s&d: True Crime! books

thanks!

all bow down before Harold Schechter, the classiest of all true crime writers....his new book The Mad Sculptor looks great. A good interview here if you can handle the interlocutor Jon Batchelor, whose manner of speaking is annoying
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXyP9re45lM&list=PLKRXaVyH4J7fr3pwuD3PpeDAx8rHhd3Ix&feature=mh_lolz

which is the best schechter book?

the one about H.H. Holmes is the best, I think

I might check that out. The HH Holmes story is so fking creepy

I just started reading Fire Lover by Joseph Wambaugh, about arsonist John Orr. We'll see if it's any good... on the fence atm

I hate books that dont grab me right away, I'm too impatient

I'm not far into the Wambaugh book -- I am having a love hate relationship with it.

The information he's giving is intense and compelling and I want to keep reading but the way it's written is seriously offputting at times. He'll mostly maintain a passive voice but then every now and then will for reasons unknown just randomly inhabit the voice of the douchey perp and using phrases like (shudder) 'whacking the weasel' & it's so jarring and gross like WHY would you do that

Can't ppl just write stuff that I want to read & not be gross really is it too much to ask

that's funny veg, i was just thinking to myself how i was curious about firefighters who are also arsonists. and curious about arsonists in general. i wish i would read more instead of just thinking about all the topics i'm curious about and all the true crime i want to read. anyway the book i'm reading is on the run by alice goffman and it's ok so far. i just liked the cover. at the same time i bought the new kitty genovese book too. this and being a little too excited to pay my mortgage two weeks early (idk why) contributed to me overdrawing my bank account.

arsonists interest me too! this is the first time I've read anything specific

I worked with a guy a long time ago, there was talk among the other staff that he was a firebug and I always wondered about him. He had tried to become a professional firefighter but they wouldn't take him, for whatever reason. Always got about in army fatigues and wore a hitlerish mustache and by the time I worked with him he was legit unstable enough that I was kind of scared to even talk to him

(this was at a commercial laundry who pretty much hired everyone in my hometown that was otherwise unhireable)

he shouted at the washing machines fyi

whether or not he lit fires I never really ascertained. he kinda seemed a bit too looped to be an un-nabbed arsonist, didn't seem really able to be coldly calculating but who the hell knows

but this guy John Orr is like the perfect profile of an arsonist, it's kind of amazing that he worked for so long not being caught, because he was setting off like every alarm bell even in his early career

it fits with my other interest in police impersonators. like guys who buy old police cars at county auctions and stick a red and blue light on the dash and pull people over.

TOTALLY

i always give side-eye to those middle-aged dudes who ride around on police-style motorcycles

this is gonna make one hell of a book someday:

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/03/justice/mcstay-murder-mystery/index.html?c=us&page=1

whoa

xxpost harbl i just reached thepart in the book where the arsonist totally purchased an old crown vic & added lights & a siren loool

I usually don't read true crime, but couldn't resist _The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder by Charles Graeber. I guess I'm not devious in my thinking bc when it became clear how this nurse was murdering people for years and years, I was really taken aback. The way the hospitals kept letting him go but not even reporting their suspicions to their state's Boards of Nursing... unbelievable. My only annoyance (as a person who IS a nurse) is the way the audiobook kept pronouncing "dig" (short for digoxin).

I like the line in Fire Lover where Orr is described as "burying the accelerator pedal" in the old Crown Vic.

I live in Glendale and remember the Ole's Home Center file. Had to read it even though Orr is such a cypher.

I'd never heard of that fire til the book- so awful

After seeing it recommended here I checked out Fire Lover and finished it in two days. Man oh man. You almost have to admire his brazenness, but good lord. California is very lucky that there weren't a LOT more deaths as a result of his fires.

Loved the stat about the number of brush fires after his arrest going from like 60-80 per year to one.

right? crazy

ok i NEED to read that. last night i was thinking about the dc snipers and found no apparently decent books exist about them. just shitty ones. too bad.

I was stopped at a traffic light last week behind a beatup old caprice and found myself thinking 'wow yeah that is a really roomy trunk, totally get why the dc snipers used that model'

:/

Finally got a copy of the Charles Whitman book Viceroy recommended many months ago.

Vegemite, I guess that is how I progressed from the knives and gore books to mafia books. After so many slashers, you conclude, these people don't know how to do a "job". Refreshing to read, say, "Black Mass" and learn how to get rid of a body. When I see a Caprice Classic, I immediately think of dope deals and body dumping - they were so common back in the day that a crook driving one is less noticeable. We had one Caprice after another when I was a kid.

I loved renting Caprices/Crown Vics for band stuff because I could fit two amps, guitars, keyboards, *everything* in the trunk.

*nods, writes in notebook*

have started The Suspicions of Mr Whicher -- loving it! So cleverly written, I'm hooked already

Lots of good points and some appealing recommendations here, mostly recent books I hadn't heard of (most true crime books don't get much promotion budget and/or coverage, seems like):
http://www.salon.com/2014/05/29/sleazy_bloody_and_surprisingly_smart_in_defense_of_true_crime/
I even wrote her a fan letter, and I never do that! Honest! Tried not to make it like I was one of *those* fans, hope I didn't try too hard...

i think i heard her on npr this morning or yesterday

wow such a great list in that article. gotta read em all like true crime pokemon

Yeah she was interviewed at the end of the most recent On The Media episode, which is still on the OTM site. That's where I found out about the article.

yay! more books to read!

Heard back from author, thanking me for tip on Teresa Carpenter's Missing Beauty and mention of 2666 as novel drawing on same strengths as some true crime she describes, esp. Lost Girls.
Also, I just now recalled this venerable site, which has always developed in various directions, incl. quality of writing (but worth checking)
http://www.crimelibrary.com/index.html

i finished people who eat darkness yesterday morning. i thought it was decent but something about it annoyed me. i gave it 3 stars on goodreads. then i got right to work on green river running red.

oooh that's a good one

Finished A Sniper in the Tower, the Charles Whitman book by Gary M. Lavergne. About a third of the book is a meticulous and exceptionally harrowing account of the 90 minutes in which Whitman did his killing (stretch that to 13 hours, if you begin with his wife and his mom). I'm sure any account of such an event--Aurora, say--would be just as harrowing, but there's something extra unfathomable about the idea of this guy up in a tower, gunning down people in various directions and up to 500 meters away (how far a man who peered out from a barber shop was when he got hit). The author is really good at conveying the incredible risks people took that day to assist those who'd been shot, and also at placing the shootings in the shadow of Capote's In Cold Blood and the Richard Speck killings, both of which were headline news when Whitman happened.

One odd oversight in a book so extensively researched: calling The Deadly Tower, a 1975 TV movie, "the first attempt to dramatize the Tower incident." Bogdanovich's Targets ('68) is not obscure.

Didn't he seek help, and/or make notes, realizing he was gradually losing it? And maybe had a brain tumor?

That became a big point of contention for years. Whitman thought something was wrong with him, and visited a UT psychologist. (Amazing: the psychologist stepped before microphones the day after the shootings and admitted that Whitman had told him he was "thinking about going up on the tower with a deer rifle and start shooting people.") Family and friends claimed it was the tumor. The author and most professionals dismiss that based on the careful and methodical planning that went into the shootings.

To clarify: yes, he was diagnosed with a small tumor.

Thanks. Think John Hinckley Jr. was shown to have some cerebral abnormalities, but connection between those and his shooting of Reagan were strongly disputed by experts on both sides of the case, as often happens. Correlations can be hard to establish in any case, it seems.
Also, brace yallselves for this, there's a new book out, The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths Are Solving America’s Coldest Cases (not published by Reddit, far as I can tell). Interesting interview with the author on On The Media, with a comment from someone who says online sleuths have helped her search for her sister, missing since the 70s: http://www.onthemedia.org/story/online-supersleuths/

reading that whitey bulger book 'black mass' at the moment. about 20% through and so far it's just a load of admin about the fbi chain of command. no real drama or gripping tales or anything (full disclosure: been rewatching sopranos lately), does it get better or should i ditch it for that 'going clear' scientology book?

Don't skip Going Clear, whether you continue with Black Mass or not. Haven't read that one, but so far Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and The Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice, by Kevin Cullen and Shelly Murphy---two Boston experts on WB from way back, especially Cullen---is pulling me right along.
Also want to read the memoir by Jennifer Mascia (who also wrote a lot for the NYTimes' Gun Report blog). Her father was a low-level Mafia brokester and murderer; she gets to the meat of it in this intro:
http://www.amazon.com/Never-Tell-Our-Business-Strangers/dp/B008SLDY1A

thanks dow. so the 'most wanted gangster' one is worth reading? this one is so dry and unengaging but has wild raving reviews online, people saying to read that one first etc. tempted just read that jenna jameson book and be done with it

mascia book sounds much more like what i'm after

Well, the Most Wanted is mainstream newspaper journalism (why go tabloid, when it's more effective to let the litany of typical atrocities speak for themselves), but not like a clipping file. Murphy was digging deep when he could've been digging his own grave, and has continued to do, not sparing the local and Fed elements who aided and abetted Bulger for so many years.

Also, if you like Mascia, check this one: http://www.amazon.com/Five-Finger-Discount-Crooked-Family-History/dp/0375758704

Oh guys this thread is great. I don't really read true crime as much as use my monthly audible credit on it. The stuff I have 'read' is pretty trashy so far with the exception of 'Stranger Beside Me'. That one had me jumping at shadows for a good month. A couple of recent hits and misses:

Search:
'Lost and Found' by John Glatt - This is about the Jaycee Lee Duggard case.

Destroy:
'A Warrant to Kill: A True Story of Obsession, Lies and a Killer Cop' by Kathryn Casey - I usually like Kathryn Casey's books when I'm in the mood for a story about some crazy, small town texan, ex-high school football star having no concept of divorce as an option. All that heat and concussion. You know someone's about to get brutal. This one though. Ugh. I mean it was okay but there was zero info on the relationship between the cop (killer Kent MacGowan) and his victim (Susan White. I man, I guess he was harassing her but its all very vague.

Gregg Olsen's 'Bitch on Wheels' (originally released as 'The Confessions of an American Black Widow') - This book 11 hours long (lol audiobook) but I'm fairly sure if all of the 'slut' references were cut out it would maybe 45 minutes. Less if you take out the foreword where we have to hear Olsen's opinion that everyone is obsessed with slutty female murders. Again, not really sure why she was having these guys killed except maybe some smallish insurance claims and, of course, her slutty magic vagina. Why one person, somewhere, was once maybe heard to claim 'If Sharon had as many dicks sticking out of her as there had been put in her she'd resemble a porcupine!' (<-- highlight of the book, honestly). Anyway, I went away with the feeling that Gregg Olsen is way creepier than the instigator of these murders.

Thinking about maybe Ann Rule's 'Small Sacrifices' next.

Small Sacrifices was the first Ann Rule book I ever read (way back in early high school). It's SO good.

does 'methland' count as a true crime book? anyway, methland! thanks to la lechera for mentioning it somewhere elsewhere, it piqued my interest.

Another one I've always meant to read---think I saw the author on Book TV way back; must check their archives---description from Amazon (don't look up the rest of it if you're a spoiler weenie)

The Murder of Helen Jewitt
Patricia Cline Cohen

In 1836, the murder of a young prostitute made headlines in New York City and around the country, inaugurating a sex-and-death sensationalism in news reporting that haunts us today. Patricia Cline Cohen goes behind these first lurid accounts to reconstruct the story of the mysterious victim, Helen Jewett.

From her beginnings as a servant girl in Maine, Helen Jewett refashioned herself, using four successive aliases, into a highly paid courtesan. She invented life stories for herself that helped her build a sympathetic clientele among New York City's elite, and she further captivated her customers through her seductive letters, which mixed elements of traditional feminine demureness with sexual boldness.

But she was to meet her match--and her nemesis--in a youth called Richard Robinson. He was one of an unprecedented number of young men who flooded into America's burgeoning cities in the 1830s to satisfy the new business society's seemingly infinite need for clerks. The son of an established Connecticut family, he was intense, arrogant, and given to posturing. He became Helen Jewett's lover in a tempestuous affair and ten months later was arrested for her murder...