s&d: True Crime! books

catching up with this thread---re clemenza on British Columbia, thought of this, in latest dispatch from The Crime Lady (AKA Sarah Weinman, who has written about true crime and edited domestic suspense anthology, also that d.s. box set for Library of America):
If you are not listening to the podcast You’re Wrong About — and if not, why not, it’s wonderful — they are doing a book club-in-progress on Michelle Remembers, the long out-of-print 1980 tome by Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist (and future husband) Larry Pazder, that was essentially the “Patient Zero” of the Satanic panic. I am beyond fascinated with this story, since it originated in Victoria, BC, and 40 years on, encapsulates everything about the panic in a single story.

From her enewsletter before that one: true crime and (mostly) related fiction:

So many authors are seeing their book tours canceled, years of dreams supplanted. Amy Klein, who has a book coming up in April, on https://electricliterature.com/what-its-like-to-try-to-promote-a-book-in-the-middle-of-a-pandemic/ and alternative ways of doing so.

Which is also why I want to stump for my favorite books of 2020 so far, some that aren’t yet published yet:

The Third Rainbow Girl by Emma Copley Eisenberg (I reviewed it here: https://airmail.news/issues/2020-1-25/chasing-rainbows)

Weather by Jenny Offill — a timely novel that’s only going to get more classic over time.

Pretty As A Picture by Elizabeth Little — the voice! The insight into moviemaking! The scathing commentary about sexual politics and true crime! The teens! We did an event at Chevalier’s Books last month and I’ve never wanted an event to go on for many more hours. That’s what the book is like.

Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong — a brilliant collection as a whole, but I was particularly taken with her piece on the life and murder of Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha, an artist I’ve long wanted to write about (Dictee is one of my favorite books of all time) but now I don’t have to.

Lurking by Joanne McNeil — for the Internet old-timers, for those who want to know when the Internet was good, why it went bad, how it can foster community, it’s just a wonderful, thoughtful book.

Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson — for pure confection, post-modern mystery escapism.

Take Me Apart by Sara Sligar — my favorite debut crime novel of 2020 (out in April), just spot on about transforming life into art and who gets sacrificed — particularly women — as a result.

Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker — Lost Girls was a stone masterpiece and so is this book, out in April.

Wandering in Strange Lands by Morgan Jerkins (it’s out in May, and it singed my soul for how good it is)

My Life as a Villainess by Laura Lippman — chances are you’ve read some of the essays already published in venues like Longreads and Glamour, but trust me, the entire collection — also out in May — is dynamite. I’ll be thinking about the final piece for a long, long, time.

These Women by Ivy Pochoda (also out in May, and it reverse-engineers the serial killer narrative from the vantage point of all the women — victims, loved ones, those on the margins — who don’t end up in his orbit, but supersede his orbit.)

Life Events by Karolina Waclawiak (also out in May!) — I loved how it mined a woman’s drifting ambivalence through life, marriage, travel, and there are no easy answers, nor should there be.

Mother Daughter Widow Wife by Robin Wasserman (out June 23) — this novel had me questioning all of my life choices, and it wrung me dry. I felt changed reading this.

Becoming Duchess Goldblatt by Duchess Goldblatt (out in July) — it stole my heart and is a damn good memoir about creating a new identity to save yourself.

Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby (out in July) — my other favorite debut crime novel of 2020.

The Devil’s Harvest by Jessica Garrison (out August 4) — I blurbed this because it’s a propulsive and incisive look at a hired killer who targeted those on the margins — often poor, undocumented immigrants living in the Central Valley — told with necessary compassion.

True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee by Abraham Riesman (out September 29) — another book I blurbed because it made me understand the complex, hard-to-pin-down man that was Marvel Comics’ id and superego, and the archival research is amazing.

There will be more added to this list, of course. Let’s keep reading, let’s keep supporting authors, in this time and at all times.

Jenny Offill book is fantastic, Peter Swanson book is fun but daft as a brush

Got this from the cheap online remainder house I buy from:

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328347182l/8728693.jpg

As I started reading, I realized the story made an appearance on Mindhunter.

man the whole Dean Corll story is so fuuuuuuucked up. thats one that kept me up at night

Definitely. I'm just where Elmer Wayne Henley has killed him and they're digging up bodies. The first part of the book is mostly about a completely uninterested police department.

plus iirc that was published in 74... Brooks & Henley’s cases were still going through court up til like 79 or 80 i think. helluva long sad tail to that story.

Brooks died this year of COVID!

Wow, that's amazing. He hasn't been that prominent in the book thus far.

Has anyone read Chaos by Tom O’Neill?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/07/chaos-charles-manson-cia-secret-history-sixties-tom-oneill-dan-piepenbring-review

It’s as much about journalistic obsession as it is about the weird links between the Manson family and a whole host of government agencies, and is inevitably inconclusive, but it’s pretty wild.

― ShariVari, Friday, February 14, 2020 11:18 PM (six months ago)

ok i'm almost done with this and it's pretty good. i started helter skelter a long time ago but never finished it and it makes me never want to read it! since he's convinced me it's all LIES.

I just finished it recently!

Bug is widely accepted as a total douchecanoe & kinda poisoned the well

The CHAOS book is really good - worthwhile buuut but with some caveats: it’s largely an exercise in watching someone lose themself in the rabbithole;

on the Los Angeles-centered stuff he’s great & raises good questions about Melcher, the Sherriff’s actions, and Bugliosi too

But on the CIA & was he an informant bigger spook stuff he just doesnt have the connections or the right kind of investigative experience to really illuminate any new or good information, by the time he gets there it feels like he’s drowning in theories & not ruling anything out. Also a lot of “...but he’s dead” / “he refused to talk to me” / “and then he hung up” / etc

Also the moment when he caught himself imploring Sharon Tate’s *father* to “think of the victims” it definitely got very YOURE OUT OF YOUR ELEMENT DONNIE

But all those peripheral people are fascinating so it still leaves you with a lot to explore, even if it doesnt quite go anywhere

Hats off to the editor because LORD that must have taken some doing to turn O’Neills notes into cogent narrative of any kind

yeah, agree with all that. at least he was contrite about his mistake with sharon tate's father but he could have just cut that whole part out, it didn't add anything to the story. i do think there was something to the fact that a lot of these guys couldn't explain their unusual actions & were funded by known CIA fronts but agree that i'd like to see someone with a background in intelligence to dig into it, because he got to the point that *it's conceivable* there's something there but not beyond. they could have the same trouble with missing info though, who knows. had someone else made these connections before him? it's not a case i'd read a ton about.

would like to know more about roman polanski too but felt like his suspicions about him were not well founded, just some odd behaviors that could have been innocent

innocent is not the right word to describe polanski at any point in time but you know what i mean

polanski suspicions wrt sharon’s murder mostly feel opportunistic, it’s just over-scrutiny of someone who was grieving in a really unhealthy unhinged way
he is fucked up and guilty of many things & not deserving of much sympathy at all but i think melcher & wilson deserved way more scrutiny than polanski

i kept thinking, if someone like an ex local news journalist had done this, and really pushed their connections, you could probably get some interesting stuff

i think a lot of stuff is known in the manson-obsessed community but not many other books that I know of collect all the wackos in one place like O’Neill has here

Ed Sanders’ The Family is a good followup now that you have all the nerdy trainspotter stuff situated - it was written in 71 and is a good ground-zero place to really start honing your what-ifs ... plus he writes in a very grooooovybaby way lol

I read several reviews, saw a couple interviews with Jeff Guinn that made his Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson seem professionally credible: he researches details and familial-societal context of origin quite a bit, not settling for The Bad Seed but not reductive either.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/819EGR5PZXL.jpg

i guess one benefit of the first-person rabbitholeness aspect of this book is that it lends the theory more credibility than if he had come at it another way. he wants to assure you he is NOT a conspiracy theorist and is resistant to believing any of this is possible, which i can relate to. i think i am going to be reading more books about the CIA. lol.

yeah i read about half of that a while ago, it had to go back to the library. but i remember liking it.

Also, one of his lost girls (who testified for the prosecution):
Member of the Family: My Story of Charles Manson, Life Inside His Cult, and the Darkness That Ended the Sixties, by Dianne Lake, seems like it might be good---not enough by the female participants and/or survivors, seems like.

Guinn’s book is the best at unravelling the mythology of Manson & just showing him as the humbug he was: a carny, a pimp & an egomaniac. Highly recommend.

I have Lake’s book in my pile of “to reads” but I haven’t read it yet — need to dig in to that

xpost Those mentioned and several others, incl. O'Neill and Sanders, cited here, in the wake of Tarentino:
https://www.rollingstone.com/product-recommendations/books/charles-manson-family-murders-books-once-upon-time-hollywood-864908/

I think Guinn is a really good grounding, and the exact opposite of what-if. You really get a tangible, unvarnished & uncomfortable understanding of the reality of Manson, his crimes & his relatiinships. I think it would especially effective as a counterbalance to O’Neill’s freewheeling red-string-diagram.

Veg, pretty sure you will enjoy DES currently on in the UK: David Tennant as Dennis Nilsen
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11656892/

oh whoa didnt know about this! thx fod the heads up

showing him as the humbug he was: a carny, a pimp & an egomaniac

i think maybe you are forgetting 'murderous sociopath', because it's too hard to describe him accurately without mentioning the murders as part of who he was at the time.

i figured that was implied but ok

A long Black Dahlia story from crimereads.

https://crimereads.com/the-black-dahlia-history-los-angeles-cold-case/

not a true crime (maybe?), but since chaos got me interested in the CIA so i read the devil's chessboard by david talbot. pretty good. author believes more in the anti-soviet project than i would have liked, but it's a good overview of the first few decades of the CIA. it touches on sidney gottlieb and patrice lumumba assassination and some other things that i knew about, but there are many more forgotten things. i kept going to myself, "they what?!" a few more books like this until i'm someone who won't shut up about the CIA.

oh interesting, i’ll add that to my list!

i feel like anytime cia involvement is revealed a family member somewhere is reading the news like “wait so crazy uncle jerry was telling the TRUTH?”

EXACTLY

i'm really angry that you go to school and learn about the kennedy assassination in history and it's just this thing that happened, a crazy guy was mad at him or whatever, *it is a mystery*. it's not a mystery! same as learning about latin america. fuck!

Plus there’s shit like Greece or Chile and it’s like these mfers are gaslighting everyone, ~also~ high school textbook writers

open yr eyes, maaaaaan

I must be a masochist ... I got this 700 page book Deconstructing Jack where the guy drains the piss out of every Ripperologist ever. He sez Jack the Ripper don't exist, he was a bunch of guys. I say "like, duh",seems kind of intuitive. I mean there's this chapter long bit on Irish Nationalists and the Times, loads of social history without someone's pet theory getting in the way.

that sounds nice though. does it presume some knowledge about jack the ripper? i confess i don't know a lot about that one.

I have just started tackling it, so I dunno, but I have watched a jillion documentaries and read a bunch of books and my impression is that the whole premise is that Ripperologists are full of shit, so you'd have to be familiar with that culture. There's really no point in the book where says, "here's what went down." I'm into it because I like Victorian history and old newspapers.

I still want to read Bruce Robinson’s Jack the Ripper book because I’m such a withnail nerd

New book on the Bruce McArthur killings in Toronto:

http://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/1191-1/C8C/36D/42/%7BC8C36D42-756A-4B8A-9787-1BE4BE959616%7DImg400.jpg

Another CIA book worth a look, tho I have 0 idea how accurate: The CIA and The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy, popular among New Lefties in 70,s although it's been updated and superseded by The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, most recent ed. that I've seen is 2003.

Prob got the Contras in there, with Noriega playing and plying all sides, incl. various Colombian associates.

started this yesterday, already nearly halfway done. nothing really new to me yet because i live here and i had read all the articles but may be more interesting to the uninitiated.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51cFhDXSUEL._SY346_.jpg

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/zodiac-killer-cipher-solved-amateur-codebreakers-51-years/

i need a new one

Just started this (quote from Jeff Guinn on the jacket):

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1585172862i/52041387._UY400_SS400_.jpg

oooooh

I'm always plugging this site--you can get it pretty cheap here.

https://bookoutlet.ca/Store/Search?qf=All&q=we+keep+the+dead+close

Chaos seems to be £0.99 on Kindle this month in the U.K.

So fucked up, esp. toward the end----and "deathbed confession"=somebody in the newsroom finally heard about the attorney's memoir? I'd like to read it---like, what *else* did he do/not do?? Meanwhile, I assume this is pretty much the same as the NY Times paywalled version: https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/kidnapping-what-kidnapping-the-irish-pair-arrested-in-one-of-new-york-s-most-bizarre-cases-1.4648464

Interesting piece on how true crime heightens anxiety. I've never engaged in the genre so no idea whether it's true or not.

https://www.gawker.com/culture/true-crime-is-rotting-our-brains

it's a lot more true in the past decade with podcasts and netflix and stuff. like anything now you need to get clicks and more sensationalism = more clicks = more anxiety about crime. i don't listen to that many of the podcasts and have not heard my favorite murder but from what i know about it i agree with bergquist's thesis. but yeah i am really bothered by how a lot of it plays into very right wing narratives about crime. i am still a true crime consumer but always try to select for...not that stuff.

i mean a lot more interested in historical, deep dives into like why did this person end up this way, how did the cops/prosecutors screw this up, etc.