Cold Hard Crime

By John Hood

Americans dig their crime. And why shouldn’t we? We’re the most crime-committing nation on the planet. Hell, if I didn’t know any better (and I generally don’t), I’d say we commit crimes just for the fun of it. We certainly commit ’em outta spite. Outta spite is outta crime.

Since we dig committing crimes so much, mad reason would indicate that we’d also dig reading all about it, from the depths to the heights and beyond. Which would kinda make editor Harold Schechter’s mammoth True Crime: An American Anthology (Library of America $40) a book after our cold hard hearts now, wouldn’t it?

Of course it would. But to call True Crime a mere book is like calling Hearst Castle a simple house. It is that massive. Actually, at nearly 800 pages, Schechter’s killer collection might better be called a doorstop — for a walk-in vault. But you sure as hell wouldn’t wanna use it as such, because then you’d miss out on all the wildness within its ever-liberating confines.

And “wild” barely even begins to describe the utter insanity contained herein, which begins with the Pilgrims (William Bradford’s The Hanging of John Billington) and ends with the Menendez brothers’ shotgun murder of their very own parents (Dominick Dunne’s Nightmare on Elm Drive).

In between, the book is a beast, and it’s teeming with the beastliest deeds ever chronicled by some of the best chroniclers ever to put ink to parchment, from the historical (Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln) to the hysterical (W.T. Brannon), and the classic of old (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain) and not so old (Alexander Woollcott, Theodore Dreiser). There’s fist-bricked newspaper columnists (Damon Runyon, Jimmy Breslin, H.L. Mencken), one of their most brawl-bearing magazine counterparts (A.J. Leibling), and a gentleman storyteller who bridged both worlds and came up unbeatable (Joseph Mitchell). 

And there are women here, among them Susan Glaspell (The Hossack Murder), Zora Neale Hurston (The Trial of Ruby McCollum), Elizabeth Hardwick (The Life and Death of Caryl Chessman), and Miriam Allen deFord (Superman’s Crime: Loeb and Leopold).

Most infamously, perhaps, are the scribes whose crime-writing would go on to make them famous on screens big and small. Men like Herbert Asbury (The Gangs of New York), Jim The Grifters Thompson (Ditch of Doom), Jack Dragnet Webb (The Black Dahlia), Truman In Cold Blood Capote (Then It All Came Down), and James L.A. Confidential Ellroy (My Mother’s Killer).

But by far the most representative writer included in this crime Bible is one Jay Robert Nash (The Turner-Stompanato Killing: A Family Affair), the cat whose more than 70 works are fervent attempts to capture each and every criminal America’s ever produced and put them between covers. Then again, what do you expect from a scribe whose spillful, spiteful Bloodletters and Badmen subs out with: A Who's Who of Vile Men (and Women) Wanted For Every Crime in the Book?

You want crime? True Crime’s got it. And then some. Just so long as you’re not afraid to do the time.

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