Book Review: Conan Doyle for the Defense

Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer
Margalit Fox
True crime

This is a pretty good book, but it's probably a better book if you haven't already read a half-dozen other pretty good books covering the same material. For one thing, the Oscar Slater case isn't truly a  "forgotten cause célebrè". For another, Arthur Conan Doyle's role--while certainly extremely important--isn't quite what Margalit Fox would like you to think. 

Finally, Margalit Fox is intent on fitting Doyle, Slater, and the crime into an overarching narrative about Social Justice and The Victorian Mind and Other Big Important Issues. She's far more right than wrong; but the real world is not actually this neat, and she has to do some judicious editing, hand-waving, and generalizing to make everything go where it's supposed to.

To summarize quite a bit, here's Fox's story:

1. The murder in question was a sensation at the time and a major event in the evolution of he justice system. (Exaggerated)
2. The choice of Oscar Slater as culprit had more to do with contemporary social attitudes, particularly anxiety towards aliens, than anything else. (True)
3. The police investigation was a travesty. (True in spades)
4. Slater's guilt was not discovered but constructed. (True)
5. Conan Doyle was a genuinely admirable person, and exemplifies the virtues of his time as much as the bogus investigation and trial exemplified its vices. (Largely true, but incomplete)
6. Without Doyle, Slater would never have been released. (Exaggerated)

The truth is that many, many people other than Doyle knew that the verdict was a gross miscarriage of justice. Doyle's major contributions were to write an outstanding and devastating summation and analysis of the case, which nonetheless didn't get Slater released, and to lend his enormous prestige and his connections to the cause.

Look: I liked the book. It has great pacing, a generally sound thesis, some magnificent character portraits, pathos, and a fine sense of time and place. Whether it would be a better book if it were more restrained and less carefully topiaried into shape is an unanswerable question. 

Book Review: City of Devils

City of Devils: The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai
Paul French
Biography, history, "true" crime

Let's start a representative quote. It's opening night at Farren's, the glittering jewel in the crown of Shanghai's hectic eve-of-war demimonde of nightclubs and gambling venues:

Here's the honorary Cuban consul, a man with his hand permanently out for cumshaw; the slimeball Portuguese commercial attaché, talking up Macao's neutrality with his arm round the honorary Brazilian consul--the Portuguese mobs paid both men three times as much as their government salaries in squeeze every month. Here also is the nest-feathering brigade of officials from swamps like Venezuela, Mexico, Chile, all with passports for sale and letters of transit falling like confetti, no worth more than gold. A Portuguese visa had been a few hundred dollars' cumshaw to a corrupt official a year before; now the price is treble, quadruple. Still they mingle--Portuguese bossman Fat Tony Perpetuo, Macassared hair slicked back with some simmering señorita on his arm, trades gossip with fellow countryman José Boletho, while the consults in white linen suits hover near and smile through nicotine-stained teeth.

Here's the thing: "letters of transit" do not exist. They're a plot device made up for the movie Casablanca. Paul French either doesn't know or doesn't care; he refers to them at least twice more.

That's City of Devils for you. Lively, beautifully visual, fast-paced, written in the best choppy hard-boiled style, visceral, an incredible sense of place, full to the bursting of cinematic scenes and sharply-delineated characters . . . and it's bollocks. Not all bollocks. Probably a good half of it might be true. Good luck figuring out which half, though.

It's a ripping yarn, mind you. It's written like a combination of Raymond Chandler and Sebastian (The Perfect Storm) Junger. If you made a movie about it, which could easily happen, it'd be a kind of art-deco Blade Runner. Definitely read City of Devils if you like this sort of thing. Just keep in mind that some unknown fraction of it is bollocks.

Book Review: Killers of the Flower Moon

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
David Grann
Crime, History

David Grann's previous book, The Lost City of Z, is an extraordinary saga of Amazon exploration, lost civilizations, and mystery--one that wouldn't be out of place in a pulp adventure, except that it really happened. Killers of the Flower Moon is likewise almost too good to be true, but it's a darker and harder story: not adventure, but noir.

At first blush, the two books might seem wildly disparate. What do lost pre-Columbian jungle cities have to do with Oklahoma in the 1920s? At a closer look, though, there are things that unite them. Like its predecessor, Killers of the Flower Moon has an iconic, little-remembered central figure (the lawman Thomas White). It has some searching detective work and follow-up by David Grann himself. Most crucially, it shares a theme--the theme of Euro-Americans' blind persistence, and persistent blindness, in trying to force this continent's natives into a particular narrative mold.

I don't want to go into more detail, because I don't want to spoil the book. David Grann is a terrifically kinetic writer; like The Lost City of Z, Killers of the Flower Moon goes from zero to unstoppable within a chapter. He also has a gift for describing highly colorful events without resorting to highly colorful prose, while still bringing out their full dramatic--and, in this case, genuinely shocking--resonance. 

Killers of the Flower Moon is not a cheerful read, but it's a good one. It's a real-life detective story. It's a sad but illuminating look at an almost-forgotten episode. It's hard to put down. It's harder to ignore.