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.



View all my reviews