Review: Arntfield & Danesi, Murder in Plain English (2017)

Murder in Plain English: From Manifestos to Memes--Looking at Murder Through the Words of Killers by Michael Arntfield

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is not a very good book, which is disappointing, because the idea---that murderers (by which they mostly mean serial killers and mass murderers) have particular stories they tell about themselves and that those stories can be analyzed to tell us more about how murderers think---is great. (I love close readings.) Unfortunately, Arntfield & Danesi aren't very nuanced readers, and they never really get in there and close read a text the way I was longing for them to do. I think the points they make about the possibilities of literary forensics are intriguing, although there's a creepy Philip K. Dick/Minority Report vibe to their idea that murderers can be detected by their writing BEFORE they commit murder. To be fair to Arntfield & Danesi, I think what they mean is that people (mostly male) likely to become serial killers or mass murderers can be detected in adolescence (by teachers who magically have the time and training to close read their students' work for signs of schizoid or other personality disorders) and (magically) successfully intervened with by social workers or psychiatrists, not that they should be pre-emptively incarcerated.

In the last chapter they try to prove that literary forensics is useful in cold cases, but in none of the cases they look at (O.J. Simpson, Jon-Benet Ramsey, and April Tinsley) does their analysis of the writing involved get us any closer to justice. Their close reading of Simpson is sort of nice as corroborative evidence, but it's nothing new or surprising. They point sort of vaguely at Patsy Ramsey as being involved somehow in the ransom letter, but it's very vague and of course she's dead. And their not-very-close close reading of April Tinsley's murderer accomplishes nothing.* (Interestingly, in that case, the only case where they have made any effort to get involved in actually SOLVING a crime, the information they give the Fort Wayne police---to which the Fort Wayne police do not respond---is geographical profiling, which they do not talk about at all in the entire rest of the book, not literary analysis. So they're severely undercutting their own argument.)

In summation, this feels like a case of academic scholars trying to join the bandwagon of unlikely specialties that turn out be forensically useful and trying to prove that they have special skills that are uniquely suited to solving---or preventing---crimes. On the one hand, people have been close reading the writings of murderers for decades, even if they don't call it that, so there's nothing really new here, and on the other, their argument for the unique suitability of trained literary scholars to fight crime is unconvincing.

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*In 2018 a man named John Miller was successfully prosecuted for April Tinsley's murder, but he was caught by genetic genealogy and DNA profiling, not by literary analysis of his writing.



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