UBC: Phelps, The Devil's Rooming House

The Devil's Rooming House: The True Story of America's Deadliest Female Serial Killer by M. William Phelps

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



I wanted to like this book. I really, truly did. It's about the abominable Amy Archer-Gilligan, who is the many, many times removed inspiration for the Brewster sisters in Arsenic and Old Lace. She ran a cross between a boarding house and a nursing home, and between 1908 and 1916 she murdered somewhere between five and sixty-six people. For their money. She also committed fraud, theft, embezzlement, what we would today call "elder abuse" . . . Two of her victims were her husbands. And she was a Tartuffe of the highest quality, claiming that the investigation was a witch hunt begun because some of her neighbors had taken against this poor, saintly Christian widow and that everyone who was suspicious of her ought to be ashamed of themselves.

I wanted to like this book. But it is honestly a mess.

Partly, this is because of the nature of the material. The Archer-Gilligan case is insanely complicated, because you have (1) the course of the perpetrator (fraud, embezzlement murder, etc.); (2) the widely varied courses of her victims; (3) an investigation that was begun by a reporter named Carlan Goslee years before the police got involved, which ranged hither, thither, and yon over Connecticut and Massachusetts, tracking down the relatives of Archer-Gilligan's victims and other interested parties; (4) the police investigation, including exhumations and autopsies of corpses with enough arsenic in them to kill five men apiece; (5) the trial, appeal, retrial, conviction, prison sentence, and Amy Archer-Gilligan's eventual committal to an insane asylum, where she died in 1962. That's a lot of trails to follow, and I don't know how to arrange it coherently, either.

But Phelps causes a lot of his own problems. He bounces back and forth in his chronology to create "narrative tension" rather than because it's the only way to tell the story (and I put "narrative tension" in quotes because that's not what his technique causes). He opens with one of Archer-Gilligan's borders who thinks he's being poisoned, but he never tells us what happened to that particular man. For reasons that remain entirely opaque to me, the beginning of the book describes the incredible, lethal heat wave of 1911, which--while a fascinating piece of forgotten American history--has nothing whatsoever to do with Amy Archer-Gilligan except for the fact that she was alive and murdering her boarders in Windsor, CT, at the time. He gets horrifically tangled in the chronology of one of Archer-Gilligan's victims, and ends up sneering at the newspapers for getting Smith's age wrong in his obituary, when--to the best of my ability to tell--it's Phelps who's wrong, and that's simply from doing the math on the information he provides. He leaves out bits of the story; for example, there's a gap between the DA saying emphatically it was first-degree murder or nothing and the DA accepting a plea of second-degree murder that makes it impossible to figure out what happened. He is a sloppy writer, using anachronistic slang (like saying Archer-Gilligan "lawyered up" (191) or that something "must have rattled her cage real good" (175)) . And he has the trait that I hate above all others, of using a word that sounds sort of like the right word, but actually means something entirely different, like "emphatically" for "empirically" (154). It happens again and again in this book, and it drives me straight up the wall.

So, fascinating material--and Phelps clearly did a metric fuck-ton of research--but lousy execution, leaving me disappointed and sad. This book could have been so awesome and it just missed its grip.



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