UBC: Maccabee, Oates, Oney
Maccabee, Paul. John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crooks' Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920-1936. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1995.
Oates, Jonathan. Unsolved Murders in Victorian and Edwardian London. Barnsley: Wharncliffe Books-Pen and Sword Books, 2007.
Oney, Steve. And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003.
One of these things is not like the others.
The Maccabee and the Oates are similar in a number of ways: both are true crime books organized by place rather than time or person; both are well researched (the Maccabee in particular is exhaustively researched, and I admire him deeply for it); and both are, for all their excellent research, very poorly written. Neither of them has any feel for how to organize their facts into something either compelling or, frequently, comprehensible. My favorite is this passage from Oates: "There was certainly much to show that the boy had been deprived of food. This was due to the fact that the lungs were severely inflamed and cut to pieces." Maccabee has sentences just as bad.
I recommend the Maccabee, certainly, if you are interested in the history of St. Paul, because it is impeccably researched and it is full of fascinating details. It also does give a vivid sense of how wide and deep corruption ran in St. Paul during Prohibition and how vital an effect that had on the careers of Prohibition-era gangsters.
If you're interested, as I am, in the crimes of Victorian London that nobody writes about (like the Thames Torso murders, for instance), I will recommend Oates, because he does write about crimes that otherwise, at best, get a glancing mention from Ripperologists. But, given how poorly it's written, it is definitely a book for the fanatic.
The Oney is a completely different ball of fish. For one, it is an excellent book, extremely well-written along with being well-researched. For another, it is about a single disaster bookended by two catastrophes, the dreadful murder of Mary Phagan in the basement of the National Pencil Factory in 1913 and the lynching of Leo Frank in Marietta in 1915.
As Oney says, at this point, we are probably never going to be able to determine whether Leo Frank murdered Mary Phagan or not. I tend to lean toward "not" (and I think Oney leans with me), but there are just enough discrepancies and doubts that I'm not sure. On the other hand, we can be sure that he should never have been convicted of her murder, because there was more than enough evidence for reasonable doubt, and he as sure as sin shouldn't have been lynched for it. The course of the trial, the petty, self-interested politicking of the state prosecutor and the corrupt Atlanta police, the demagoguery of a gentleman named Tom Watson, and the cold-blooded lynching (Frank wasn't just lynched, he was broken out of/kidnapped from the state prison farm in Milledgeville and driven 118 miles to Marietta and then lynched), and the aftermath, which proves with sickening exactitude how the good ol' boy network worked (two members of the grand jury who determined that, no, they had no hope of discovering who lynched Frank had been in the lynching party and EVERYBODY KNEW IT) are just horrifying. And the good faith efforts to figure out the truth of Mary Phagan's murder were a dismal failure. The bad go unpunished and the good go unrewarded.
As I so often say in reviewing true-crime books, I wish that Oney had gone ahead and pulled back for the meta chapter, a careful review of the evidence, what we actually know, what we can responsibly conjecture, and which theories of the crime we can prove to be incorrect. Excluding notes and index, this is a 649 page book, and by the end of it, I could really have used a clear summation of what had happened. But that's a fundamentally minor complaint in a book that is an excellent, careful, impartial-as-possible piece of history. (When someone's viciously, virulently anti-Semitic rhetoric is (a) in large part responsible for the (1) conviction and (2) lynching of a very possibly innocent man, and (b) in large part responsible for the revival of the KKK, and that someone is thrilled by and proud of both these things, it's a little difficult to remain impartial about him, Tom Watson I am looking at you.) It is not a pleasant read, but it is compelling, and I do recommend it if you can bear its subject matter.
Oates, Jonathan. Unsolved Murders in Victorian and Edwardian London. Barnsley: Wharncliffe Books-Pen and Sword Books, 2007.
Oney, Steve. And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003.
One of these things is not like the others.
The Maccabee and the Oates are similar in a number of ways: both are true crime books organized by place rather than time or person; both are well researched (the Maccabee in particular is exhaustively researched, and I admire him deeply for it); and both are, for all their excellent research, very poorly written. Neither of them has any feel for how to organize their facts into something either compelling or, frequently, comprehensible. My favorite is this passage from Oates: "There was certainly much to show that the boy had been deprived of food. This was due to the fact that the lungs were severely inflamed and cut to pieces." Maccabee has sentences just as bad.
I recommend the Maccabee, certainly, if you are interested in the history of St. Paul, because it is impeccably researched and it is full of fascinating details. It also does give a vivid sense of how wide and deep corruption ran in St. Paul during Prohibition and how vital an effect that had on the careers of Prohibition-era gangsters.
If you're interested, as I am, in the crimes of Victorian London that nobody writes about (like the Thames Torso murders, for instance), I will recommend Oates, because he does write about crimes that otherwise, at best, get a glancing mention from Ripperologists. But, given how poorly it's written, it is definitely a book for the fanatic.
The Oney is a completely different ball of fish. For one, it is an excellent book, extremely well-written along with being well-researched. For another, it is about a single disaster bookended by two catastrophes, the dreadful murder of Mary Phagan in the basement of the National Pencil Factory in 1913 and the lynching of Leo Frank in Marietta in 1915.
As Oney says, at this point, we are probably never going to be able to determine whether Leo Frank murdered Mary Phagan or not. I tend to lean toward "not" (and I think Oney leans with me), but there are just enough discrepancies and doubts that I'm not sure. On the other hand, we can be sure that he should never have been convicted of her murder, because there was more than enough evidence for reasonable doubt, and he as sure as sin shouldn't have been lynched for it. The course of the trial, the petty, self-interested politicking of the state prosecutor and the corrupt Atlanta police, the demagoguery of a gentleman named Tom Watson, and the cold-blooded lynching (Frank wasn't just lynched, he was broken out of/kidnapped from the state prison farm in Milledgeville and driven 118 miles to Marietta and then lynched), and the aftermath, which proves with sickening exactitude how the good ol' boy network worked (two members of the grand jury who determined that, no, they had no hope of discovering who lynched Frank had been in the lynching party and EVERYBODY KNEW IT) are just horrifying. And the good faith efforts to figure out the truth of Mary Phagan's murder were a dismal failure. The bad go unpunished and the good go unrewarded.
As I so often say in reviewing true-crime books, I wish that Oney had gone ahead and pulled back for the meta chapter, a careful review of the evidence, what we actually know, what we can responsibly conjecture, and which theories of the crime we can prove to be incorrect. Excluding notes and index, this is a 649 page book, and by the end of it, I could really have used a clear summation of what had happened. But that's a fundamentally minor complaint in a book that is an excellent, careful, impartial-as-possible piece of history. (When someone's viciously, virulently anti-Semitic rhetoric is (a) in large part responsible for the (1) conviction and (2) lynching of a very possibly innocent man, and (b) in large part responsible for the revival of the KKK, and that someone is thrilled by and proud of both these things, it's a little difficult to remain impartial about him, Tom Watson I am looking at you.) It is not a pleasant read, but it is compelling, and I do recommend it if you can bear its subject matter.
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