"[C]ontaining a Full and Complete Account of the Abduction of Charles Brewster Ross" and his brother. Copyright 1876, so evidently this is a first edition of this account of a very famous case (which reached a conclusion, of sorts, not far from where I'm typing this).
It's a case everyone knew in the 19th century and almost nobody knows now, so even though this copy is much older than most of my stock, a stiff multi-fonted beauty that is in itself decor, I thought it might never sell -- that, much like Charley himself, nobody would ever find it.
Wrapping it up, I felt a little pang like I always do when a book with "years in" in inventory goes on its way. I'll miss the old fellow, but I like knowing someone is out there waiting for him.
Old love (#oldiesbutgoodies), new love (#hotoffthepress), and lots more tags on sale for the next week or so -- but if your problem is lost love (can't find a first edition or OOP tome from your past), I can probably help. Every book has his lap.
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I don't have any Capote-adjacent mags in stock as I write this, although I'm hoping some mid-sixties Esquires (not the one that got him in hot water in 1975, mind you; others that fact-check In Cold Blood) come in over the next week. I do have lots of other mags, from the 1950s through the 2020s -- and I'm always able to help find OOP glossies, or really anything else. (Looking for pre-FEUD reading recs? I wrote up a guide earlier this week.)
]]>The list looks about right to me; the only real surprise is the Glatt, and even that is more of a mild brow-lifter, it being Glatt, who's written an absolute ton in the genre, and about a case everyone was talking about last year.
I have that and one other 2024 nominee in stock as of this writing -- but one of my projects at the end of last year was to enter every single Best Fact Crime nominee on that list into the shop inventory database, just so that I wouldn't miss tagging any future arrivals. I don't have every nominee, alas, but I do have a bunch, and you might find some surprises in stock.
And speaking of awards, 'tis the season for an "as seen on TV" and "as seen in film" sale! If a book got made into a movie or miniseries (or a magazine wrote about a true-crime production), it's on sale until early February. In the market for one of my (weirdly) many DiCaprio-adjacent properties? Grab it now and save.
]]>And then there's the fact that he might have been murdered. And the ongoing saga of the Poe Toaster. And, mostly, that it all happened so long ago and with such whiffy "documentation" that there's a lot we can't ever know...which is part of the appeal.
I don't have a ton of Poe materials in stock just now, just the two books linked above -- but the lurid and afflicted story of Poe's own life, and the fossil record of a bygone city you end up ensorcelled by when you Google around about him or Mary Rogers, is a wonderful "wow, really?" wikihole to tumble down in the bleak midwinter. If you find any books or cases down there you need help researching, let me know.
]]>I'll be head down in an absolute unit of a presidential-race memoir from the mid-'70s, but for reading more specific to the man the long weekend celebrates, click here for new and secondhand accounts of Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder and the ensuing manhunt, or, on the nemesis side, here to read more about J. Edgar Hoover's purposefully racist bungling (not that some of these accounts would put it that way, of course).
And if you still haven't gotten around to Baldwin's The Evidence of Things Not Seen, no time like the present, truly.
The shop does have a "racial justice" tag, but to tell you God's honest, it's hard to know when to use it, because it can seem to apply to so many of the criminal-justice stories on my shelves. Like, a majority of them, even (or especially) the ones that don't realize it. The crossover with the "wrongful convictions" tag is...not even shocking to me, anymore.
But if, while browsing those tags or any others, you're not finding a title you'd hoped to, don't forget that books come and go all the time -- and that I can track down or special-order you what you need, or recommend things you might also dig.
]]>* Urban Dictionary says it's a word, so away we go
The books will wend their way into inventory eventually, after I've read them, because I do care, but I admit that the subgenre doesn't seem compelling on its face -- and that a lot of the writing about it is fibrously dense, even for folks who seek it out. The line between "process-y" and "performatively detailed" is fine enough that the majority of stories in the genre blunder across it on, like, page 4 and can never get back. When even Dave Sr. is handing off a bitty-fonted book to me all "...good luck"? It's hard to expect anyone else to invest the time.
But if you are intrigued by the topic, and just don't want to end up with a pile of boggy prose you'll never read and feel bad about not liking, I can help. Ben Tarnoff's Moneymakers is tops, although I don't have it in stock currently (as always, holler if you want me to chase it down for you); if you've liked certain books about other kinds of forgeries, that'll help me guide you towards counterfeiting/coin-shaving books you might like just as well.
"That's not for me, Bunts." I get it! Books about moneymakers aren't moneymakers; it's a funny old world.
Featured This Week
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I don't make reading resolutions, either; I have gotten better about bailing on books that aren't working for me/switching to skim mode (maybe that's why I finally finished a Goodreads challenge in 2023?), but I've also stopped trying to fight my stubborn completism. That said, life's too short (and shipping's too expensive) to spend much of it on reading you're not psyched for, so in the coming year, if you need a recommendation or buying guidance, seriously: ask me.
Really! It is free, it is what I do, it is genuinely my pleasure, and it is not tied to the expectation of a purchase. You want to buy something I recommend? Great! You end up talked out of a purchase because I already read the book and it sucked? Also fine! Not that I don't like making sales, obviously I do, but the "told" part of "true crime, told and sold" is as important at Exhibit B. as the "sold" part. Or, I guess, you can't have one without the other.
So, I'm here to help -- and that includes buying your secondhand genre materials, if you need to fundraise after a holiday shopping spree (or just clear off some TBR shelf space). More info right here, or email/open a chat window.
A happy, safe New Year to all.
]]>Good news, though!
That last item is true year-round, btw, so even if you just want a subscription box for yourself and want to pick my brain, g'head: exhibitbbooks at gmail, or just hit the chat button. (Want to call/text instead? 732-314-1034.)
]]>Maybe that's why he doesn't sell very well, maybe the cost to ship one of Nash's absolute units is prohibitive. Maybe the other folks who fondly recall paging through the scandalous tales of bygone crooks also yoinked their parents' dusty copy, and don't need to replace it...or they also recall that Nash's prose is, at best, workmanlike.
But he did do the work! He did put celebrity slayings and cons/con artists and American murders going back to the colonial era all in one place. He wrote quiz books. He anthologized missing-persons cases and felonious ladies, and Civil War battles, and crime scenes. There are a few writers like Nash, latter-half-of-the-20th types who fell below the horizon in the internet age (Robert Sam Anson is one), but without him, this shop...isn't.
I've got a notable piece of Nashiana hitting the shelves in the next couple of days (hat tip to another valued Exhibit B. shelf denizen, Sarah Weinman, for alerting me to its existence) -- and it should qualify for the ExMas 12%-off promotion, so keep an eye out. - SDB
]]>Recently, my esteemed colleague Elon Green (yes, "that one") suggested I gather/tag all the books in inventory that appear at the back of Bill James's Popular Crime. It took a couple weeks, but that list is now complete. Well: "complete" in the sense that every single book on that list is in my system, but may not be in stock just at the minute...a lot of them have come in, then gone right back out again.
I was surprised at just how many of them were already clattering around in the inventory database already; I was also surprised at how long it took for a copy of Villaseñor's Jury to come my way, although given how well James speaks of the book, I suppose it stands to reason that people hold on to their copies. The case Jury addresses, the hideously productive serial murders committed by Juan Corona, has fallen below the horizon -- I discussed it on The Docket earlier this year, but I still don't think we quite sewed up why that is, and Jury may well stand alone as far as longform coverage of the case.
...Spoke too soon! There's also a book by Ed Cray about the Corona case. As for the Villaseñor version, it's relatively hard to find (and this particular edition, inappropriate though I find the color palette, is particularly seldom seen), so 1) I've tagged it as a rarity, 2) which means it's on sale through Boxing Day. - SDB
]]>Sarah Weinman: And since we're still very much at the beginning of what's going on here, we know that [alleged killer Rex Heuermann] was arrested and charged with three of the murders. And probably the only reason they didn't charge him with the death of Maureen Brainard-Barnes is they were worried that he was gonna strike again. He was buying a burner phone. And they had him on camera; they arrest him in Manhattan, not at home. So they either figured he was gonna flee or do something.
Sarah D. Bunting: Right.
So hopefully they will or they'll have enough on Amber Costello, Megan Waterman, and Melissa Barthelemy to at least proceed. But that doesn't necessarily help all the other potential victims. Those were very -- I think a lot of about the probable Asian trans woman, in part because she is consistently misgendered. And that leads to another large issue with true-crime reporting and investigating, which is if you either identify as trans or you know, you've gone through the gender affirmative surgeries and you die -- as unfortunately trans people tend to die, at a much higher rate than other groups. And then your body isn't discovered for however long and then when it is discovered Right. They're going by biological characteristics, not who you actually are. Right. So what are you missing out? 'Cause you can't see the totality of a person. 'Cause they're just bones.
So these are questions I think about maybe too much, but it's hard not to because I want to know, who was this person? Like if you had bodies of nine women in a given space -- and a toddler. And then you have someone who's identified as an Asian male. So just take a step back and think about this a little bit? Especially when the description is dressed in women's clothing, it's like, hmm, let's do some deduction here! Maybe this is a trans person. Or someone who is identifying as trans -- you know, so why not make that leap? Or at least be like "probable" if you have to hedge it. But don't call this person a guy because probably they weren't. And also consistently, why would there be one person who's identifying as male among a group of women? Just look at the bigger picture.
Yeah. And look at, you know, proportions of trans people in sex work, and dangers to trans people in sex work, and traps set for trans people in sex work...like, you work in law enforcement, aren't you supposed to know these trends? But they don't always, it's "weird."
Right. And at least, at least in this case, one of the searches that this guy did was about, like, "Asian twink" something -- and I was like, why now? Especially since he's clearly going back and reliving his crimes. So I hope that some of these other victims can be identified. I hope that their family members can -- I never say they can find closure. I don't believe in that.
No; there is none.
But I hope that they at least get some tangible answers that can alleviate some of their suffering, but it can never alleviate all of it.
Yeah. I mean, part of the trauma I think is the not knowing, and I don't think knowing is easier, but it's a different kind of hard that's a little more manageable through therapeutic means, sometimes.
So it's like, if you don't know, you can't grieve. If you do know, you can grieve, it doesn't make it less awful --
You're still grieving. It's just like, you can start the process.
Right. So if it's in suspended animation for years or decades -- I physically cannot imagine what that does to a person. But it does a lot of bad things.
Yeah. And especially, I don't know, realizing what really did happen and having to think about the last terrified moments of your loved one's life -- that's not pleasant, but you've probably been imagining that for decades anyway.
I sold the only copy of [Robert Kolker's book] Lost Girls that I had on hand to a regular who had somehow not read it. Oh wow. And before it went out, like, it was pristine, but I carefully reread the last bits, and it holds up. Like, he did it perfectly so that it was like, this story isn't about having an ending. The story is about these stories.
I'll be really curious. I haven't talked to Bob that much. I texted him when the story --
Yeah, what a weird place for him to be right now.
[laughs] I mean, I think I just sent him, I actually heard about it from Elon [Green]. He sent over the news story and I was like, what? And I just said, I wanna hear from Bob. So he I think texted Bob and just said, "Good morning! What's going on?" And Bob's like, ha. And I said, "This news." He's like, yeah, it's, it's been a little nuts. And he was working on the piece that the Times later published, which was excellent, about just remembering the women.
It was so good. So yeah, I've got to track down Joshua Zeman and Rachel Mills, who did that series --
Oh yeah!
-- and I have their emails somewhere...
I might actually have Josh Zeman's email somewhere.
I always thought he doesn't get enough credit, period. They don't get enough credit.
No. I mean I actually had a meeting with him once. All I wanted to talk about was Cropsey.
Oh my God, it's so good. And Killer Legends, which got the dumbest goddamn name. I'm like, "I'm not watching that" -- and then I realized who it was from and I was like, "How have I not watched this 50 times?" And it was really a cool idea. They should have made it a series. I did interview them about [the LISK] series and how they sort of felt that it got...A&E'd, but --
-- but what are you gonna do? It is A&E.
Yeah. I think they're mostly happy with it, but I don't think anybody has necessarily, that I've read, reached out to them about that.
I'll be interested to see what -- how Bob revisits it; he might not have to in book form, but I feel like it needs more than another afterword?
Mm, yeah.
But maybe it doesn't need a whole other sequel. But at the same time, I don't know if I want anybody else working on this story, other than Bob.
I don't think I do either. But also let's, and I was thinking this off of something that you said earlier about a completely different topic, but -- having read a bunch of monographs recently, basically it's like, there's kind of no way to package or market it that's not gonna be too cutesy. But I feel like, pocket books or monographs with a nice cover on it, like a nice heavy card stock, that could be an answer. Because I've been reading a lot of those that they used to do in the previous century all the time.
Like this is what they should have just made John McPhee do most of the time, when he's like, "So about long distance hauling trains," and they were like, buddy, noooobody cares.
[laughs]
Although his one on the Pine Barrens, they did make him turn it into a book and then it is just, like, this doorstop.
Unlike Janet Malcolm, who just pretty much straight transcribed her articles in books.
Yeah, perfect!
Exactly -- like, they didn't need to be any longer. You don't want The Journalist and the Murderer to be a 600-page doorstop.
I don't understand why Vanity Fair books don't do this; definitely go through it again and update with anything that you know now, but...the only one I can think of that wasn't a complete padded disappointment, and even that did have a little padding, was My Friend Anna --
Ohhh, right!
-- after the Anna Delvey thing, that I thought [Rachel DeLoache Williams] -- I mean, Vanity Fair was basically trying to its money back after this con, which is fine, but it was quite well done, it was structured well, there was some stuff that wasn't in the original article, but so many times Vanity Fair is like, well, we need to get to whatever folio, like, after 300 pages. And it's like, do you? Elon's like, I did this, here's my footnotes, bye. 175 pages. Thank you.
[laughs] Well, I think his new book is gonna be a little bit longer than Last Call was. Right. But, you know, speaking of true crime that really does it right, it's not just the book, but the doc, that to me feels like a model and anybody else who isn't doing that kind of work and care should just be laughed out of the room. Like, I don't wanna see true-crime media that isn't like Last Call! Because it's putting the victims first, it's looking at the larger picture, it's showing how the LGBTQ community was completely shafted and ignored and overlooked. And yet again is, especially with respect to trans people. So we keep repeating the same old shit. And this is showing what happened and why.
I mean, I know it's been cited in reviews, but that scene where the, the director asked the cop, is there anything else that I haven't asked you about? And he's, what's up with the gay thing?
Yeah. "Why does it always have to be about gay stuff?"
You know, just, it just lingers as everybody gets uncomfortable. That's great.
Truly. That they still, like, they were quoted in the book, they know what this project is and they seem completely resistant to reflecting on the way that they speak about --
I don't think they're capable, because -- the whole idea of doing detective work is you have this tunnel vision of working on a case. And then you have to move to another case and another case and another case. So I don't think there's any real time to do that kind of reflection. And then they're done with their shift and they either do another shift or they go home and start all over again. So no wonder, I think, you get a kind of tunnel vision or a sense of, well, we, we pursued the leads.
It's like, no, you didn't actually take the deep time to think through some outside-the-box stuff because cops aren't writers -- cops aren't filmmakers, cops aren't journalists. So, you know, one of the advantages I have as a full-time writer is that I can just spend a lot of time thinking -- but how is a detective gonna do that? You know, if they daydream for two hours, then they're not working. So that doesn't necessarily mean I have extra sympathy. I just think I understand how tunnel vision can go.
No, I'm really more talking about like in a talking-head interview when you are a retired detective who worked on this case, that it's like, you must have like kids or grandkids who are like, "Poppy, you can't call people 'flamers' anymore." So they'll get that far? Like they'll, they'll use inclusive terms?
But they won't really understand what you mean.
Yeah. It's sort of floating on top of their brains a little bit. And when this guy, like, he sincerely was like, "I just don't understand why everybody has to focus on the gay angle." And it's like, because --
Because that was the case! It's like, yes, a number of gay men are being killed and they're last seen at a gay bar. Maybe understanding the culture that they were part of would help you solve the case. But this, you know, it didn't just happen in New York, it happened in Toronto with that serial killer --
Sure. Boystown. Yeah. Yeah.
It's happened anywhere that there have been LGBTQ people murdered, or gay-bashed, or whatever, if you have cops who just don't understand these communities -- but it's not just the LGBTQ community, it's any marginalized community that if they don't understand the forces that create these communities and at least try to do a good-faith effort. If they can't, then other people should be.
Yeah. Or get a community lease liaison or, I don't know, go on Web Sleuths. ...How has it been alternating between anthologies and, like, single-player projects?
I Iove the idea of a non-fiction book that I wrote is a single player project. [laughs] Which means an anthology is, what, a multiplayer? Wow. I have to ponder this. I mean, I love writing and I love researching and I love reporting, and so I'm always gonna be doing that. And as a result it's just, you know, these are rich books that I try to work on and just deal with -- you know, this is a hundred percent mine, as much as any book can be. I have a fact checker and an editor and --
Well, yes. Any book is --
It's always a collaborative effort no matter what.
Sure. But especially in this genre, I'm wondering if like, sort of spreading out the lift a little bit is a relief, or just a different stance for you about think about things?
Yeah, I think the events that I did really highlighted how much I love editing anthologies. Because what a privilege it is to be able to seek out great pieces that I love, and have the means and opportunity to reprint them and pay some emerging writers, a little bit of cash.
And very nicely mentioned a certain newsletter which got its own whole page!
[laughs] I didn't know they were gonna set it as its own page.
I'm on vacation, I'm, like, leafing through; I made a sound. [My husband's] like, what happened? He assumed it was, like, a cat video that was especially good. I was like, oh no no no, much better. Check it out! "Right, uh h- oh, that's you!" It was so exciting. Thank you so much.
I mean, I said what I said! But your newsletter gives me a lot of information and delight. So why not share that with everybody?
Well, thank you.
Which is the point, is that if a piece provoked a real emotional response, and I had the ability to reprint that, and kick in some cash. Especially, you know, younger writers who really maybe have never been anthologized before.
Like, I know with Unspeakable Acts, Elon had never been anthologized before and this was viewed as a really great thing in advance of Last Call's publication. And there were a number of other writers who I haven't mentioned, but --
We still refer to that Doodler piece.
Oh my god.
Like, weekly.
Well, you know, that's actually the story of how Elon and I became friends -- because that piece published and I'd actually looked into that case, but I just couldn't make any headway with it. And I'm always of the belief, if somebody writes a piece on a case that I have either, you know, tried to report out or whatever, I will always give it the time of day. And usually if it ends up being really good, I'm like, hell yeah. This is great.
So I remember tweeting about this. I'm just going, this is a great piece and I, you know, it's something that I was looking into but I couldn't do anything. But this is great. And then Elon emailed me and you know, for certain personal reasons, I'm little wary of him, but then I explained where I was coming from, and he had read my Real Lolita piece -- and then we were like, okay, we're friends now. Now we talk like every day!
He will be in our comment section, and sometimes I think other commenters think that it's just someone else who, like, picked [Elon Green] as their username --
Sometimes I comment too. I just forget. But it's, you know, it's a good robust comment section. That's what you want!
[Reader, don't ask how we got from that to Gary Glitter, but after that...]
I don't wanna get into the whole, "What do we do with the artist? He's terrible." It's like, do whatever you want! The art is out there. I still listen to Michael Jackson. I also think he's horrible person who clearly had horrible trauma in his childhood, which does not excuse an iota of his behavior.
Yeah. But both of those things can be true at once. And we're all adults here...
Apparently. Or maybe not?
But it doesn't have to be that binary.
That reminds me of two things. One, to go back to the [anthology vs. solo-project question], I like, I really like it when someone else can report out pieces that I'm not able to. So I just had read, which had been published earlier in the month, this piece about arguably the longest incarcerated person in American history, Frank Smith. I had looked into that for a really really long time and even got the point of requesting documents from the Connecticut Department of Corrections. And he's 98 years old and in a nursing home; big Tucker Carlson fan; still angry, still believes he was railroaded; he may not be wrong. Somebody actually confessed to the robbery that he was imprisoned for and nearly executed.
And then Annalisa Quinn, who years ago I knew as a books and culture reporter...at NPR. I can't even remember why; somebody mentioned Smith in some context and I Googled and I read it, and I was like, this is exactly the piece I wanted to report! Right. And it was great! I was like, I didn't have to do it. Someone else like did the work! So I love when people do that.
Yeah, me too. And then I'm always like, so can you keep --
Doing more of this? Yeah, yeah. Totally.
Yeah, someone the other day was like, you know, it's really a shame that Sarah Weinman can't just take over Best American Crime Writing*. I'm like, she basically did. She just doesn't have the IP. She's on it. Relax.
I appreciate that very much. But I also don't think I could do it as an end, because every anthology that I edit has to have some kind of underlying argument; to say just "here are the best pieces," that's not as interesting to me. It's like, I'm not interested in writing quote traditional true-crime narratives either. They have to have some other, deeper thematic question that I can do. Like with The Real Lolita, it was what is the relationship between a great work of art and real life trauma and pain. With Scoundrel, it was, who has afforded our belief and trust.
And with this new book, it's, I mean, I'm still kind of working out what the central thematic question is, but I think it's, why is it that as a culture we were so incapable of believing that a woman could be raped by her husband. And what, even though it's been criminalized, why is it that we're still kind of lagging behind in understanding that this is an actual crime that deserves attention and prosecution and care.
Well, that was my next question, which was: what's next? So what's your current timeline for that project?
The manuscript's not due until next fall. So that's fine. I have a lot of work to do. This is a project that, I have had to fly out to Salem, Oregon to cover a contemporary criminal trial, which I've never done before.
Oh, okay. How was that?
Weird.
... What are you reading right now?
At the moment, I'm reading a lot of nonfiction for a prize that I'm judging, which I can't really say much more than that. Okay. And I'm also reading a lot of contemporary fiction for the New York Times column, which I also can't really talk about? [laughs]
Okay! Uh, what have you read in the last few months that you can talk about that --
Well, I've reviewed it, so, I mean, I will talk anybody's ear off about Genealogy of a Murder by Lisa Belkin.
Oh, yeah yeah yeah.
And just the way that she reconstructs this family history of the murderer, the victim, and the psychologist who she heard the about the case from. I mean, she wrote Show Me A Hero, so she knows what she's doing.
... I'm in the middle of the Jack Dunphy memoir right now.
Oh, I still need to read that! It must be so --
It's such a weird -- he was such a good writer, but the structure is so weird. You just have to sort of give yourself up to this fictionalized part where there's like a priest who brings Capote home from a bar, and then it's interspersed with the, the actual writing. But whenever Dunphy is in the oral history, it's like, why weren't you a much more famous writer? I guess he just didn't think of himself that way, but he had such a way --
It's a question of who's ambitious and who isn't, and God knows Capote was insanely ambitious.
(Everything I've got in stock from Sarah Weinman is right here, and you can follow her on Bluesky -- and Exhibit B., too.)
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* The series' original editor, Otto Penzler, recently announced the formation of a true-crime publishing imprint.
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Exhibit B. Books: So how's it going so far? How's promo? How are you feeling about the response to it?
Sarah Weinman: I mean, I feel pretty good. I did a little book tour -- I was in Brooklyn on the 11th, and I moderated a panel with contributors at the Brooklyn Public Library branch over in Brooklyn Heights. It was lovely. It was great.
I was so mad I couldn't go to that.
You know, life happens. And then I was in Western Mass, specifically South Hadley, which has Odyssey Bookshop. And that was also lovely. Various friends, even family showed up. Then the next day I was on a flight from Bradley Airport out of Hartford -- it's like a smallish international airport that's actually manageable. So I flew there to DC for the event at Politics and Prose, and that one, weirdly, was the one I was most nervous about, just because I didn't know Jonquilyn Hill. I've just been a fan of her work. So, for true-crime people, you might know her as the host with the podcast Through The Cracks, when she still worked at WAMU; she is now hosting The Weeds at Vox, which is like a weekly political and policy podcast. So I got to the green room and we were introduced, and within like five seconds, I was like, okay, it's gonna be great.
So that's been my little tour, and then I go back to DC for the National Book Festival next month, and there may be some other things coming happening in the fall, which I'm still finalizing.
So the subtitle, of course, is "True Crime in an Era of Reckoning." Have the conversations that you've had, or interviews that you've done for this one, shifted since Unspeakable Acts and --
Yeah, I would say so.
I mean, that felt like there was definitely a similar focus on accountability in true-crime narrative, but it wasn't as explicit as in this one. I don't know what is cause or what is effect, but do you want to talk a little bit about that shift, in questions you're hearing or convos you're having?
Well, I think the shift reflects the change in focus, which is that with Unspeakable Acts, the first part was sort of more traditional true-crime narratives. The second part was interrogating the genre. The third was, well, what topics do we even consider to be true crime? And how can we kind of explode that out? So Evidence of Things Seen took that third part and made it the whole anthology basically. We gotta interrogate everything, and we have to look at true crime in the most systemic and the broadest possible way – without saying "this isn't true crime." Because I think it's pretty clear that I never want to be the person who says I'm not part of the genre. I've been part of the genre my whole life.
Yeah, don't – don't Berlinger that.
Don't Berlinger that, don't say "transcend the genre," don't do any of that shit. The genre is, but to take it in the most expansive possible way means you can fold in a lot of different topics, and think about them in a much more thoughtful manner. And that also, I think, leads to what I've said a lot on the press circuit, which is that if the genre has been asking, has been looking for answers all this time, now it's time to start asking more questions.
Right.
So if we think about true crime in the context of larger societal stuff like poverty and the unhoused and racism, and systemic communities where people are missing and murdered -- especially those that are particularly marginalized; if we think about how crime works in those contexts, I think we can just ask better questions.
Do you think that there's a general shift that true-crime reporting and reviewing is also undergoing in the last three to five years? What proportion of this is sort of your, like, physically shifting the focus, and what is the whole genre kind of stepping over and looking at things from a different angle?
I mean, it would be amazing to say that I am the one shifting focus.
I just mean, like, between the two books.
I mean, look at what has happened in the last three years. Obviously when Unspeakable Acts came out, we were deep in the early pandemic and nobody…I still get the sense that we didn't really know what we were doing. And everybody was still very freaked out, and publishing Evidence of Things Seen three years later, I think we still don't fully know what we were doing. And we're still really freaked out, and acting out in ways that are particularly destabilizing.
And just looking at what has happened: yes, we had social justice protests in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020. But we've also had significant backlash, where all of these efforts to defund police or do significant reform, some of it has happened on a small scale, but most of the larger scale ideas have kind of, you know, fallen by the wayside. It turned out people really love cops, almost like in an addictive way -- and they can't quite shake that addiction. And don't want to. And it's frustrating because there are really more meaningful ways to address rising crime, which by the way, isn't even rising anywhere!
So it's just, like, getting at some of the more stubborn myths about crime narratives, and why we love cops when so many of them have proven themselves to be like murderers of black people, especially unarmed black people, [and to be] obsessed with the military and keep getting these military contracts to outfit themselves. And frankly, like cosplay -- a dangerous cosplay?
Right. "Cosplay," Jesus.
It absolutely is!
No, it absolutely is. And on top of that, it's like, there's the venality and then there's the ineptitude. And as with so many politicians, I always find myself asking, like, "Which is worse? ...I'm not gonna choose. They're both horrible."
So it's also just impossible to divorce true crime from what's been happening at the Supreme Court, and the rights rollbacks. Especially reproductive rights, where things that would not have been considered to be a crime now are -- and that's also fascinating to me, especially looking at it from a larger historical lens to see what was considered to be a crime, say a century ago, that we would never think of as a crime anymore. And what wasn't considered a crime that people really, really – like, I think there are certain factions that would love reading to be a crime, and that's why you have book bannings. And certainly they want to criminalize pregnancy. And abortion. They want to criminalize birth control.
And this is getting ahead of myself, but working on my next book, which is about a spousal-rape case, it's hard not to see this all in a kind of semi-linear trajectory of rollbacks. That if you take away abortion, move towards taking away birth control, move towards taking away no-fault divorce -- well, what about taking away the idea that a person can rape their spouse? So thinking through all of these ebbs and flows and pushbacks and backlashes and, uh, progress, it's dire. But that's kind of where we have to be thinking.
Which pieces [from Evidence] are getting the most play in the press and the interviews that you're doing from this one?
Yeah, the ones that, I mean, probably the best review that I got was from the Washington Post, which was from Elizabeth Held, who you know very well. I was really glad to see that review. I think she really got the book. But also, I'm like, "Wait a minute, you're a friendly reviewer. I know what this is about." But I think what she really got was what I was trying to articulate in terms of this larger systemic thing. And I think the pieces she particularly highlighted were May Jeong's piece from Vanity Fair on the Atlanta spa shootings -- May was one of the panelists at the Brooklyn event along with Amelia Schonbek, who wrote the restorative justice piece, which was not a direct restorative justice piece. It was what was called surrogate restorative justice, where a woman who had experienced sexual assault and a man who had sexually assaulted, but not each other, could be in the same room and go through the points of, of reparation –
Like parallel mediation, kind of.
Kind of, yeah! It was really like, when I reread it in advance of the panel, I just was reminded how just stark, but also kind of moving the whole thing was.
People also have been bringing up the Amanda Knox piece. And obviously that piece grew out of a tweet thread, so it's written in a way that's a little bit, I think, more pointed as a result, since it was initially intended to be 280 characters at a time. But I think it does work as a standalone essay of who gets to tell a story about a person. Especially someone who has been in the public eye as long as Amanda has, who has gone through wrongful conviction and who the media still -- too many in the media and outside circles still look askance at her, like she had something to do with this, but she did not. And this will unfortunately be part of her life's work.
Now Amanda is also well situated to contend with it. I don't know about handling it, but contending, because she is now a public figure, not just as an exoneree, but also as a podcaster and a media person who is also trying to interrogate what's going on in the genre.
Yeah, I think she's found really effective ways of taking what she can use from the experience and leaving the rest, which under the circumstances is really quite extraordinary.
It's extraordinary. And I don't know how many other people could do it. And in a way it's kind of like using her, you know, pretty white woman privilege for good.
Which she has said on the record. I'd said in my review that that was such a, like, if I thought about it too much, that Möbius would just give me a migraine -- that the essay was like, "Here is this narrative in which I object to my life being…a narrative." But this is how you have to do it. Like, hold up two mirrors at exactly that right angle so that people are like, "Ohhh." Because that's the thing that will remind people every now and then, this isn't made up. This is true.
Which is also why it's been interesting to see another strategy she's been employing on social media where she'll just post almost gallows-humor tweets. And especially if it's about people who've been wrongfully convicted or people who've been in situations of -- I think there was one which really went viral where someone was talking about Italian vacations and she just commented something [laughs]…
I have seen and liked those tweets many times. I just love -- it's very dark.
Humor is also part -- like, we can't totally throw out the humor in the genre.
Also the word "gallows" is right in there. Let's just all be where we are.
Absolutely!
Anything else unexpected in the conversations that you've been having about the book? I feel like nothing would surprise me in terms of people's or interviewers' reactions to certain pieces. May Jeong's in particular, I sort of sat with it and was like, "It will take me six hours to sort of flip this tapestry over and explain to myself why it works. So I'm just gonna have to ellipsis it and go on to the next thing. I have other jobs." But it was extraordinarily effective. And the piece about corporate crime --
Oh, Mike Hobbes's piece, yes.
That is the one that I've really been thinking about a lot in the last few days.
It's hard not to think about it, especially as a certain former president is probably facing indictment number three as we speak. And there may be more. And I think that is really more emblematic, less of the political stuff and more of, white-collar crime never gets punished in the way that if you're black and brown and poor, you are really going to get punished. It's almost like that is overkill, and with white collar folks, it's more under-kill.
That was a piece that actually I decided to include pretty late in the process. I mean, it only took about two months from start to finish to put Evidence together. I think I started April of 2022, and by early July of last year I had all the permissions that I wanted. But that was a conversation with my editor at Ecco -- who's now Sara Birmingham -- most of the pieces I picked and she signed off on. But I think there were just a couple of instances of, wouldn't it be great to have this topic, and what about something about white-collar? And I think all but one of those, the pieces in the anthology are from March 2020 on; [Hobbes's is] the only one that's from right before. But I reread it, 'cause I'd read it at the time and I just was struck at how relevant it was again -- and I think will continue to be so.
And I thought it was a little more, and I don't mean this in a bad way because I am, myself, very bloggy, but it was a little more…not even bloggy, but sort of first-person – like it was a monologue, just transcribed. Like a John Oliver monologue.
If you hear Michael Hobbes on his podcasts – first it was You're Wrong About, then he left, he's now on Maintenance Phase and now If Books Could Kill, which is the one I listen to pretty religiously just to hear him and Peter Shamshiri completely take down these terrible ideas books from the eighties. I mean, every episode has been a banger, but the one I keep coming back to is the Malcolm Gladwell one.
Actually this was my next question -- about process, so thank you for escorting us over there. Can you talk a little bit about the editing process or the sort of collation process, and also how it might have worked differently this time from Unspeakable Acts, if it worked differently?
I think I knew better what pieces I wanted to include. And so from the time Unspeakable Acts was published to preparing Evidence of Things Seen for publication, I had this running list of pieces, and that list pretty much verbatim is in the back of the book. And I would also tally, like, which podcasts and which documentary films and streaming and books and the like. So I wanted to have that back matter almost first, because then I had this long list that I could generate. So from that bigger list, I think I had about 20, because it happened with Unspeakable Acts where I would request permission for pieces; it happened, I think, in one significant case where the writer's agent, uh, said no. And I think in that instance it's because it made up a significant portion of a book that is still not published yet
You know, I get it, it's fine. I was dealing with that same agent for a different piece this time and there was no issue. Everybody feels different about being anthologized at whatever stage they're at in a book process. So, April-ish of 2022 is when I start really diving into that big list and finalizing my choices. I knew that I wanted a piece on mass shootings, that was May Jeong's piece. I think I read it and I knew immediately, I wanna anthologize this. I knew that with Justine van der Leun's piece on women who killed their intimate partners and how they're disproportionately punished.
Oh, that's so good.
What I later learned is that that is going to be part of the book she's working on. She's actually gonna be published by my publisher, but a different editor. Justine also, she wrote a book called We Are Not Such Things a few years ago that was kind of, she inserted herself in the narrative and she was reporting out a story -- and then she did this podcast Believe Her, which is also excellent. So the work she's doing is pretty amazing.
And then there was another piece I knew right away I wanted to reprint: Wesley Lowery's piece on the lynching in the eighties. It just addressed a lot of the racial justice portion. He's a great writer and a really great reporter. And he's just doing work that needs to be done in this space. And also I thought of his comments in a piece I did not reprint, but I think also was clearly hanging over the anthology, which is Elon Green's "The Pernicious Whiteness of True Crime." So, reprinting that would've felt a little obvious; I did reference it, in my editor's note, and he was reporting out, like, why true crime is so damn white -- and I think Wes had a comment in it of, well, it never felt like true crime had a place for black people and that it wasn't really reflecting our experience, and it's like, not wrong.
Yeah. I -- not frequently, but I have gotten enough requests like, "Why don't you, during Black History Month or Women's History Month or whatever, Pride, why don't you highlight appropriate or genre-appropriate work." And I'm like, I think that's gross for me to do, particularly in Black History Month...but then the next question is, "Why don't you highlight writers of color?" And it's like, I try to --
There aren't that many.
It's like, "Oh, here's Bryan Stevenson, there's Marcia Chatelain. Oh, that's sold out. Here's James Baldwin; that's sold out again." I'm trying! I'm trying.
One of my favorites is Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso by Kali Nicole Gross, which is a historical true crime book published by Oxford University Press. It's great because Hannah Mary Tabbs killed people and she was kind of not remorseful, and it's just like a well done, short book. And so I tell people, this hits all of your remarks if that's what you want. And she's a scholar, so she's obviously doing very different things just like Marcia is.
We had an AMA [on The Docket] and it was like, if you could get any true-crime writer to take over for you guys for a week, if you were on vacation, dead or alive, who would it be? And I was like, honorable mention to Marcia because her mind is like extremely nimble, but then the expression is extremely accessible. She must be a fucking brilliant teacher. And she's a brilliant writer and brilliant to talk to --
And also really fun!
Yeah, she's rad! But then our number-one choice was Elon [Green] because he would just do worst-stuff lists the whole week.
[laughs]
He actually sent in a question that was like, what's the worst true-crime book of all time? And I was like --
Where do you even get started?
I know. I mean, I actually didn't have to think about it that long.
Wait, who's your pick?
The worst written was, um, Dominic Gugliatto, Lawrencia Bembenek's boyfriend who helped her escape.
Oh God.
I literally threw it in a trashcan after six pages.
Did he write it? Did somebody ghost it?
I don't remember. ["Per my 2013 review, a Kelly Moran 'helped' write it." - SDB] It's in a landfill somewhere, where it belongs. But the actual worst was For One Sweet Grape, which is the rapist-murderer's memoir published by Playboy Press that --
Oh, I heard about this. I, I can't -- I mean, I have a whole thing about giving --
Naked ladies on the cover! And then his accounts of his crimes where he is taking responsibility, quote unquote, it's just like --
Well, this was a whole thing in the seventies. Right? Like Edna Buchanan's first book [1979's Carr, Five Years of Rape and Murder: from the personal account of Robert Frederick Carr III], which I hope will never be reprinted. And I don't think she ever wanted to, I mean, she's still around, but I don't think she's ever wanted that. But she spent hundreds of hours with this guy in this idea, you know, "the family members of the victims deserve to know the whole truth." And I'm like, do they, though? Is that what they want? Did you ask them?
Yeah. Because a lot of times the "truth" is that these guys are --
Getting off on it!
-- jerking it in the cell, thinking about these women that they've raped and killed and terrorized.
Which I think also brings me to the case that everybody's asking me about this week and last week is Gilgo Beach.
Okay.
And I refuse to say his name; I'm calling him The Orange Guy, because one of the anecdotes is --
The anecdotes are so --
They're wild. And it's lending it this weird, absurdist tone. I don't think I like it, but I also don't know what to make of it.
I think I said this in the comments somewhere on Best Evidence, that this case is the apotheosis of how true crime is both horrifying and sometimes really frumpily silly at the same time. And if you look at his internet searches, which are like, "why can't the cops find me"? You're just like, oh my God.
But then you look at his porn searches and they're horrifying! Like, just full of pedophilia! I mean, obviously there's a lot more than --
And the neighbors --
Who is the one that said, "Oh, there must be bodies buried"? And I'm sure there were conversations about, is it bringing down property values for everybody?
Yeah. And people pointedly, like, going over over the property line with the weed-whacker?
That was making me wonder if that was also something he enjoyed. It's like, "I'm never gonna fix up my house because I'm going to, you know, stick it to my neighbors. Which, considering what a rigid personality we're finding out that he was and how incredibly compartmentalized, it's very --
Yeah. And the wife, I mean, that whole situation...
Ohhh, and I mean, that wasn't even his first wife. So I will be very curious --
Where is his first wife?
All I know is her name and I know that there was --
Alive?
-- an early divorce, as far as I know she's alive. The Times has since done a story about the family, which I still am not sure -- I get why? Because if the second wife's DNA was found on evidence --
Yeah, then she's a person of interest.
She's a person of interest, and even though the cops seem to feel that she had no involvement, probably 'cause she didn't, because she seems, he seems to only have allegedly struck while she was out of town. Which also kind of tracks. Yeah. But I get why she had to be named; I'm still not sure why the daughter, we need to know her name. I know her name because I can look up in databases, but I'm not going out there publishing this information. The New York Post did that within like two hours of his arrest!
Of course the Post did it.
Well, they owned it. It was like, yes, you own a story, but it's so -- the relentless tabloid churn was kind of alarming.
And when you want to, like, be hashtag first, sometimes people are not stopping to think, is this information that has value, versus harm.
Right. Or how about these are actual people who as far as you know, have no direct involvement in the crime and why are you ruining their lives? Which is also why it's interesting to pay attention to Kerri Rawson's Twitter feed. She is of course the daughter of Dennis Rader -- BTK. It seems like there are some personality similarities between BTK and this guy, so she I think has understandable insight into it, but also just that family members of perpetrators deserve our empathy too.
And anybody who says, you didn't know, how could you not know? It's like, no, that's by design! They set up their whole lives so that they have like double and triple lives, and they get off on that. So, of course!
Yeah. And this is part of coercive control, this control of information flow -- so, totally makes sense.
Stay tuned for Part 2, when we talk about Robert Kolker, detectives' tunnel vision, cold-calling sources, and what Weinman's reading now.
]]>Seventy Times Seven: A True Story of Murder and Mercy, out now from Penguin Press, tells the story of the 1985 murder of Ruth Pelke by 15-year-old Paula Cooper. More from the book's publisher's page:
In a city with a history of racial tensions and white flight, the girl, Paula Cooper, is Black, and her victim, Ruth Pelke, is white and a beloved Bible teacher. The press swoops in.
When Paula is sentenced to death, no one decries the impending execution of a tenth grader. But the tide begins to shift when the victim’s grandson Bill forgives the girl, against the wishes of his family, and campaigns to spare her life. This tragedy in a midwestern steel town soon reverberates across the United States and around the world—reaching as far away as the Vatican—as newspapers cover the story on their front pages and millions sign petitions in support of Paula.
Author Alex Mar carefully weaves the case's tapestry from threads that include ignorance of adolescent development, inattentive child-protection systems, draconian sentencing statutes, and debates over the framers' intents...among many others.
I spoke to Mar April 13 about choosing a medium, pros and cons of in-person interviewing, timeline-clarity process, and more. This is the second part of our conversation, which I've edited lightly for clarity and flow; you can find Part 1 right here. - SDB
[spoiler and content warning]
Sarah D. Bunting: I wanted to talk briefly, if you don't mind, about Paula's death, and your experience of bringing us along on this journey. To that point, I will say that the book is very...I was not tempted to second-screen the information and see how it all turned out. I was like, "I'm here with the book --"
Alex Mar: Oh, I'm glad.
"-- and I'm going to trust it." But as a result, her death, especially the manner of it, was really a blow that I felt. I thought it conveyed the surreal anger that you feel when a loved one dies suddenly, but especially by suicide. How was it to write that? Was your process anything different in particular? Was it a struggle, or had the book -- like we were saying before, did the story suggest to you which way to go?
Well, it's interesting. The very first time I stumbled across this case, I never heard about Paula's story before. And I read up on the events of the '80s in some detail. It wasn't until after that that I got to the coverage of her death. So in this shortened period of time, but feeling already highly invested, I went through the story in this totally naive way. And her death really hit me. I was personally really moved by that.
Then realizing that here I was doing this initial research into a crime from the '80s, and this key character had died just a couple years before as I was sitting there reading about it. It brought it all just rushing into the present, you know?
Right, right.
So in terms of the process of writing it, you spend enough time thinking deeply about someone, whether or not you've gotten to meet them in person...I lived with hundreds and hundreds of letters of Paula's, mainly to Bill [Pelke] but to other people as well. And getting to know her sister, Rhonda. And talking about their childhood and their relationship, which was really intense, like two outsiders loving and protecting each other the best they can in this extreme circumstance. So [Paula] just was so vivid for me, even though I knew I was never going to fully understand her. So then I just waited until I'd written most of the book to write that scene, because it felt like the end of that relationship.
I'll also mention the first time her death really hit me, after I knew that it was coming, there was this other emotional moment where I was going through all of her letters, trying to understand the psychology of different moments for her -- when she was on death row, when she was in prison as a regular inmate, so to speak, and her relationships with people. I'm going through these letters and seeing her change over time as she gets a little bit older. And then one day I ran out of letters.
And it really hit me, because it felt like if one day I just stopped writing. If your voice just goes away. In her case, it was because she was no longer alive. And that just hit me in a way I hadn't anticipated. That [the letters] had just run out, and I was so used to living with her voice.
Right. Wow. Well, I thought it was extraordinarily done. It was very affecting.
Oh, thank you.
And prior to that -- I thought one of the things the book does especially well is illuminate, without underlining, the lack of services around this for the formerly incarcerated. But I thought her transition into -- as an adult on the outside for the first time, I thought that what was facing her was well done. Her death was both...it didn't feel inevitable when you got to it in the text, but it was surprising, but also...sensible. That's not the word I want, but I remember thinking, "Oh, no. No no no no, you just got out. Everything's fine. What happened?" But also my writer-process mind, looking at the back of the tapestry, was like, "This must have been a pointy bitch to write this part, because it's hard to go there."
I definitely felt a certain amount of responsibility to the people who cared about her and still care about her, right?
Sure.
So you're writing these sensitive, very loaded moments. I really didn't want it to censor me or take me away from describing the truth as best as I could of the situation. But I pictured her sister reading it, you know?
Right, right.
And I pictured Monica Foster reading it, who developed such a deep connection with Paula. I think that a lot of people who are readers of different kinds of writing about crime and justice, there's a fascination that is very human. But it comes from having a great distance [from] the reality of what took place. It feels very different to be in it with family members, and with people who were there at the time and who lived with the memory of this. It's just a different kind of weight that goes into the process, for sure.
Right. Yeah. I mean, I have a number of grand unifying theories about true crime because I do spend so much time with it in my day-to-day work. Most of them are probably bullshit, but I think one of mine that holds is that people are coming to it from a place of "knowledge is power." And sometimes that takes really outré forms, like people trying to get their minds around cannibalism, for instance. But also trying to get their minds around wrongful convictions, unfair sentencing.
But any aspect of true crime in terms of the criminal justice system, but also the trauma -- I think there's an attempt to try to control this terrifying unknown by taking on information about it. Even though having read every, whatever, Ted Bundy book probably would not have protected you from Ted Bundy. ... But yeah, I think that's one of the instincts from the reader's standpoint, that they're trying to both close the distance by reading these accounts, but also to reinforce it with information, if that makes any sense. I don't know if I'm right.
No, I think that's a really interesting theory, this idea that the information is going to empower you. And that staring something that scares you in the face, that somehow that is going to prepare you for something else about life.
I think there's also -- we would all really love for justice to be uncomplicated, in the way that most prosecutors are selling a certain sentence to us as the solution. In this case, you have: Ruth Pelke's death was a horrible tragedy. Her life mattered. Therefore, in a death-penalty state, we are going for the death sentence, because that's how we measure the seriousness of the event that took place. And the family gets on board.
And not just for the prosecutor, but I think also potentially for some readers, the idea that a victim's family member is standing up and saying, "No, my grandmother would never have wanted this, and this is a miscarriage of justice. It doesn't make any sense. We shouldn't be doing this." To think about how complicated even the conversation around finding justice for Ruth Pelke really is, is unsettling. So you have family members who are angry and traumatized. And then you have family members who are angry and traumatized, but they just don't see the prosecutor's agenda as healing for them or any kind of recompense. There's that kind of reaching across the aisle where Bill was saying, "I have something in common with this other family," right?
Right.
Everyone involved is a human being, and another death isn't going to bring back the victim. That's a really complex and complicating view of how the system should work. It's a real challenge to the system. But to me, one of the really big takeaways from working on this was just this vivid sense that there's a family on either side. And it really shakes up the idea that there's a good-versus-evil narrative that's really clear, and it's very satisfying to get to the end of that where justice is achieved.
I've had people at book events ask me what I think justice would look like, just in general. I don't have a clear answer, but I do think that a story like this proves that if we're at least willing to embrace how gray that zone is, then we'll be in a better place than pretending that, let's say, a very simplistic tough-on-crime agenda is going to keep us all safe. So that's my little rant, but hopefully a gentle rant.
Hey, I'm a big fan of rants. But I think that when you were talking about this on CrimeReads with Sarah Weinman, that you guys were just talking about the nature of narrative in criminal justice -- and then the nature of all human narrative and every single story that we tell each other, whether it's advertising or pop music or whatever, is to try to bring order out of chaos. Because black and white is a calming, authoritative, sensible, non-chaotic state. And gray is, like, it's gray. It's like, "Well, but is it a brown-gray or is it a blue-gray? I don't know what to do with this." The human mind wants to simplify and use pattern rec, and -- it's almost never available in the criminal-justice system. So the criminal-justice system tries to square the circle. And that's my rant. One of them, anyway.
No, that sounds about right to me.
Last question. Are you reading anything in the broader true-crime/criminal-justice genre right now that you would like to recommend -- or warn people away from if it's not great?
Ooh, I'm getting so little reading done right now because I am barely sleeping and seem to always be late to get into the rental car. But I've been thinking a lot about a series from last year, Under the Banner of Heaven, inspired by Jon Krakauer's book of the same name, about a terrible murder within a fundamentalist Mormon community in 1980s Utah. It's a scripted series whose lead detective character is actually a composite, but a great deal of detail draws directly from Krakauer's terrific, in-depth reporting. And the series poses some very challenging questions about the fraught role faith can play in many people's lives, and how it shapes our relationship to violence. It's a series in line with some of the questions I wrestle with in my own work.
Read more from Alex Mar here.
]]>
In a city with a history of racial tensions and white flight, the girl, Paula Cooper, is Black, and her victim, Ruth Pelke, is white and a beloved Bible teacher. The press swoops in.
When Paula is sentenced to death, no one decries the impending execution of a tenth grader. But the tide begins to shift when the victim’s grandson Bill forgives the girl, against the wishes of his family, and campaigns to spare her life. This tragedy in a midwestern steel town soon reverberates across the United States and around the world—reaching as far away as the Vatican—as newspapers cover the story on their front pages and millions sign petitions in support of Paula.
Author Alex Mar carefully weaves the case's tapestry from threads that include ignorance of adolescent development, inattentive child-protection systems, draconian sentencing statutes, and debates over the framers' intents...among many others.
I spoke to Mar April 13 about choosing a medium, pros and cons of in-person interviewing, timeline-clarity process, and more. This is the first part of our conversation, which I've edited as lightly as possible for clarity and pace. - SDB
Sarah D. Bunting: First of all, congratulations. The book is fantastic.
Alex Mar: Thank you. Thanks so much.
Second of all, how's it been? How's promotion been?
It's been good. It's been exciting actually, because I worked on the book for what ended up being about five years, which is the longest I've spent on any single project. It's a story that has that kind of a scope. And I just continued to feel like, "No, we're not done. No, it's important for me to go and meet this next person. I have to see them face-to-face." So it took the time it needed to take.
Now to be able to actually talk to people about it -- you are catching me at an interesting moment because this week of my book tour is actually taking place in Indiana. So I'm back visiting a lot of places that are connected to the story. A lot of people connected to the story in the book actually came out for some of the events this week. That was pretty remarkable.
And now I'm in Bloomington. So let's see what happens here. But yeah -- there's almost been an emotional side to some of the events this week. But overall, a whole range of people have been showing up for events, including, I had a pastor of a local congregation show up when I was in Harrisburg in Pennsylvania. He talked about how he shared the story of the book with his congregation that Sunday because he just found it so extraordinary, the forgiveness piece of the story. There's just been surprises at each event, in terms of how the book has gripped people.
That's really fantastic. Was there a point where you thought you might not be able to do a traditional book tour behind this book? Because I had a book come out in September of 2020. And it was just like, we didn't know where we were with that stuff.
Yeah. Oh my goodness.
Galleys [went] off March 12th of that year or something. …Was there a point in your process where you were like, "How am I going to bring this to the world?" Or did you just trust that this --
Yeah, I was concerned that the book would come out when we were still deep inside of the pandemic, just because psychologically I really needed the chance to share it face-to-face. I think we all feel that way as writers. You want to emerge from your cave and be able to interact with people and be surprised in ways. Virtual events were great to have during the pandemic, but I think everyone knew that it wasn't satisfying that same need.
I told myself that the fact that the book was taking longer than I'd planned was actually all because I was strategizing to be able to have a book tour when we eventually published this, which was wasn't the case.
Penguin Press didn't hesitate about a tour. But I think there are a lot of bookstores that are still concerned. They want to make sure that they can put on a successful event. …But there's definitely this energy of people wanting to be at events again in person, I think.
Right. Well, it seems like, based on another interview I read with you at Shondaland -- which I want to get back to on another axis in a second. But it seems like you have definitely a much more in-person requirement for research and gathering work and talking to people than I do. I feel like I process in interviews a little bit differently from how you do it. So that was interesting to read, that you really felt like that was an important part of the build. And you were able to get that done, for the most part, the important part before lockdown started.
Yeah, I was really lucky in that regard. The vast majority of the research just happened to have been finished within months of lockdown starting in early 2020. It's interesting that you bring up in-person versus remote interviews. Because someone like Terry Gross, for instance, with her live interviews or -- well, close to live. But Terry Gross with her interviews, I've heard her comment that she prefers, even if someone comes to the studio in Philadelphia, to have them, I guess, down the hall in another booth. And not have them within eyesight. Because she discovered over the years that she was communicating a lot through just the physical presence of two people looking at each other. And that it wasn't putting the heart of the conversation in their voices as much. So that's a different kind of animal.
But for me, I've done a lot of reporting where I'm describing the present day. And I want to be immersed in the environment and see where someone lives and how they carry themselves, and the clothes they wear. And really any other details like that that are about a sense of place. This was a combination, because a lot of the action happens in the '80s and the '90s. But then it eventually jumps towards the present day. But the material is so sensitive. It's a pretty intense story and there's a violent crime at the center of it. And I felt that there's a kind of sensitivity and empathy you can convey in person much better than over the phone, right?
Yeah.
And with some of the people involved, I wanted to demonstrate to them that I'm not a newspaper reporter on a tight deadline like the people you've dealt with over the years asking you about this sensational crime. I'm someone who's going to take her time. It's a book. This is going to be a relationship. And if you want to get a read on me and, physically in the room, decide how much you want to trust me, then I wanted to give them that opportunity too on their side.
You talk about this in the book too, that it's like, it's pretty easy to not return a call or not return an email, whereas if someone is in front of you, then it's a different decision tree. So that was interesting from a build standpoint, to me.
Yeah. Well, there are sometimes surprises that emerge from those in-person conversations that change the shape of the book. It's not necessarily that you go in knowing that you need information about a really fraught event that you want to include. It's just that you might be struck by someone in a different way in person. So for instance, I initially hadn't planned to do any more than just maybe have a brief call with the prosecutor in this case, who went for the death sentence initially for all four girls, 14, 15, 16 years old. And did get the death sentence for Paula Cooper.
I thought, "I know what his agenda was at the time. That's all I need. I don't really see a space for him in this story beyond that." But I did end up meeting him in person. And I'm really glad I did, because I think he then saw the seriousness and the breadth of the book and what it was trying to cover. And he started to open up in a different way.
And I was able to make him into more of a fully realized human being. Even though I personally disagree with a lot of his agenda back in the '80s, I was able to turn him into someone whose decisions I hope the reader can at least just relate to a little bit more, or you just have a better understanding of the choices he made. I mean, he's someone whose hero was Bobby Kennedy, and yet he was this passionately pro-death-penalty, tough-on-crime guy.
So those kinds of surprises for me make it really worthwhile, because that's the thrill is to not really know where this stuff is going to take you. And how your allegiances are going to maybe open up or shift a little bit along the way.
Right. Well, yeah, [the aforementioned prosecutor] Jack Crawford is...I mean, that's another whole book, I feel like.
I agree.
But I will get back to him; I wanted to talk a little bit about the medium that this ended up being. You did talk to Shondaland also about how you and this story came to take hands, so to say. But I wanted to ask about when you knew this was a book, versus a documentary film or a series or even a podcast. Because you do work in other media. So I was wondering if it was always a book, or if other media suggested themselves to you and then the story told you how it wanted to be told.
Well, I made a documentary feature, American Mystic, back in 2010. For me, that really cracked open my relationship to non-fiction. Since then, I've really been focused on writing. So it's long-form journalism and books. I had my writing optioned and developed for different formats over the years. My identity as a writer is sort of the core of it for me. So I was actually on tour for my first book, Witches of America, when I started doing some research, wondering what the next big project might be. So I was very much looking for something to dive into deeply.
I think, for me at the time -- my first time taking on the story of a violent crime, a heinous crime, something that had that kind of drama at its center, I wanted to make sure that I could have room to pick that apart and pick its impact apart on a big palette, just a much larger scale. So that I could have the time and the space to get away from just the logistics of what had happened, which are enough for an article easily, right?
Right.
I mean, there's a lot here to unpack.
That sort of fed into my next question, about the many story "streets" that branch off your main story. And how you managed to stay on the road of this one, even though, I mean, the number of other figures in this book who could have books of their own...how did you discipline yourself to not have this be "Volume The First"? Or did the story tell you how to do it? Because sometimes that's how it is, that the story is like, "No no no no no, this is what I want to be. Come back over here." Other times you really have to grip the steering wheel with both hands.
I lost control of this metaphor, but I was wondering about that, because --
I like it, though. I like it.
I kept dog-earing pages, and being like -- because even cases you would mention tangentially that weren't solved, or the whole lottery/sexual harassment donnybrook with Crawford. It's just like, oh my gosh, how did you avoid just wandering into the library stacks to think about that? Maybe this is just a discipline issue that I have. But I was wondering how that was for you, when you were in the thick of writing it.
Yeah, that is a great question. I do firmly believe that a story tells you what to do after a certain point, you know?
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
That the story uses you to become what it needs to become. So there's that. But more specifically, I knew in my gut that this relationship between Paula Cooper and Bill Pelke...the man is the grandson of her victim and chooses to forgive her. So that to me is absolutely what grabbed me from the very beginning. I knew that that relationship was going to be kind of the spine of the book.
But then beyond that, the only other rule I had was, okay, let's try to keep everyone who I spend meaningful time with only about one degree of separation from Paula or Bill. So there's this series of, almost a Venn diagram of overlapping circles representing different relationships with them at the center. I started to see that after a certain point.
But I know what you're talking about. Because I really wanted to try to make something that would be a unique experience instead of simply giving you the core facts of this dramatic and emotional event, I really forced myself, in the first probably two years in particular, to stay open. Anytime I met with someone, if an interesting contact emerged and I wasn't sure if I really needed to talk to them, I would say, "No, no, no. Keep the appointment. Go." And I would make sure to ask everyone about their larger story. This is a habit I've developed over the years. Really, their childhood all the way up to what we're really talking about that's the most relevant to Paula Cooper's case. Because I was finding these patterns. And I was finding unexpected connections between people in Indiana who had different roles in this story.
I wouldn't have found those connections if I hadn't really tried to figure out, who is this person, where are they coming from? And then that way I could understand who's integral to this larger picture. And a model, for me, was always [Norman] Mailer's The Executioner's Song, which I think he had a huge amount of --
Oh, sure.
There's a large cast of characters in that book, which is about Gary Gilmore's crime and execution back in the '70s. So for me, that was a great example.
I revere that book. I wouldn't necessarily need Mailer to use my bathroom, but that book is just stunning.
Look, let me tell you, Sarah, my feeling is especially the ones who misbehave or act out of turn, they owe us all their fancy tricks as artists.
But I think the work really speaks for itself. And there's a number of people of questionable character whose work I think ends up inspiring work by other people who you would be willing to have lunch with. So that's my feeling about that.
But I think once you embrace the approach of a chorus of characters with these two lead singers in the middle, then there's freedom, but there is structure. And otherwise, it was my editor just kind of telling me that "I'm sorry, but you can't have half a chapter about the history of the Franciscan order." And then stuff like that would go.
Right. Well, look, we've all done that research. And then been like, "Look, I went all the way to X and I spent Y amount of time wearing archival gloves. And it's staying in. These are my children."
But I bet you've had a lot of good times in the archives. So there's that part of it too. Part of it is the thrill of just diving all the way in, even if not all of it ends up on the page.
Yep, absolutely.
I wanted to ask a more specific process-y question, about your choice in terms of verb tenses. Because I felt like your authorial decision to have the context of the case be as central as the case details itself was clear -- and correct, for what it's worth. But I was wondering about your choice to be in continuing present tense in whatever timeline you were in. Was that just something that suggested itself as the only option, or was there a conversation about how that reflected the strangeness of time, both for you writing it and for Paula behind bars and so on and so forth? ...That was like ten questions in one. Sorry.
I think that in this case, the present tense helped to keep things more vivid. And I wanted the reader, and also for myself as I was writing it, to really be thinking about the stakes of the decisions that each of these characters were making in an active way. It's easy to look back at 1985 and feel that it's so long ago. And frame it as, "Oh, the '80s," and whatever presumptions you have about what the '80s were like. But I wanted some kind of immediacy. So I did try a universal past tense at one point in certain sections. For me, it felt a little bit too safe in this particular case.
I found that it made the prose better able to mirror some ambiguities, and just the fundamental unknowability of people at times that you mentioned explicitly in the text. I thought the present tense put that idea forward more effectively than universal past would have.
Oh, I'm glad.
But it must have been a challenge also to be writing from within whichever '80s or early '90s timeline you were in -- and not betray what you already know is going to happen. Was that difficult in terms of, for instance, writing about a sentencing hearing and knowing that we have all these advances, legislatively and so on, in terms of what we think of adolescent development? Were you trying to write from a place of "the characters in this timeline don't know that yet"? I mean, not "characters."
No, that's a great point. The choice of present tense also was informed by that. So we are in this moment in the mid- to late '80s, early '90s, whatever section of the book you're in. And we're working with what we've got. Because the challenge to me, I really wanted people to be able to live inside of each character as you encountered them. And so many of these characters are fighting a piece of the battle, right?
And they're working with what they've got. It was intended as an immersive narrative, where the emphasis is on that human everyday level of decision-making that then ends up adding up over time and having an impact. So for me to then step out of the narrative and lecture people about, "Well, in the larger context of things, what they're not aware of is that the juvenile justice system is about to go through a change." That constantly would be pulling people out of the narrative.
So when we find out, let's say, basic facts about the death penalty for juveniles or the history of the death penalty, it's up until that moment in time. So when Monica Foster, who's one of Paula Cooper's appellate attorneys, when we meet her, the stats about the death penalty are presented as stuff she's grappling with as she tries to help public defenders in Indianapolis around the issue. It's not an outside voice so much. I tried to avoid that unless it was really necessary.
But that was challenging, because I didn't want readers to be misinformed. I wanted people to walk away from the book with a deeper and maybe more emotional curiosity around some of these issues around juvenile justice and capital punishment. But I wanted it to feel a bit more like a novel than anything else.
Right. Well, and after the fourth time you've used "unbeknownst to" in the draft, it's like, "This is not going to work."
I'd really love someone to use that in the voice-over about my life as I walk into a room. "Unbeknownst to Alex Mar..."
It's the stereotypical planning wall with the red string on it, and it's like, "Unbeknownst to Alex Mar." ...I feel like that we can make that happen for you somehow.
Oh, wonderful.
In terms of that, keeping it in the present, you are also functionally emotionally embedded with these people, and the trauma and the journey that each of them has undertaken, sort of coming to the same point. I, at least, got a good sense about Paula, about Jack Crawford, about Bill Pelke, that these are complete dimensional people who aren't their best selves every second.
But how was that for you as the author to try to...I don't know how to put this. Be in step with them in the timeline, but also not, for instance, throw [Paula's mother] Gloria under the bus? Which I would not have been able to resist doing. I admire your restraint, all of my notes about her are like, "This fucking lady. What the hell?"
I really am curious to examine your reading copy.
If you can read my handwriting, there is a parade waiting for you.
Oh my goodness. ...I guess I tend not to want to write about people for whom I can't muster up some degree of empathy, because then it collapses the situation, right? It flattens the story out for me. So for someone like Paula's mother, Gloria, I feel I just took the tack of I'm never going to understand where she was coming from. And probably there were significant mental-health issues at play. Then I really tried to remove any kind of judgment if I could.
In theory, someone could read this book and come out the other side pro-death penalty. I think it's hard to do. But I didn't see the book on that level either, as championing one side or the other. I do think that if you put certain events and certain facts in front of people, you can predict the vast majority of people's responses. So that ends up being a little more powerful.
Something that really has always been a huge influence on me is visual art. So I'm constantly looking at work at galleries and museums. I've always loved the freedom of that. I'm not someone who thinks that it makes sense to tell the viewer what their experience of the piece of work is supposed to be. And I think it applies with literature as well, right?
Mm-hmm.
So I didn't want to come on too strong. There was a conversation with my editor as well where she felt the same way. So there might be a moment here or there, maybe with the prosecutor, where my language had a little bit of an angle to it. And she said, "Are you sure? Because this is not the tone of the book so far." And I agreed with that.
But the other piece of that is I'm really drawn throughout my work to an exploration of belief systems, like what are the beliefs that we lean on, especially in extreme circumstances? So you have someone like Jack Crawford who was Catholic, going to Mass, but he didn't see that as a conflict with his tough-on-crime, death-penalty agenda. He found a way to work around that. And then you have Bill Pelke, who was a devout Baptist. His devout Baptist family was very much in favor of retribution. And he had to say, "My version of my faith is taking me in a totally different direction." So how do you get inside of something as intimate, and potentially really embarrassing, to write about as someone's personal faith?
So I really tried to have kid gloves and just try to put on the page how that person described their feelings around that and their perspective. So, a really sensitive scene was the scene of Bill's revelation up in the crane cab at the steel mill one night, the night that he decides that he's actually going to forgive Paula Cooper. How do you put that on the page and stay in his perspective, give people a sense of his emotions, his confusion, and not have it be colored by any of my feelings about Christianity or what someone is supposed to do or feel in that situation?
So that's also part of why there's really almost no first person in this book. That was a very, very thought-out decision, even though I've used the first person plenty of times in the past.
Right. There are moments, I think, where you have Jack Crawford sort of musing about someone else, like, "What kind of person is such a camera hog in this situation?" Then there's a text break before you move on to the next section. And I was like, "Hmm."
That's probably the closest I got to commentary.
"Yep, message received. That's a nice low pH on that guy."
Yeah, he had an issue with Bill Pelke for speaking out against Paula's death sentence to the press. And I just thought it was too perfect of a parallel. So he had an issue with that, and yet I include the saying that was popular around Lake County legal circles at the time, which was, "The most dangerous place to be is between Jack Crawford and a camera." I will say, I was so concerned about getting the tone and the feel of the life in the courts in Lake County at the time right. Because Lake County, and Gary, Indiana in particular, it's just like a treasure trove in terms of a really unique, but very American location and context for a story, that I just can't believe there's not more written about this county.
I mean, it just had a tremendous reputation of being very politically corrupt, had an enormous crime issue. Gary has this fascinating history and had at the time, and still now, a very strong Black community. And all of this together was something...I really wanted to get that snapshot right. So I talked to so many attorneys, former prosecutors, former public defenders, current-day people, in addition to Jack. Because I felt that if I got the climate in the prosecutor's office wrong, it was going to undermine the legitimacy of the book, because that's the foundation of how this crime was framed.
Right. Well, the context is the text, basically.
...I've never heard that line. I like it.
The second part of this conversation will go live in a few days. In the meantime, you can pick up a copy of Seventy Times Seven right here.
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]]>This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and flow.
Sarah D. Bunting: It definitely is one of those times that, and you and I have talked about this before, that sometimes in non-fiction books, it's like, look, I went out to this archive in the middle of nowhere with no air conditioning. And I tracked down this fact and it doesn't really matter, but goddammit, it's going in. This is one of those times when it's totally earned, like, we all had to live with this...
Sarah Weinman: But that also brings up a point that, you know, the difference between Scoundrel and The Real Lolita is that The Real Lolita felt like I was really just mining every little scrap of information to put in the book, because there just wasn't a lot. You know, it wasn't like Sally Horner documented every part of her life. She did the opposite, in fact, so I had to do much more inserting of myself in the narrative and much more speculation that frankly -- I had to work against my own inclination. I was really uncomfortable with that level of speculation, though I think it succeeded.
But I also knew for Scoundrel that I was practically drowning in primary source material. So I didn't need to be in the narrative except for the introduction, where I was just basically stating, here's why I'm telling this story in this way, that I'm taking the wind out of the sails. You're not gonna be in suspense that Edgar didn't do it, because that's not important. What's important to me is the why, and the "how the hell did this happen" and how were people duped and things like that. Those were the much more pressing questions, but I had to really pare down what was included, and it wasn't like I could quote from every letter; I had to still create a sense of pace and narrative.
And I know that some readers are like, oh, this middle section drags. It's like, yeah, but how else am I going to represent the fact that you have a guy sitting on death row? And the only way of really communicating with people is by letter. And it's all very internal and yes, there are visits, but I just have much more information about what letters they're exchanging and what they're saying to one another.
So how do I convey that? But also not get the narrative too bogged down. So that was a real central structural question that I had. And then obviously the opening sections are, you know, murder, trial, conviction, trying to stave off execution. Those are natural points of sort of thriller-y-type pacing. And then after he gets out, then there's more action and there's more sort of movement, and Edgar's going to California. And then when he is on the run after he nearly kills Lisa Ozbun, so the momentum sort of picks up again, but there was really very little I could do aside from what I did do.
Structurally, well, yeah. That part -- the pacing that felt normal and fine to be. Because I was like, this shit just takes time. Also in true crime, death penalty fights like this --
They take years or decades. Yeah. Yeah.
It's not like it was a hundred years ago where it was like, he's convicted, he's sentenced, he's dead. These things take a lot of time. So that reflected a reality to me and didn't feel slow, but you know, I did sometimes have to put the book down, because it's like, girl.
Yeah. I know.
Sophie.
Yeah.
What about spending time with [William F.] Buckley? Because he seems to me like both the catalyst of this story, and also in the end kind of marginal, possibly partly by his own doing, but also because you can kind of assume how he felt at various points -- it's text. So how is it spending time with him? I mean, this isn't necessarily someone you and I would choose to marinate in, except for this aspect of the story.
It was funny too, because with The Real Lolita I had to spend time with Vladimir Nabokov, who was also really a tough nut to crack -- and trying to figure out how to humanize him was really tough, because he would create this sort of artificial author persona, and his whole thing about how interviewers had to submit questions in writing in advance. And he was really desperately trying to control the narrative. And I would just be like, how do I get past all this stuff? And pierce the veil.
With Buckley, the challenge was that most of what has been written about him, and I think it's understandable, is about Buckley and his ideas or what ideas he actually had, which upon examination are kind of -- he didn't really have a lot. I mean, as a columnist, he was -- I don't know, a lot of people are like, oh, how would Buckley fare in the post-Trump world, and I'll be like, yeah, he just would shit-post all day long.
Yeah. Probably. Or he'd be working for the Lincoln Project, who knows?
God. [laughs] Yeah.
Although that Pat Buckley bit where she's like, get those criminals out of my bedroom --
I am so glad I was able to footnote that because I just, I wish I could have put it in text, but the source who told me, he couldn't nail it down, he just was like, this is what I remember hearing. And there was no one else to ask. So that's why I was like, I'll footnote it in this way, because I have to include this. It feels so consistent with what I know of Pat's personality and how she would've reacted to things. And of course she would've hated Edgar.
But to go back to Bill, it was really important to try to figure out what made him tick and why he would do this. And the thing I landed on was that is this idea of, he would never let ideology get in the way of a good friendship. And because friendship was so important to him and he would do it in this way, that almost was like heightened romance, just in the way he would write to people. And even though his letters tended to be very short because, you know, he'd be dictating stuff from his car, he'd be dictating stuff from the office.
But I found with Buckley that, you know, he was good company, but I never wanted to forget that he believed and wrote some really reprehensible shit. Some of which I discuss, like the editorial about why the south must prevail, which is horrible. And some of which I decided not to, like the horrible piece he wrote for the New York Times Magazine, on gay men and AIDS and wanting to tattoo their buttocks. I really went back and forth. But I just felt like for the purposes of the narrative, it's really about Buckley and Sophie and Edgar. And I need to just be very laser-focused on that, and concentrate on that trifecta and how it broke apart and how, you know, in the late nineties there was one last little bit of correspondence.
So I left it out, but I always bring it up in interviews because, you know, Bill basically wrote that op-ed to gain relevancy because he felt like he was slipping. And was losing cultural potency, even in the Reagan era. So he wrote this to basically just get people mad, in the way that people like Ben Shapiro get people mad. It just felt like that.
And obviously, I don't know one way or the other, which is also why I didn't discuss it, what homoerotic levels there were to Buckley's life or personality -- you know, I've heard a lot of unsourced stuff, but my attitude was, if my fact-checker can't prove anything, I'm not gonna include it.
Right. Is there anything else like that, that you wish you were able to chase down or include?
I wish Paige had talked to me more. I mean, I had that one conversation with her when she was a little more forthcoming, but then she just basically went completely dark on me, and I get why -- she went through a lot of trauma. And just, you know, being so young and feeling like, here is this older man of some renown who I believe is innocent of this girl's murder, and I'll start a new life with him and it quickly goes to hell and, you know, she's implicated. She was arrested as an accessory, and then that got dropped; I actually tried to find the woman who wrote the letter vouching for her, but she never responded.
So I remember talking to Paige, but I didn't record it because at the time I was like, I'll keep it off the record. And I just wanna kind of, you know, sound her out. But I mean, I broke the news to her that Edgar died. She said she would not have known, because she had told the prison to stop forwarding any messages or letters from him, because he was being abusive and trying to stalk her and all this stuff.
I try to reach out; she popped up on Signal, and I tried to message her there and Facebook and email and various telephone numbers. And then, you know, at a certain point you just have to let it go.
Also, I wish that Vicky's family had cooperated a little bit more. I had one off-the-record conversation with Myrna where she sort of intimated to me that, you know, someone was writing a book with her. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. And then I never heard anything again, but I was in touch periodically with Vicky's niece, Liz -- and she told me some stuff about, like, what had happened to the family thereafter, but even she had been in the dark about a lot of stuff, and this, it is a classic thing. And it happened with Sally Horner's family, just -- a big trauma happened, and you never discuss it again. And I think in light of the fact that Vicky's parents had such a volatile marriage -- and that divorce decree, that divorce complaint was awful. The things that Mary accused Anthony of, it's impossible to say for sure what was true and what was not, but it's such a very specific accusation about the dog --
Yeah, like who is making that up --
In 1959? Like, you just know something awful happened. And then she's like, but I didn't speak to him for several weeks. I'm like, "several weeks" [laughs] God.
"Well, that'll teach him." Yeah. Is there anything that you thought people would notice or comment on from the book that they haven't, and you wish they would ask about?
That's a good question. I'm surprised that the stuff at the end with, um, Edgar's daughter and granddaughter didn't get as much attention. Because I felt like that was such an important part of the story. And part of it is just the way I was able to track them down. You know, I finally get access to Buckley's archives in the summer of '19. I write to Christopher explaining that the book is under contract, it's with a major publisher. I've already visited independent archives. So while I'm still gonna write this book and it will get published, it would benefit everyone greatly for me to have as much access as possible.
And then I sent -- and it was actually an accident, but I think it tipped the balance; I sent him a letter that Edgar wrote Buckley in the late nineties, basically apologizing without maybe fully apologizing, but it's as close as Edgar was ever gonna get, which I knew was not in Buckley's archives.
So six hours after I sent that email, Christopher writes back and says, okay, permission granted. I was like, nice. And I forward it on to Yale and it's like, let me in [laughs]. And within minutes of getting all set up, I look at a couple of initial pages, and I see this unsigned affidavit that has the next married name of Edgar's first wife, Patricia. So from that, and a quick search of Ancestry, I'm able to figure out where the daughter is, what her actual name is now, where she's living, find her email, email her within an hour. She writes back and says, sure, I'll talk to you.
And I love talking to Patty, she's just no-bullshit. Very matter-of-fact, not sentimental, cares about family, loves her daughter, loves her grandkids. I think the main stipulation with both me and my checker was like, please don't name the grandchildren. I'm like, they're not part of the story. It's fine. They're only part of the story in the sense of they exist and that's it.
Well, and here we are back at Capote again -- I mean, it's not funny and I guess it's not really that peculiar either, but that sort of experience that they had as a family, it reminded me of this story in Popular Crime that Bill James tells about Dick Hickock's biological son reading In Cold Blood in school, and like dropping the book and running out into the hallway to vomit because he just put it together, that that --
Was his father.
Was his biological father. So, yeah. I absolutely understand why this happens and how years and years go by and you're like, well, man, it's too late to say anything. So I guess I'm just gonna have to wait for them to submit DNA somewhere, and then better to apologize.
I totally get why this happens, but it does seem so like, so frequent that it's like, these, these conversations are not forthrightly had, and especially in a country where so many people are incarcerated. It's like, you know, maybe there needs to be a little less shame around it for family members who are just family members. When millions and millions of people are behind bars for something, many of them, for things they didn't even do, it's like, why are we stigmatizing the family? They didn't ask for this. And they have to suffer for the rest of their lives in a different way from the, the, you know, from those who are related to the people who are harmed and murdered.
...I mean, just the people who walked into this narrative, you know, Capote, Mailer, Mary Higgins Clark. That was a big one. I mean the Edgar Smith case really was the formative case that made her a crime writer, which is just bonkers to me. But, you know, it's mentioned in Where Are The Children? She wrote an essay in 1978 about the case for a Mystery Writers of America anthology and talks about, like, what it was like to be a New Jersey housewife. And then she tells me, like, yeah, I went to the trial and that was essentially our entertainment.
And who's the other name that floated in that, like, he's a true-crime guy, but it's not -- was it Selwyn Raab?
Yeah. Justice In The Back Room, it was called.
Right. But this isn't his genre. He's like the godfather, so to say, of Five Families writing, but then --
But this was what he did before.
Right. I think he's still alive, too.
Yeah. I believe so. I didn't think to track him down, but like at a certain point, it's just like, I have so much material.
He's somewhere doing a talking-head for the History Channel about the Bonannos. He's like, I brought my own makeup. It's fine.
It's like Shelby Foote in The Civil War.
[laughs] Bless his heart. ...I'm gonna wrap this up and let you go, but first I want to know if you're reading anything in the genre right now that you recommend.
Jimmy The King by Gus Garcia Roberts, which came out earlier this month and weirdly has had very little attention to it. And it's about the level of criminality in Suffolk County and Long Island -- and a lot of it centers around the town of Smithtown, and it turns out I have a friend who lives in Smithtown, so I was telling her about it, like, you must read this book.
Yeah, that's been on my list. First I have to get through -- I did not realize that Lee Israel had done a book about Dorothy Kilgallen.
That was how I first heard of Lee Israel, was that book. I am also a Kilgallen obsessive and definitely fell down the rabbit hole of, like, how she died and what the hell happened there -- but there's a project that I've been trying to get off the ground for a long time related to her first book, which is called Girl Around The World when she, um, traveled the world, first on the Hindenburg -- and it was this competition with these two male writers. And I just feel like, this is such a good story. And she's just come off, you know, covering the Lindbergh trial and she's young and she's trying to impress people and I'm just like, this would be fun. But finding a copy of Girl Around The World has been a real headache. It's almost impossible. But just like getting a copy of Capote's ABC documentary, we all have our white whales. And those seem to be the two at the moment.
Even Murder One, it's like, it's just us book dealers swapping the same fourteen copies.
I've got mine.
And then the other book that just came out, which I, I still am thinking about is Trailed by Kathryn Miles, about the two queer women who were murdered in the Shenandoah Valley as they were hiking.
And you know, I gotta bring up Jarett Kobek's Motor Spirit. Which, if you talk to Elon Green, he's also incredibly obsessed with that book. It is a literary book, a literary non-fiction account from soup to nuts of the Zodiac case that actually doesn't suck. And in fact is kind of brilliant, and Kobek, his background is like art stuff and novels and tech. He's kind of a polymath, but he, during the pandemic, just sort of got interested in debunking current suspects of the Zodiac, because basically all of them are terrible.
As Eve and I are always saying, it is and remains not either of our dads.
So Kobek wrote this whole book to just be like, here is a history of California as the Zodiac case was happening, and just goes through from first principles, and you realize, just, how pathetic Zodiac was and like really just such a loser.
And then he writes a companion book, which I have some qualms about just because it would never pass, like, a legal read. But he makes a pretty good argument for a suspect that nobody knows about. And the reason that he lands on the suspect is basically through fanzines, because it turns out that one of the notes references something that was in a fanzine and he finds writing that's very comparable. So do I think that this guy is the guy; I'm not sure, but it's more persuasive than any suspect that has ever been put forward as Zodiac -- and basically [Robert] Graysmith. That book is called How To Find Zodiac, and I would strongly recommend tracking it down just so, like, I can talk about it with you and not just Elon [laughs].
I am on it.
And I can reveal that when the Scoundrel paperback is out, we are changing the subtitle to The Story of a Murderer Who Charmed His Way to Fame and Freedom.
I think that's closer. I mean, I understand why the hardcover subtitle -- like, that's how you sold it in the room, so you're gonna keep it.
Well, that was actually a suggestion of my Canadian editor and we were like, yeah. And then we actually got the subtitle before the title, which is unusual. So I'm not surprised that it's changing and I was fine with it -- and they're changing the cover. So it's more basically it looks kind of like an I'll Be Gone In The Dark clone, but I'm like, great, sell more. I don't care.
I love the cover of Scoundrel. I think it's great. I would've loved for it to be the paperback, but I've been steeped enough in book-publishing land to know why they changed things. And I'm like, yeah, I would like this book to be sold in Target. I would like this book to reach people who are not necessarily -- who don't know that they should be reading it. So more power to that.
Right. That's how you shift along the spectrum from true crime to social history, less red on the cover.
Oh no, it's still gonna be red and black.
[laughs] Okay.
'Cause almost all my books are red and black. And then the next anthology is basically Unspeakable Acts, but if the third section was the entire book. So it's much more about systemic injustice and trying to reckon with the past few years in particular. I think the current title is Evidence of Things Seen. So it it's a big reference to that Baldwin book.
Well, how do you feel about that? That's a big hem to be standing on.
Oh, it was my choice, because that's all I was thinking about when I pitched it in the summer of '20, it was right around all the protests. And I just could not get Baldwin's book outta my head. Yeah. And I think that it's really one of the unheralded true-crime classics, even though he would never have considered himself a true-crime writer.
Right. Should be required reading for all.
Yeah. It's basically a book about systemic inequities and it's Baldwin's prose and it's marvelous and it's woolly and you just have to kind of go with it.
That and Last Call are my best sellers, historically.
I love that. That's so good.
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Sarah Weinman, the author of The Real Lolita and Scoundrel and editor of Women Crime Writers and Unspeakable Acts, sat down with me earlier this week to talk about the gestation of Scoundrel, Capote in Texas, research cringe, and much more. This is the first part of our conversation.
[This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and flow.]
Sarah D. Bunting: I went down, um, both while I was reading it and while I was putting together some questions, I went down like four different Wiki holes and came out like in Houston, in the seventies --
Sarah Weinman: Oh, I know which I know which rabbit hole you fell down. Mm-hmm.
I think the one I fell down in with you the last time we spoke.
Yeah. Was it the Truman Capote, you know, going to Wayne Henley's trial and being like, I've seen it all before.
[laughs] No, this was his Houston diaries that are -- I was like, all right, I'm gonna take my ass to the public library, put on the gloves and have a look.
Uh, I did, so... [laughs]
Yeah. Should I bother?
I mean, it was, I don't think anybody had looked at them until I had, so that was pretty thrilling.
Wow.
Because it was, there was a scrapbook and, you know, there was a tie on it and I undid the knot and I'm looking at it. [laughs]
Like, a silverfish walks out. You're like, hey buddy.
I can send you the picture. I was just like, no one has seen this. What? Or did the archivist not look at this? I never know what, what they do if they just sort of receive it. And then they're like, well, this is a scrapbook, but they don't actually like go in and investigate. But basically it's, he did a whole diary of clippings. So anything you wanna know about [Dean] Corll from that time, Capote had a clipping of it, which was bananas.
And apparently according to that oral history, the Plimpton book, there was like a whole room where he had all these paste-ups, and it was all reviews of In Cold Blood and I'm like, good for him.
I mean, Nabokov kept every single review of Lolita possible. Yeah. So I was, I remember looking at that at the New York Public Library also just being like, the shit that authors keep -- [laughs] speaking as one --
But the provenance of those diaries, it was relatively recent as an acquisition to the library.
It was, I think, 2018, 2019.
Some guy found it in his mom's house or something.
Yeah, I think so. And if you go to the NYPL page, which I think I still have bookmarked, cuz I actually wanna interview that person. Eventually I'm going to be on my Capote rabbithole project, which we can --
Oh my God. Well, I mean, drop a dime because I know, for some reason, just an obscene amount about, like, minor books that went out of print. Like, The KBI Agents At The Black-And-White Ball: A Memoir -- who cares? For this, I guess I did.
[laughs]
Anyway, we're already doing it, but I was struck by how many other stories this book could have been or had in it. If you hadn't, you know, had more discipline than I would've shown in a project like this. I'm thinking about Capote as a prospective blurber or reviewer of Edgar Smith's book.
That's still one of my favorite anecdotes from Scoundrel, just how that all came together. And it's just this idea that here was this convicted murderer, who's trying to get off death row and he's written a book and his publisher naturally wants to go to what was apparently the go-to criminal justice pundit of the time, Truman Capote, which is still something that's hard to wrap my head around. Yeah.
But at the time that Brief Against Death was being finished up and getting ready for publication. Capote was two years removed from the publication of In Cold Blood, maybe a year and change removed from the Black-And-White ball. So he really was at the top of his game and he had nowhere to go but down and at the time he would go on talk shows and talk about criminal-justice stuff. And especially the death penalty, he even testified at, I think, a congressional hearing.
Yeah. I think that's right.
And he just said some really off the wall stuff. I just remember reading it going, wait, that's what you think? That murder should only be a federal-court crime. It shouldn't be tried in state court. It's like, okay dude, that's an interesting opinion.
Good luck settling that out logistically. Yeah, the relationship of this literary figure to, to true crime is -- well, whatever, I'm not going down this rabbit hole again right now.
No, but it is, like I said, that's a rabbit hole that I'm hoping to go down in earnest because also concurrent to all of this is that Capote was researching a documentary that was supposed to air on ABC. It was called Death Row USA. And he went along with Piedy Lumet -- she was like a swan without being a swan. She was in that world. And she's still apparently alive in her nineties, which is also kind of wild and I'm hoping I can find her.
But she went with him to San Quentin. She went with him to the Colorado death row. And in the NYPL archives about Death Row USA, I'm looking at the notes that were being collated, I guess, to figure out who they wanted to interview. [Capote] wanted to interview Edgar Smith. Edgar's name was on that list, but he couldn't get to it because the death row at the New Jersey state prison expressly did not allow media in, which is of course how William Buckley got around it because he was on the legal team and Sophie Wilkins, the book editor, got around it because she was "his cousin" -- that was the fiction that they concocted, but what was Capote gonna do? [laughs]
And her life, just the life of Sophie Wilkins and her various assignations, and that, you know, she ends up marrying this poet -- like, okay, this is a whole other book probably. And then her whole "I'll do whatever I have to do to get this book" -- like, I don't know if you've watched Julia, but --
No, not yet.
The story there about Julia [Child]'s editor. And then the great Judith Light as Blanche Knopf losing her eyesight, spoiler --
I read the biography of Blanche, so I know.
And Blanche just like being a battle-axe to her fellow woman editors, the way that it was for these editors mid-century, and then Julia's editor was also [John] Updike's editor --
Yep. Forever.
That just reminded me of that, and the stories within stories. So getting back out of the rabbit hole --
I know, although it is interesting. I never really got anybody to tell me if Sophie and Judith Jones had much to do with each other. And I guess the answer is no. But, you know, the [Robert] Gottlieb stuff was more fun [laughs].
I mean, that's another rabbit hole entirely leading to Janet Malcolm --
Oh, yes. Who was also BFF with Gottlieb.
Mm-hmm, and I'm not gonna get on that rant.
Was this the book that you pitched, or did this confluence of stories sort of evolve as you were working on it, and the book became something else? It doesn't strike me that it is wildly different from what I saw in the trades when it sold, but --
No, because -- so maybe this is a good time to get into the chronology of how this sort of came into being, because it took like seven some-odd years from inception to publication.
Right. Because you did mention in text that like that the letters between you and Smith were like mid-teens. So 2014 or --
It was the tail end of 2014. So what happened is, I had published the article in Hazlitt that became The Real Lolita. And I really thought that my next piece for Hazlitt was going to be on the Edgar Smith story. I knew nothing about Sophie Wilkins at the time. So I really thought at that time the magazine project was going to be figuring out what went on, how [William F.] Buckley got duped, why we didn't know this story in the way that we knew the Norman Mailer or Jack Henry Abbott story. Right. Or even the Caryl Chessman case, which we can talk about another time [laughs] because of course I bought the Chessman book at your store.
So I just started researching and getting in touch with people, and I think it was at that point when I -- I did a lot of reading. There was a long piece by a woman named Lona Manning called "The Great Prevaricator" that had a lot of good background. Although I thought the writing was a little -- it wasn't the way I would've written it. Let's just say that.
But I wrote Edgar then, because I didn't really think much was gonna happen. I didn't know what, like, his state of health was. I didn't know if he was gonna write back. I didn't even know if I wanted to talk to him, frankly, because based on what I had already read from parole hearings and the case, I just thought, I don't think he's gonna tell me all that much that's useful. But as I recount in Scoundrel, he did write me back and he wanted to know how I knew stuff. And in my second letter, I just was like, well, you know, all these people are dead and you're still alive. What the hell? And he wrote me this letter -- I think he was, you know, he was basically fishing for information. He wanted to know why I was writing to him, what my agenda was. And I could just tell, even from that second letter, that this was not going to be a fruitful exchange. Right. So I was like, here are questions that I'm pretty sure no one else has asked and I will never get my chance again. So I might as well do it now.
Right.
And then he insults Christopher Buckley, which was very funny, and also kind of terrible [laughs], and essentially, I don't wanna say he busts me 'cause it's pretty obvious, but he's like, you clearly seem to be writing a book about me, I don't wanna cooperate. And then he proceeded to answer every question anyway! Because it's like, he couldn't help himself. And I get it, like, you're an eighty-something-year-old man in prison. The chickens have come home to roost. No one is writing you anymore.
I didn't know this at the time, but I would find out many years later that he did know his daughter and his granddaughter and they came, he basically paid for them to come visit, and then they cut him off. So he had basically very few people, there were a couple of people who never responded to any of my entreaties, but there was this -- he somehow befriended an ex-cop and his wife who lived in the Pacific Northwest. And so when he was stalking Paige from prison, Paige being a second ex-wife, I'm pretty sure it was through that conduit as to how it happened. It wasn't like Edgar magically had internet access in California state prison, although he could have, but I just don't think that's likely, I think he had somebody on the outside doing the dirty work.
Yeah. Or I think there's a black market in smartphones, but I'm not sure someone that age would --
I don't wanna rule out that he had a contraband cell phone, but I just feel like, I feel like he would've had some insulting thing to say about cell phones [laughs] He still had a typewriter that he was typing, you know, writing me letters.
So this is all happening and you still think, it's gonna be an article.
Yeah. But it becomes clear to me that number one, a number of sources are not going to cooperate. I remember reaching out to Paige that early, maybe in late '14, early '15. And she was just like, I, I can't do this. And the information was, I can't do this while he is still living. And I totally got it. And then I had requested access to Buckley's archives, and was denied. And I totally get why, because, you know, the Sarah Weinman of 2014 is not the Sarah Weinman of even 2019 or 2022 in terms of credentials and publications and the legacy, like, you know, Christopher Buckley didn't know who the hell I was or [laughs] why I was doing this. And especially talking to him later, I did get the sense that this was, you know, a tough subject, even for him personally, because he was involved, to a little bit of a degree.
So I get that too. And so if, like, if I don't have access to Buckley's archives yet -- but I already can tell it's going to be a book. It just felt like, let me just put this aside, and sort of wait Edgar out. And so, you know, I go on and I edit Women Crime Writers for the Library of America that comes out in the fall of '15. I get the proposal for The Real Lolita sold in the summer of '16, and I work on that book. I get diagnosed with breast cancer and go through cancer treatment while I'm working on the book.
And then back into fall of '17, by this point, I still periodically check the California state inmate search. You know, every couple months, "Is Edgar still there." He's still there. He's still there. And then I check in May of '17 and I get a "404 not found" response. Like, this is interesting. And I place a call to the public-affairs person and they were decidedly unhappy to hear from me. And at first didn't wanna confirm. And I just was like, can you just tell me, just tell me he's dead. That's all I wanna know. I don't need to know, like, beyond the bare facts of it. I just need to know he is deceased. And maybe if you wanna give me a death date, that would be great. And she's like, fine. He's dead, he died March 20th. "Do you know cause of death?" No.
And eventually I turn in the first draft of The Real Lolita, and then I think later in September of '17, the word finally leaks out to the Washington Post and then the New York Times, and they run it, and I call my agent, because at this point he knows that I am leaning towards making this whole story my next book, and I'm like, so I guess I should get that proposal ready. He's like, yeah, do that soon. And I basically burped out a draft overnight, and obviously revised at leisure, but it was all sitting in my head.
And so by that point also, I think I learned of Sophie's archive in February of 2016. That's when I know I visited Columbia for the first time. But it was just, again, idle internet rabbit holes, doing some related searching. And I see Sophie Wilkins has an archive. Oh. And Edgar's listed as a correspondent. I wonder what interesting things I'll find between, you know, book editor and her author, it'll probably be business stuff. And then I go and I just do a fact-finding mission. I look through boxes knowing that I wanna come back to it at some point in the future. I can't figure out when.
And that's when I find the smut. [laughs]
God, it's juuuust --
And I'm like, I can't -- in the Columbia rare books, manuscripts library, what's going on?
And it had to go through lawyers too. That's sort of a jump ahead to a future question, so I'll put a pin in it. So, this did evolve somewhat in terms of --
Let's put it this way. The working title was The Convict and The Conservative, which, you know, again, Janet Malcolm echoes, but I really thought it was going to be -- they were the central characters. And what I realized as I did more reporting and research is that Buckley was an integral part of the story, but he wasn't -- that wasn't the whole story. What interested me more was the collective harm that Edgar caused women and girls. And just the fact that no matter what happened, Victoria Zielinski just kept getting forgotten, kept getting maligned, kept getting slandered, kept getting her reputation stomped on the way that, you know, her head was stomped on. I mean, it is just like, that became much more integral.
So even though it's called Scoundrel, I really believe Edgar's the least interesting person in the book. And I structured it in a way that you're never actually fully in his head until the very end when he's in prison and he has nowhere to go. And that was also by design.
I mean, you could almost have called it Scoundrelled, because really this is about, and you mentioned this explicitly a couple of times, the relationships among people who had relationships with this, you know, narcissistic personality. So there's no core at the core.
Yeah. I mean, other people can call him a sociopath, call him a psychopath. I sort of land on antisocial personality disorder because he was diagnosed with that. And I feel like that, you know, that feels like a more factually accurate descriptor of what he was. And certainly just in terms of the behavior --
Well, it definitely put me in mind, as many things do in the genre actually, of this passage in one of the updated editions of Fatal Vision wherein is quoting from Herve Cleckley's description of psychopaths. That it's a finally tuned reflex machine designed to mimic human response. And after a while there is the feeling that some key element is not present. And with guys like that, who just sort of adapt to whatever situation can be manipulated --
Yeah. And it creates this uncanny valley of personality. That, you know, they're essentially a black hole that you can throw in whatever personality traits of any person they're around. And so that's why, especially in Edgar's letters, like the difference in tone when he is writing Buckley, versus the difference in tone with Sophie is like, I don't wanna say they're two different people because they feel very related to me, but he's like, he's trying to accomplish two different things in his manipulations.
Well, and then the difference between his letters with Sophie and then when she appears in person -- like this is sort of the foundational problem with internet dating, so that, that was very relatable, but also the ways that she was manipulating herself to make this situation okay.
I related so hard to Sophie and not just because there are some commonalities in background, although she's from Vienna and my family, you know, my people were from the Ukraine Pale of Settlement, old country, whatever you wanna call it, but -- you come to a country, she's 12 years old. She doesn't speak English. She's very, very intelligent. And just trying to get ahead and accomplish stuff.
But she's also bogged down by getting herself involved with a lot of terrible men, or just a lot of really mentally unstable men. I think like, I don't know anything about [the first] husband. That was basically like a quick "blink and you miss it" kind of marriage. She never talked about it. And the father of her children, who was a psychiatrist, I believe. And he ended up dying of suicide because he was really that mentally unstable. And then husband three, who was a professor and a non-fiction writer, Thurman Wilkins, he really struggled. His sons, the eldest son in particular, Adam, really had fond memories of him, but he also, you know, had no illusions about the communal mental-health issues happening in that house.
I mean, he did say to me, it seems like, she was never diagnosed, but a lot of the behaviors align with bipolar disorder. And I think based on reading Sophie's letters, I can definitely see the mood swings. The highs were very high. The lows were crushing.
I think she was not unaware of that either. ...And then there's also the, not ghost signature, but Norman Mailer and Jack Abbott, this was later, but you know, Mailer is, at the time that Smith is sort of devolving back into trouble, he's writing Executioner's Song. And then not only is there the Jack Abbott saga after that, but Gary Gilmore is also this sort of weird third dark saint in this triptych of, um, celebrated released incarcerated people who created a blast radius in other people's lives and in the culture as a result? And Mailer is always around these stories?
Yep. I didn't rely on it too heavily, but I mean, there's a whole book about Buckley and Mailer that Kevin Schultz, I think, wrote. And I read it because I was like looking for information about, like, what was happening here? And they were friends. Just the Buckley, Mailer, Capote trio and what cultural impact they had in the sixties and even the seventies -- and I guess you can add Gore Vidal there too, although he never as far as I know helped a murderer.
I own Dick Cavett's memoir, though I haven't read it yet; I wonder if he's not the center circle of this Venn, because I also was sort of reminded of this like seventies, cause-celebre guys going on Cavett, talking about either their carceral experience or how in Jeffrey MacDonald's case, the army CID screwed them over --
That's true.
I just feel like that Capote, Mailer, Cavett, Buckley nexus -- and then you have this other weird, like, Warhol-Factory lobe of the --
Right, right. And then of course, Warhol got shot by Valerie Solanas.
What was it about this time in America? The seventies are really two different decades: you have the end of the sixties and then you have this, like, Watergate and post-Watergate nihilistic paranoia; disco --
It's just like everything was breaking apart and coming together, you had civil rights, you had Vietnam, you had the Warren Court, and police actually quote, having to, you know, follow the laws and, you know, not beat up suspects and not interrogate them without lawyers and do crazy shit that frankly...I mean, that's also the thing that struck me as I was working on Scoundrel is that it actually felt like a tragedy because I could not, I would try to intuit any other way that this story could have happened. And I just couldn't. Like, the conviction should have been reversed. And it was.
I suppose you can't really retrofit criminal justice cases that were pre-Miranda to post-Miranda. But if you can, then basically anything before 1966 is under suspicion and should be. And then if you start pulling that thread, you realize that the criminal justice system never worked except for wealthy white people. And even then that that might be a problem.
And it's a New Jersey case also. And, look, as a native, you have this tolerance for everyday graft that -- it's just like, shrug, it's New Jersey. But I would say the entire 20th century in New Jersey justice is all cases where you're like, well, he did something, but they didn't prove it. Right. Hauptmann, Exhibit A. So there was also that aspect of it for me; once you realize, oh, this took place in New Jersey, there's like a baseline of -- not accepted, but assumed incompetence ,shortcuts. And also like everybody's in on it, it doesn't have to be discussed.
Right. And it's not like I think that Guy Calissi was a terrible prosecutor. I just think that the standards of the time where [Edgar Smith] seemed guilty as hell, and the defense was, I mean, the, the defense was ridiculous. It was literally a "some other guy did it" defense. And then naming him an open court, and then he testified, and everybody testifies. And you're just like, what is going on here? Or just opening up the crime scene to journalists before there's an official arrest. That was bonkers to me.
So many famous cases in New Jersey where you look at like evidence preservation...okay, it's the 1920s --
Oh, you're thinking, like, Hall-Mills. I know there's a book coming out on that in the fall.
And I'm very excited for that. But also: Fred Neulander, like, are we ever really gonna know what happened? No, because: New Jersey court and we're never gonna get it untangled. The fact that his entire family was like, nope. And just turned on him. ...But there's definitely a three-volume book about cases like this in this, like, galaxy of people from the seventies. And I am not qualified to write it, but someone needs to, and I'm very excited for it when it finally comes out. If Robert Caro ever finishes this Lyndon Johnson series...
Oh God.
He's merely 87 years old or however old he is now, like, plenty of time left! ...That sort of brings me back to the question I put a pin in from earlier, which was to ask what it was like spending time with these people, and specifically with witnessing Edgar and Sophie's relationship. You talked about it a little bit before, but as a reader, there is definitely a "train wreck in slow motion" quality to the proceedings.
That's exactly how it felt reading the letters, you know? After that initial visit in 2016, once I sold the proposal, I knew there was plenty there, even if I hadn't looked at all of it at that point. So I sold the proposal in summer of '18, before The Real Lolita came out, and then after I was done with all the major promotion for The Real Lolita, like December of 2018, that's when I got to work. And I started going back to Sophie's archive, so I could just get every single page possible between her and Edgar, and just sort of start from the beginning.
I wanted to do that so I could sort of feel in real time how this relationship developed and how it went so off the rails and what happened, what were the beats -- and trying to figure out from Sophie's correspondence to Buckley, so there was a lot of triangulation I had to do between the three of them of who was here, where, and who was saying what to whom, and what did Buckley know about the nature of Sophie and Edgar's relationship? And it turned out it was more than more than I expected, but it wasn't like he knew every little explicit detail. Not that I think he would've wanted to, but he was definitely aware, but just reading through Sophie and Edgar's letters, and there was just so many instances where I'd be like, oh, Sophie, don't do that. Don't write him. Don't, don't go visit him. Don't do this. Don't -- just, it was very, very cringe.
But in this way, that's how strongly I identified with her. And I just had such empathy for her, because I could also see exactly how she fell into this, that she was so lonely and so alienated at home and at work, and she just lost her sense of self. And I think that Edgar was -- more than he may have allowed himself, but he could never really be. You know, that was his nature is just not to do that. His nature was to charm and to cajole and to seduce and to manipulate and to do whatever it took to get anybody on their side.
Which is also how he sort of charmed other women too, including his first wife, his second wife, girlfriend, et cetera, et cetera.
But yeah, just sitting in that archive, knowing that other people around me had no idea what I was reading [laughs] was very trippy.
As a reader, you're sort of like, you feel compassion for Sophie, but also vaguely embarrassed for her. And for him, just the trampling of boundaries, and all the stuff had to go through lawyers --
Oh, but it's not like the lawyers were looking at it. They would receive it and just, you know, look the other way.
Did you ever have to take breaks from that part of --
All the time.
When I went back in '18 and early '19, from December through February, I was just up at Columbia, a fair amount. And I knew that I had to save the really explicit stuff for last, because I just needed to build up to it. And I knew that it would make me very upset [laughs] and embarrassed and cringey and -- you know, it's, it was gross, kind of, reading this, and it's not that I'm a prude and it's not like I think that sex is terrible. It's just, that felt very --
I used to be a Penthouse proofreader, I'm not a prude either, but it's really hard to write this stuff without...I mean, I'm not judging you, but "thigh necklace"? I just, I can't be in my own skin right now.
Right. Or just the whole dick-measuring thing, which was funny because, oh God, I knew that I had to include it, but I had some pushback from one of my book editors -- like, are you sure that we need to get this explicit? And then the other book editor was like, no, we need to know. We need to show the full range of the derangement here. And I was like, yeah, that's exactly it. That's why. And then my fact checker, Rosemarie Ho, actually captured the image that was in the letter. Because I had it. I just hadn't siloed it off. And so that's why it's in the book. I just was like, you know what? You just need to see level of madness here.
"We ALL have to go here."
Yeah. I had to go here, so I'm taking you all with me. [laughs]
Watch this space for Part 2 of the interview...
]]>Of course, what Dan seized on was the "when" in my opening clause, and I responded with "'when' 'if' whatever you know what I mean except if you want so do you want to get married? to...me?" He did, for some reason. Went through with it, too! hee.
But that's the origin of the "just get a divorce" tag here at Exhibit B. The sheer volume of major-case true crime that would never have occurred had the subjects just asked for -- or, in a few notorious instances, accepted (Broderick, Betty) -- divorces is kind of staggering. It's most of Ann Rule's catalog. And Dan (my husband, not Dan Broderick) and I still mutter it at our TV on occasion. In fact, while I was watching a recent Dateline, he grumbled it while walking through the living room, unaware that the woman onscreen had "just gotten a divorce," and while it hadn't gone great, she'd fallen afoul of another situation completely.
All those cases wear the "just get a divorce" tag in the shop if you'd like to see them all in one place -- and, seeing them in a group, suggest inventory additions to me! (The Twelfth of Never is en route to my shelves as we speak.) -- SDB
]]>Exhibit B. is a specialty store focusing on true-crime books and ephemera. I do have a bricks-and-mortar space, but until we're a bit closer to herd immunity, most of what the shop does will happen here in the virtual arena. (Not least because the shop is a teeny little thing in which social-distancing protocols would only allow me and, like, 1.5 customers.) That includes stuff like author events, which I can't wait to host, on Zoom or in person (like, literally one person, singular...did I mention the shop is tiny?) (I'm joking! all three of you can come!); and themed "installations" by friends of the shop.
For the moment, I'm focused on getting the teetering ziggurat of inventory into the system and in front of your eyeballs; and continuing to fill out the shelves with genre classics, mid-century oddities, and recent best-sellers. Drop a bookmark or get on the Exhibit B. mailing list* to stay up to date, or follow the shop on Insta and Twitter, @exhibitbbooks in both places.
* "You're not one of those pesty outfits that sends an email every 2 hours, are you?" God, no. We're talking once a week. You will get sweet discount codes nobody else does, though.
Looking for something I don't have in stock? Need help tracking down a first edition? Stuck for a gift -- or on how to get rid of your nana's three groaning shelves of Ann Rule? Email me -- exhibitbbooks@gmail.com -- or send a DM. I'm happy to help.
Thanks for coming by! Now let's find you something to read. -- SDB
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