (including five of the women who died) were attacked on the S-Bahn at night, beaten unconscious, and thrown off the train. (Remarkably, two of these women survived.) The women not attacked on the S-Bahn were attacked in a neighborhood of garden allotments, also at night during the blackout, and were beaten, beaten and raped, or beaten, raped, and murdered. The police put massive amounts of manpower into finding Ogorzow, hampered by Goebbels' refusal to allow them to publicize the investigation, and finally caught him because another railroad employee had once seen him climbing a fence to sneak off the job. (And it wasn't even to murder someone. It was to visit his mistress.) They realized that this meant Ogorzow's alibi was as full of holes as a whiffle-ball, and the police commissioner in charge of the case, Wilhelm Lüdkte, in interrogation, tripped Ogorzow up once and from there, baby step by baby step, got a full confession out of him. Ogorzow put forward every excuse he could think of (the gonorrhea made him do it; the Jewish doctor who maliciously mis-treated the gonorrhea made him do it; insanity made him do it, but none of them held water. He was indicted the 23rd of July, 1941, tried the 24th, and executed (by guillotine) the 25th.

There are two particularly Nazi-esque ironies that stung me: (1) Ogorzow's heirs (his wife and two children, who had known NOTHING of Daddy's extracurricular activities, including his non-homicidal affairs with other women) were billed for wear and tear on the guillotine.

(2) Although Goebbels wouldn't allow the police to publicize the fact that they were trying to catch a serial killer, he did have a bright idea for protecting potential victims: a late-night escort service, where men could volunteer to accompany women on the S-Bahn and see them safely to their homes. The system was quite intelligently run: the women had to request an escort formally, and the details were entered in a log book. But the criteria for being allowed to volunteer to protect the fair flower of German womanhood? (a) You had to be a Party member and (b) you had to be a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA)--more familiarly known as Brownshirts.

As if that weren't bad enough, Paul Ogorzow was a Party member and a Brownshirt. He volunteered for escort duty and did in fact see all his charges safely home, protecting them vigilantly from himself.

I found the book intensely frustrating because Selby writes and uses primary sources like a lawyer rather than a historian, but he's not presenting a case, just the basic, convoluted narrative of Ogorzow's career as a serial killer. This creates a muddle of nonfiction genre conventions and basically leaves me with the feeling like there was no book in this book. YMMV.

As far as I know, it is the only book in English about Paul Ogorzow.



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UBC: Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Krakauer starts out with a question: how can two men, sane by all reasonable legal and medical standards, willfully, cold-bloodedly, and with malice aforethought murder their sister-in-law and eighteen-month-old niece and believe, sincerely, passionately, and with absolute conviction, that it was the will of God?

Much of the answer lies with the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints and its teaching on the subject of polygamy and women's necessary and ordained place (which, to be clear, is doing whatever the hell they're told to), but there's also a sub-theme here--which I picked up also in Into the Wild--which I'm not sure how to put into words. It's not the danger of masculinity so much as it is a concern about what happens when a certain kind of gender identity doesn't have a safe outlet. Into the Wild is about risk-taking. Chris McCandless had been taking crazy, unnecessary risks for years before he found the one that killed him, and Krakauer's remarks about his own mountain-climbing experience explain what called to him in Chris McCandless' story. (Also, in the prologue to Under the Banner of Heaven, where he says, "For some, the province of the extreme holds an allure that's irresistible" (xxiii).) Under the Banner of Heaven is about (in part) men who understand their masculine identity in a very clearly defined way (short version, paterfamilias), but are blocked from performing it by the changing gender and social roles of the world around them. Krakauer isn't using that to exculpate Dan and Ron Lafferty (far from it); he's just saying, here is this thing. Here is how the world looks to these men. Here is one source of their impregnable self-righteousness.





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UBC: Robert Kolker, Lost Girls

Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a fascinating, disturbing, terrifying, and deeply sad book. It's a study of the deaths of five women, all of them "escorts" who advertised on Craigslist, four of the five (if not all five) murdered by the same person. Kolker isn't so much interested in the investigation as he is in the biographies of the victims and the stories of the people who survive them. He's compassionately non-judgmental (I think the only person I could actually tell Kolker didn't like was Shannan Gilbert's last john) and what he ends up writing is a study of modern American poverty as much as it is anything else. These women didn't resort to prostitution because they were corrupt or lazy; they resorted to prostitution because they needed the money. The money they could make at "honest" jobs (and those "honest" jobs being hard to come by) just looks ridiculous next to the money they could make as escorts. Kolker comments at the end, "The demand for commercial sex will never go away" (381), and the truth of that is something America has been failing to cope with for a very long time. In most ways, the world that these women lived and died in is very different from the world that Helen Jewett lived and died in (The Murder of Helen Jewett), but in some ways it is horribly the same. And if you compare the hardship--and outright lethal danger--of trying to make a living as an escort via Craigslist with the relative safety and security of the women at Mustang Ranch (Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women) it kind of makes you despair of a society that would rather blame the prostitute than admit any shred of responsibility on the part of the john. Would rather condone murder than give women (and men) a chance to do this job safely and with dignity.

Kolker doesn't try to impose a narrative on something that is intrinsically narativeless. There's only parts of a story here, parts that can't be lined up with each other. Lost Girls is a gentle ironizing of books like Someone's Daughter, as Kolker records the alliance formed by the mothers and sisters and friends of the murdered women, and then records the way that alliance falls apart under the pressure of the horrible anti-closure of the case. The arc of redemptive community, of the survivors coming together to create a family, ends with a woman unwilling to talk to the accidentally encountered father of her murdered sister's son because she's afraid of looking like a stalker. There is nothing, Kolker suggests, that is redeemable about these crimes, only destruction.






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Interview with New Books in Science Fiction & WFC

There's a podcast interview with me here.

Did not win World Fantasy Award, meaning that, at the end of this awards season, my batting average is .250 (1 in 4). Which is not great for a ballplayer, but still above the Mendoza Line.

Thank you to everybody at WFC who took the time to tell me how much you liked The Goblin Emperor. I appreciate it deeply.

Underfoot Cat is ingenious, but not always very plausible.

ME: Underfoot Cat, what have you done with my glasses?
UNDERFOOT CAT: What makes you think it was me?
ME: Well, there's only the three of us in the house, and it wasn't me and it wasn't Catzilla.
U.C.: How do you know there's only three of us in the house? You could have gremlins! Poltergeists! A secret cat!
ME: No, I couldn't. Besides which, you were sitting beside them on the counter just before they disappeared.
U.C.: That's nothing but circum . . . circumstitial . . .
ME: Circumstantial.
U.C.: I knew that. Circumstantial evidence. Doesn't prove a thing.
ME: And yet, here are my glasses, under the bathtub, and there are you, the only creature in the house who could have knocked them there.
U.C.: Um. I plead the Fifth?
ME: If you have Constitutional rights--which you don't--that's not one of them.
U.C.: All right! All right! I confess! I did it! I did it! I repent!
ME: . . . Your repentance looks an awful lot like rolling around on the floor and picking a fight with the bath mat. And losing.
U.C.: 'S not my fault if interpretive dance is the best of my limited options for communication.
ME: Yes, let's both just pretend that's what that was. Try to remember that my glasses are not a toy.
U.C.: You say that about everything. [exits grumbling] It was all the Secret Cat's fault anyway.
ME: [after him] We don't have a secret cat!

A dialogue at 5:30 in the morning

ME: Underfoot Cat, why are you in the bathtub?
UNDERFOOT CAT: Because.
ME: What are you doing?
U.C.: Stuff.
ME: It looks to me like you're chasing your own tail.
U.C.: . . . Maybe.
ME: You realize this is a misappropriation of the bathtub.
U.C.: I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am.
ME: That's you purring.
U.C.: Same difference.
ME: I could turn the water on.
U.C.: You wouldn't.
ME: . . . Maybe.

And again ...

[tremendous, drawn-out, and clearly disastrous clattering noise]
Me: Oh my god, cat, what did you do?
Underfoot Cat: [looking innocent, if somewhat alarmed] I have no idea what you're talking about.
[I search the house with great and dour suspicion.]
Me: No, seriously, cat, WHAT DID YOU DO?
Underfoot Cat: This lack of trust wounds me greatly. Just for that, I'm not sayin'.
Me: AUGH!

A dialogue between cat and biped

Underfoot Cat: What are you doing?
Me: Taking a shower.
Underfoot Cat: Why?
Me: Personal hygiene.
Underfoot Cat: Wtf? Why don't you just use your tongue?
Me: Because reasons.
Underfoot Cat: ... You're not putting me on, are you?
Me: [getting out] No, really, this is how we--
Underfoot Cat: OH MY GOD YOU'RE MADE OF WET