by Bruce Robinson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 13, 2015
A ripping good read, strange, suggestive, and memorable.
A wild ride down the back alleys of London in the service of "Ripperology.”
His title dripping with irony, British director/screenwriter/actor Robinson (The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman, 1999, etc.) takes aim at the pieties of Victorian Britain, a time when sex, drugs, and the moral equivalent of rock ’n’ roll were readily available to anyone who could afford them. Against a setting of streetwalkers and junkies, the author opposes the old boys of the empire (“Kitchener was an imperious bully even when he didn’t need to be”), stout fellows who exchanged secret handshakes and kept one another’s secrets—good reason, one might think, to suspect that the penny-dreadful serial killer nicknamed Jack the Ripper might have been a card-carrying member. He was no Rotarian or Elk, Robinson continues, but a full-fledged Freemason, and his secret was protected through a web of accident and design, doubtless with the assistance of the cops—for the commissioner of Metropolitan Police, “a lousy cop and a worse soldier” whose “God inclined to the hard right—probably something like Kitchener in freshly laundered clouds,” made sure that the Ripper was untroubled by justice, whether by ineptitude or design. Robinson names names, eventually settling on a fellow close to another fellow on whom suspicion has fallen and lifted and fallen again for a dozen decades now: “the conspiracy to airbrush [him] out of his own history was cooked up a very long time ago.” The book takes a whirlwind tour of a lost world, with its Dickensian “street Arabs” and cockney rhymes. Whether Robinson has hit on the solution to the Ripper’s identity, finally, will be a matter for Ripperologists and criminologists alike to debate. What he has done is to produce a lively, oddball work of literature that blends true crime, social history, and the occasional whiff of psychedelia into an utterly original whole—good reason for the book to have been longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.
A ripping good read, strange, suggestive, and memorable.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-229637-5
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2015
HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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by Truman Capote ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 7, 1965
"There's got to be something wrong with somebody who'd do a thing like that." This is Perry Edward Smith, talking about himself. "Deal me out, baby...I'm a normal." This is Richard Eugene Hickock, talking about himself. They're as sick a pair as Leopold and Loeb and together they killed a mother, a father, a pretty 17-year-old and her brother, none of whom they'd seen before, in cold blood. A couple of days before they had bought a 100 foot rope to garrote them—enough for ten people if necessary. This small pogrom took place in Holcomb, Kansas, a lonesome town on a flat, limitless landscape: a depot, a store, a cafe, two filling stations, 270 inhabitants. The natives refer to it as "out there." It occurred in 1959 and Capote has spent five years, almost all of the time which has since elapsed, in following up this crime which made no sense, had no motive, left few clues—just a footprint and a remembered conversation. Capote's alternating dossier Shifts from the victims, the Clutter family, to the boy who had loved Nancy Clutter, and her best friend, to the neighbors, and to the recently paroled perpetrators: Perry, with a stunted child's legs and a changeling's face, and Dick, who had one squinting eye but a "smile that works." They had been cellmates at the Kansas State Penitentiary where another prisoner had told them about the Clutters—he'd hired out once on Mr. Clutter's farm and thought that Mr. Clutter was perhaps rich. And this is the lead which finally broke the case after Perry and Dick had drifted down to Mexico, back to the midwest, been seen in Kansas City, and were finally picked up in Las Vegas. The last, even more terrible chapters, deal with their confessions, the law man who wanted to see them hanged, back to back, the trial begun in 1960, the post-ponements of the execution, and finally the walk to "The Corner" and Perry's soft-spoken words—"It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize." It's a magnificent job—this American tragedy—with the incomparable Capote touches throughout. There may never have been a perfect crime, but if there ever has been a perfect reconstruction of one, surely this must be it.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1965
ISBN: 0375507906
Page Count: 343
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1965
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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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