Old-timey true crime round-up
So as mentioned, this is something I find myself reading nearly every time I go on vacation. I don't know why, but it's such a comfy read. The subject matter is pretty grisly, but James has kind of a funny dry style and often highlights absurdities about particular cases, or even just about the era. The 1900s/1910s are a time that don't get a lot of attention in pop culture, like there's plenty written about the 1880s/1890s, but then there's kind of a dearth of material until you get to WWI and the Jazz Age.
It's also just really fascinating. I'm skeptical of books that purport to solve cold cases (see below), but James presents a solid and convincingly unflashy solution to not only a famous unsolved crime--some writers have referred to Vilisca as America's most famous unsolved multiple murder--but links it to a series that no one even knew existed. Man, what was with America and roving bands of axe murderers in this era? There were at least 2 others, the New Orleans Axe Man and whoever was responsible for the murders that Clementine Barnabet was convicted of.
Reading The Man From the Train reminded me of this book, which I originally read a few years ago. I love Skip Hollandsworth--he's the main reason I have a subscription to Texas Monthly--and I love an old crime/scandal that was covered up by those in power. A lot of lifelong Austinites have never heard of the Midnight Assassin, although the old Moonlight Towers that were erected partially in response to the murders are famous landmarks. (One of the towers is where the kegger in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused happens, although the one some of the characters climb is obviously a prop.)
The Midnight Assassin is the name the contemporary press gave to the murderer, but today he's usually called the Servant Girl Annihilator, a name that I hate how cool it sounds. It came from a letter written by William Sydney Porter, who would later become the writer known as O. Henry, who was living in Austin at the time.
There's a theory that the Servant Girl Annihilator went to London a few years after the murders in Texas and became Jack the Ripper, but I don't buy it. In Texas the women were only murdered indoors, in London they were only murdered on the streets. In Texas they were killed with a variety of instruments, in London they were only murdered with knives. In Texas there were often other people involved (sometimes they were attacked, sometimes they weren't), in London the women were always attacked alone. I think the connection was made because of proximity in time and how badly mutilated a lot of the victims were. But it's not like it was hard back then (or fuck, now) to find men who hated women enough to murder them and hack them up.
This was a book that got a lot of mentions on literary blogs in the 2010s, which is when I first read it. It's about New York City's first medical examiner and his chief toxicologist. (Previously the city was on the coroner system, which was and remains extremely problematic; journalist Radley Balko has written reams about why it sucks, if you're interested. I also recommend his book The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist.) Together they helped modernize forensics and came up with a lot of the chemical tests that could identify poisons in human remains. (Trigger warning, a whole lot of dogs were killed in this process.) Each chapter is about a different specific poison and a case they worked that involved it.
This is about a murder of a young woman that happened in 1930s China, which was needless to say kind of a fraught time. Nominally it was a Republic, but warlords were still running large chunks of the countryside, the commies were getting people riled up, and pretty much everyone was expecting Japan to eventually full scale invade the country (the murder happened a few years after the Japanese established the puppet kingdom of Manchuko). It's really kind of a melancholy story about not just a girl's life violently cut short, but of a vanishing country; even the cemetery that Pamela Werner was buried in no longer exists. Her father was literally one of the last westerners to leave China; he was actually in the same Japanese prison camp as the man he publicly accused of murdering his daughter, which, yikes. Awkward!
There was a rumor going around a few years back that this was being developed into a series for Netflix, which they said wasn't true. But apparently it's currently being adapted by Kudos Film & TV, a British company whose content often airs on Netflix for US audiences. So watch this space, I guess. Not that they might not drop the whole thing for one of any number of reasons. (Yes, I am still bitter about The Devil in the White City.)
I'm still reading this one (or rather listening to it, I bought it with an Audible credit), but so far it's... weird. How To Find Zodiac is Jarett Kobek's follow-up to Motor Spirit and kind of reads like an extremely long footnote to that book. Kobek talked a lot of shit in Motor Spirit about the futility of trying to pin Zodiac's crimes on any one actual person, especially now, so long after the fact, so I almost wonder if this isn't some kind of long troll. If it is, it seems to have taken in both LA Magazine and Doerr's own daughter. Kobek also makes a few odd stylistic choices, like writing about himself in the third person and referring to Google Street View as "Privacy Invasions", that seem like he's deliberately making himself look and sound like a crank. (I don't mean that he just thinks Google Street View is an invasion of privacy, I mean he refuses to even use the phrase "Google Street View" and uses "Privacy Invasion" as if that were the proper noun.)
So anyway, if a year or two from now Kobek releases another book called You Dummies Fell For It (which a lot of people have, judging from the Goodreads reviews), I'll be real smug.