Fiona's True Crime Book Reviews: S by author Harold Schechter Depraved: The Shocking True Story of America's First Serial Killer Herman Mudgett, who called himself Dr. H. H. Holmes, seemed the epitome of the late 19th century "Golden Age": He was a well-dressed, charismatic, self-made entrepreneur (think Andrew Carnegie). Unfortunately for his many victims, he was also a liar, bigamist, debtor, con-man, and murderer. The setting for several of his murders was the bizarre urban "castle" he built in Chicago--a ramshackle construction with mazelike corridors, soundproof rooms, sealed vaults, oversized furnaces, and chutes leading down to the cellar. Holmes's undoing was an insurance scam in which he planned to use a corpse supplied by a doctor to fake his partner's death, but ended up killing the partner, his wife, and his five children. The Boston Book Review wrote, "Schechter's account of this charming, repulsive monster is both an astonishing piece of popular history as well as a near clinical analysis of as sinister a killer as this country has ever produced." INFO Harold Schechter Deranged Harold Schechter is a professor of American culture at Queens College (CUNY) who takes an academic interest in the history of violent folklore: "Our pop entertainments aren't necessarily more brutal than those of the past," he writes. "They are simply . . . more state of the art." In this book Schechter turns his keen historian's gaze on real-life serial killer Albert Fish, who killed--and ate--as many as 15 children in New York City in the '20s. Fish resembled a meek, kindly, white-haired grandfather, but was actually an intense sadomasochist whose sexual fetishes included almost everything known to psychiatry: For example, he stuck 29 needles into his pelvic region. Apparently Schechter, while writing his book Deviant about Ed Gein, asked Robert Bloch (author of Psycho), "Why are people so fascinated by Ed Gein?" Bloch answered, "Because they haven't heard about Albert Fish." INFO Harold Schechter Deviant: The Shocking True Story of the Original 'Psycho' Harold Schechter is a historian: he takes old files and yellowed newspaper clippings, and brings their stories to life. Deviant is about everyone's favorite ghoul, Ed Gein--whose crimes inspired the writers of Psycho, "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," and The Silence of the Lambs. Schechter deftly evokes the small-town 1950's Wisconsin setting--not pretty farms and cheese factories, but infertile soil and a bleak, hard-scrabble existence. The details of Gein's "death house" are perhaps well-known by now, but the murderer's quietly crazy, almost gentle personality comes forth in this book as never before. As Gary Kadet wrote, in The Boston Book Review, "Schechter is a dogged researcher [who backs up] every bizarre detail and curious twist in this and his other books . . . More importantly, he nimbly avoids miring his writing and our reading with minutiae or researched overstatement, which means that although he can occasionally be dry, he is never boring." INFO Harold Schechter, David Everitt The A-Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers A lightweight but reasonably tasteful collection of information about serial killers, by a respected historian of crime (Schechter) and the author of Human Monsters (Everitt). Includes individual entries devoted to the most famous killers from all over the world, and amusing sections devoted to such topics as black widows, bluebeards, killer couples, Lustmord, Nazi buffs, power tools, pyromania, and trophies. Also has useful tips for further ventures into art, movies, books, zines, music, and tourist attractions devoted to serial killers. Cross-indexed, with numerous black and white illustrations. INFO Jim Schutze Bully: Does Anyone Deserve to Die? Jim Schutze combines natural details about the sawgrass marshes and roaring alligators of the area south of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with keen observations about the fantasy lives of teenagers hooked on surfing, steroids, and instant gratification, to paint a harrowing picture of seven suburban kids who slide all too easily into moral depravity. At the heart of his tale is a kind of love triangle: the "bully," his best friend Marty, and Marty's girlfriend, who fiercely desires to rescue Marty from a strangely destructive friendship with strong homosexual undertones. Schutze's account of the aftermath of the murder includes interesting details on how the police skillfully lured confessions from the kids involved. I found the writing a bit flowery, with a few inconsistencies, and I wished the author had provided more background about how he reconstructed the dialogue; but those are small reservations about an excellent book overall. INFO Christopher Seymour Yakuza Diary: Doing Time in the Japanese Underworld In the spring of '93, freelance writer Christopher Seymour talked his way out of the grasp of a suspicious immigration official just in time to extend his stay in Japan during a countrywide yakuza (organized crime) gang war. From the opening pages, his lighthearted enthusiasm is infectious. As he works his way into the yakuza network of physically imposing men with full-body tattoos and a weakness for tacky golf clothes, Seymour has adventures both scary and farcical. And he collects a slew of revealing details. For example, Seymour tells us that part of the affected romance of the hugely successful and influential Japanese underworld is that they style themselves as losers: "ya-ku-za" literally means "8-9-3," a losing hand in an old-fashioned Japanese card game. The Village Voice writes, "Christopher Seymour's journey into Japan's netherworld is alternately funny and harrowing, and always thoroughly original. His self-effacing style makes the perfect foil for this fascinating guided tour of institutional crime and ritualized violence." INFO Gini Sikes 8 Ball Chicks: A Year in the Violent World of Girl Gangsters "TJ had never killed anyone before, but then who knew for sure? Sticking a pump shotgun out of a moving car and blasting into a crowd--you could never really tell which bodies fell because of you, whose life you were accountable for..." The cover may be gaudy, but this account of girl "gang-bangers" is down-to-earth and refreshingly free of melodrama. In what appears to be an increasingly popular genre--inner-city travel writing--journalist Gini Sikes spent a year hanging out with girl gangs in Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and San Antonio. As Salon writes, "Sikes' analysis is sparse and not particularly illuminating ('Without an effective national policy for youth, kids fell through the cracks in droves'), but she's got a good ear and the sense to step back and let her subjects seize the microphone most of the time." INFO David Simon Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets This 1992 Edgar Award winner for Best Fact Crime is nothing short of a classic. David Simon, a police reporter for the Baltimore Sun, spent the whole year of 1988 with three homicide squads, accompanying them like the reader's secret video camera through all the grim and grisly moments of their work--from the first telephone call to final piece of paperwork. The picture that emerges through a masterful accumulation of details is that homicide detectives are a rare breed who seem to thrive on coffee, cigarettes, and persistence through a endlessly exhausting parade of murder scenes. As The Washington Post writes, "We seem to have an insatiable appetite for police stories . . . David Simon's entry is far and away the best, the most readable, the most reliable and relentless of them all . . . An eye for the scenes of slaughter and pursuit and an ear for the cadences of cop talk, both business and banter, lend Simon's account the fascination that truth often has." INFO Carlton Smith Death of a Little Princess When Carlton Smith completed this book, in May 1997, the mysterious beating/strangulation murder of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey had not been solved--placing, of course, an inherent limitation on what could be said about the case. Nonetheless, Death of a Little Princess is a well-written and readable summary, including a succinct portrait of the Ramsey family and computer business; the key events in the investigation; profiles of Boulder, Colorado, police chief Tom Koby and district attorney Alex Hunter; a chronological account of the media reaction to the murder itself and to the topic of child beauty pageants; and details on the developing feud between the Ramsey "dream team" and the separate groups of the police department and the district attorney's office. Even those who've been following the case closely will be interested in the results of ex-FBI criminal profiler Robert Ressler's consultation on the case, reported in an interview with the author. INFO Carlton Stowers Careless Whispers: The Lake Waco Murders The three teenagers found in a wooded Texas park had suffered slow torture with a knife before dying. A usually implacable cop who was early on the scene, Truman Simons, was so shaken by the lonely, abandoned appearance of their naked bodies, he got down on his knees next to one of the girls and promised her he would find her killer. But he wasn't part of the initial investigation, which exhausted all leads and was labeled "inactive" after just 52 days. Simons begged his superior to be allowed to investigate on his own, slowly tracked down a few pieces of the puzzle, and then was asked to drop the case after a suspect he'd arrested was set free. He then did what few cops would do: he quit the police department, took a job as a jailer, and pursued the case on his free time, eventually forming an oddly intimate jailer-suspect relationship with one of the killers. Careless Whispers is a well-crafted classic that won the 1987 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime. INFO Carlton Stowers To the Last Breath The story opens with somber drama: the body of a two-year-old girl is removed from her grave and transported to a hospital for a second autopsy. In the small Gulf Coast town of Alvin, Texas, a bereaved mother and grandmother, and the female detective who has risked so much to champion their cause, await the opinion of a visiting pathologist. Carlton Stowers, whose Careless Whispers won the 1987 Edgar Award in Fact Crime, brings all the right skills to this tale of a sullen, possessive man who liked to play cruel mind games on his loved ones and apparently killed his young daughter in a slow and deliberate fashion. Perhaps at the end, we don't really know why he did it, but we have come to know and admire the three women who fought for justice. INFO Bella Stumbo Until the Twelfth of Never "She would never abandon her claim that she killed in self-defense, that she was a victim of emotional battery, driven to protect herself and her children. . . . Such purity of purpose, whether it is based on fact or fancy, principle or paranoia, is a rare thing." Bella Stumbo has written a masterful, fascinating study of a "first wife" who scrimps and saves to put her husband through law school and to help build his lucrative career, only to be stripped of everything--including her dignity and perhaps even her sanity--by divorce laws that her husband manipulates to his own ends. The heroine, Betty Broderick, is almost larger than life in her intelligence, drive, anger, and fierce love for her children, and yet all too human in her inability to refrain from compulsively exacerbating her situation. Until the Twelfth of Never won the 1994 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime. INFO Yaron Svoray, Thomas Hughes Gods of Death Legal scholar and anti-pornography activist Catherine MacKinnon approached journalist Yaron Svoray about "snuff films," because he was the only person who'd said in print that he'd seen (while undercover investigating neo-Nazis for his book In Hitler's Shadow) such a film, in which a girl was raped and murdered. "It is my misfortune," Svoray says, "to have been born with a need to look under the carpet." After a bit of soul-searching, he undertook the investigation described in this book--a start-and-stop series of adventures with many dead ends and mishaps, some of which are quite funny. (This reviewer was impressed by his tenacity.) The writing, while sincere, is overdramatized and synoptic, leaving the reader to decide whether to believe Svoray's hair-raising tales. This book is important for what it says about how (in Svoray's words) "blood sells," and it will no doubt spark much discussion among those who doubt the existence of snuff films. INFO [All reviews copyright © Amazon.com, Inc. 1997-8] True Crime Is Ugly Write to Fiona Ragged Entelechy