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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