Anatomy of a Murder · Boss Tweed

The crime
Sexual assault, followed by murder. Also, libel — and, meta-textually, McCarthyism. Oh, you’ll see.

The story
I didn’t realize 1959’s Anatomy of a Murder is based — quite closely — on a real story until the paperback showed up in Exhibit B. inventory, complete with contemporaneous hep font, and even then, I assumed it was a novelization. But from the diving board of a “robert traver anatomy murder true story” search string, I plunged into the real case: Robert Traver was the pen name of John D. Voelker, an attorney and fly-fishing nut who had written a few stories and novels that didn’t do much, then decided to turn his hand to writing up “a criminal trial ‘the way it really was.’”

The trial in question, of Lt. Coleman Peterson for the murder of bar owner Mike Chenoweth after Chenoweth (…allegedly) raped Peterson’s wife Charlotte, appealed to Voelker as a subject because it highlighted the “moral ambiguities” of the law (and probably because Voelker, recently voted out of the county prosecutor’s office after years in the position, spent the bulk of his time on flashers and drunk-and-disorderlies in small-town Michigan, and needed the change of pace). Certainly it appealed to 1950s readers, because the book stayed on bestseller lists for over a year…and technically, it is a novel, thanks to different names for the subjects and the addition of more literary subplots.