A pleasantly instructive social history.
Sprightly look at the parochial mid-19th-century England that produced an infamous serial poisoner.
Guardian journalist Bates (The Photographer’s Boy, 2013, etc.) displays his fine understanding of Charles Dickens’ world in his portrayal of roguish, wayward Dr. William Palmer, whose mounting gambling debts caused great mental anguish and eventually prompted him to poison several people dearest to him. Since Bates begins with Palmer’s public hanging on June 14, 1856, having been handily convicted by jury of the poisoning death of his racing buddy John Parsons Cook, there is no peril of spoiling the ending, and therein lies the author’s challenge: how to maintain the tension and suspense of a murder tale. Bates succeeds with his lively characterizations and by sprinkling some hints of doubt on Palmer’s guilt: He never confessed, and evidence of strychnine was not discovered in the corpse (probably from lack of stringent or accurate analysis). Palmer makes for a curiously bland, hence chillingly ordinary and indifferent villain. A resident of his provincial hometown of Rugeley, he had been trained as a doctor, but his family inheritance allowed him to fall into rascally ways, from heavy drinking to seducing young ladies to betting on horse racing. At the time of Cook’s death, after a day and night of winning and drinking at the races, Palmer had two other recent questionable deaths to explain: his alcoholic brother, Walter, and Palmer’s wife, Ann. In both cases, just before their deaths, Palmer had taken out an insurance policy on their lives from the Prince of Wales Insurance Office. The author sifts all kinds of other circumstantial evidence—e.g., Palmer’s purchase of strychnine and his affair with and blackmail by “Jane.” Moreover, Bates considers the role of the rabid press, moneylenders, solicitors, judges and jury—with amusing illustrations.
A pleasantly instructive social history.Pub Date: May 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4683-0911-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
None
This memoir of a childhood acquaintance who became a peripheral casualty of social turmoil is affecting despite a curious remoteness. Loizeaux (Anna: A Daughter's Life, 1993) revisits the suburban New Jersey of his childhood to exhume the story of a charismatic schoolmate of mixed race, William ``Rabbit'' Wells, mistakenly shot and killed by a young police officer, William Sorgie, in 1973. This account of Wells's life and death is indisputably a structural marvel, nimbly flitting back and forth in time in a way that should be confusing but isn't, thanks to his unfailingly clear prose and his eye for the detail that instantly impresses a scene on the mind. Piecing together a fragmented image of Wells—and, much less distinctly, the still-living Sorgie—Loizeaux flirts again and again with the circumstances of Jan. 13, 1973, but leaves the heart of the matter to a powerful climactic narrative. But while precise, Loizeaux's style also exhibits a sort of contrived-sounding hauntedness. For despite apposite autobiographical touches, the book doesn't really establish the source of the author's depth of feeling for Wells, as manifested in sometimes almost incantatory writing and heavy-handed symbolism. And while the transitory presence Wells had, even for those who became closest to him, understandably makes for a dearth of solid facts 25 years later, Loizeaux's rather flat novelistic reconstructions of speculative events become unwelcome as they mount up, repetitively signaled by phrases like ``I can imagine . . .'' or ``I suppose. . . .'' Ultimately, the wounds seem to have healed long ago (albeit with visible scar tissue) and been overtaken by broader upheavals. Thus, this story's power resides in its careful reckoning of a personal loss, not in the ``echoes of our national life''— Vietnam, urban rioting—that he perfunctorily refers to. Still, a quietly heroic rescue of a pointlessly stolen life, and an evocative snapshot of an extraordinary moment in an ordinary place.
None NonePub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55970-380-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
A haunting look at the phenomenon of missing persons. Scottish journalist O'Hagan explored the United Kingdom in search of stories of people who have vanished. He begins with his own grandfather, a sailor lost at sea, and continues the search through the ugly tenements where he grew up—and where several boys were lost. He interviews the families of these children, and their agony is horribly vivid. One father happened upon a look-alike of his missing son and almost begged the boy to move to his house and pretend to be his son. Other parents obsessively flip through photographs of their missing children, forever frozen in time at the age they were when taken. The police call the vanished ``mispers,'' for missing persons, and are only now beginning to compile records on the subject. O'Hagan also visits a grim center for homeless teens, where the residents do their best to sever any remaining familial ties. He follows the trail of a number of lost girls to the home of Fred West, who killed at least 25 female boarders and buried them in his backyard. These stories are unrelenting, and O'Hagan presents solid insights into both the minds of the families and those of some who've deliberately disappeared. But the grisly litany would have been better served by the presence of real insight into why people vanish. He revisits the murder scene of James Bulger, a young boy killed by two 10-year-olds, and recounts episodes of his own cruelty, as a child, toward other children. But while O'Hagan raises the fascinating specter of child sadism, he doesn't speculate on its causes, quickly dropping the matter. Though somewhat lacking in a sense of the big picture, this is a powerfully observed and often heartbreaking portrait in miniature of those who disappear and the effect on those they leave behind.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-56584-335-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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