April Bonus Review #2: American Sherlock
An ovewritten slog through the life and career of E.O. Heinrich
the true crime that's worth your time
I suppose I needn’t bother with the rest of the review. Nor do I suppose I have to bother telling you that, were this not “required” reading, I’d have DNF’d the thing on Goodreads with a quickness and moved on to the next book in my stack, a Jerry Orbach bio (which, frankly, I don’t have a ton of hope for either, but that’s a grouse for a different day).
But maybe American Sherlock is for you in a way it isn’t for me, so…on to the autopsy, then?
The crime
American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI is as much…okay, actually I need to stop and talk about the last bit of the subtitle. I will bet you one hundred unmarked non-sequential dollars that someone at Putnam looked at the original subtitle — something like “Murder, Courtroom Drama, and the Birth of American Forensic Science” — and was like, “Well but let’s just futz it for SEO because it’ll mean the same thing!” And Kate Winkler Dawson, well sick of discussing it by that point, said “whatever, fine,” and now it’s this “birth of American CSI” phrase that, thanks to the long-running TV franchise, seems to make sense until you think about it for two seconds, at which point it turns into a clattering word heap trying to imitate the rhythms of a stereotypical prestige-true-crime subhed, having to do the work that the bot-esquely opaque primary title didn’t. I have compassion for Dawson around this but I don’t bring it up for no reason.
Anyway! The crime is not just one, of course, but several of the legendary cases in which Edward Oscar Heinrich’s forensic investigations played a role, including the Fatty Arbuckle case, the d’Autremonts’ really-not-great train robbery, and the David Lamson trials. American Sherlock is as much a biography of Heinrich and his compulsive life and times as it is an overview of various cases.
The story
Dawson is a lecturer at UT’s journalism school, according to her Goodreads profile, and American Sherlock as a work of research is quite good. As a reading experience, it’s deeply tiresome, and I don’t want to pile on too hard here, but the usage errors started on page 6, when Dawson describes “The way [Heinrich’s] round rimless glasses fit extra-snuggly [sic] around his temples.” Later, there is a “making due [sic].”
But the copy editor’s failures aren’t Dawson’s; the primary issue with Dawson’s prose is a certain aspirational overreach diction-wise. An early paragraph on Prohibition is typical of the problem:
Varying levels of corruption tainted local governments and police departments across the country. Judges enjoyed immunity from arrest, and most major cities were ruled by crime bosses. Poverty and unemployment were also responsible for the increase in violent crimes, as many Americans became desperate for security and safety.
It goes on like this, and I can’t put my finger on why it doesn’t work on a sentence level. Part of it is extremely broad statements like the “most major cities” one, which aren’t substantiated and as such are distracting. Part of it is that anyone reading a book like this is likely already familiar with the outlines of Prohibition’s effects on crime and the justice system. Mostly, it’s that it reads like a social-studies paper on the evolution of expert testimony, written in strict adherence to inverted-pyramid essay structure and awaiting re-fonting to Courier to hit the page count. That last clause might seem mean, but there is a lot of space devoted to Palo Alto’s weather; (forensically irrelevant) length and thickness of victims’ hair; explanations of “Hoovervilles,” which, again: anyone who doesn’t know what a Hooverville is can Google it; etc. and so on.
Occasionally, Dawson’s clumsy attempts to marry what she thinks is “high-end” true-crime writing and the rat-a-tat rhythms of a contemporary ink-stained wretch lead to amusing locutions, albeit probably inadvertently. One accused man’s psychological decompensation is described with serendipitous dryness on page 90 — “He lamented about whippings he had received as a child and sulked over his struggles with writing musical poetry” — but this is likely down to the humor inherent in poet histrionics (“said the creative-writing major authoritatively”), versus a deft touch from Dawson.
And the thing is, a deft touch is nice…but it isn’t necessary! I think there’s probably a drive amongst many true-crime authors (and possibly it’s felt more strongly among authors employed in academia) to “elevate” the material, make it something else via a more literary prose attack — or less what it is, less prurient or grimy or whatever writers think people are saying with that eye-flick at cocktail parties when you explain your latest book. Trying to set the work apart from the black covers with the red lettering is an understandable, or at least common, instinct, but I’m about to do a road show for a Beverly Hills, 90210 book, and I just think you have to own your subject or not bother. Plus the black covers with the red lettering aren’t uniformly terrible; when they are terrible, it’s often because the writing is aiming way over its own head with imagistic scene-setting and chapter-end cliffhangers, or weird indentations meant to suggest a victim POV…like, just get to the point. Show me something I haven’t seen. I haven’t read Dawson’s other work, but the impression I’m getting from American Sherlock is that in order to score the pale cover with the carefully curated, matte serif lettering, she felt obliged to generate an impressively starchy pile of 50-cent words describing Christmas 1921, or a shelf of ledgers, or a continental hotel’s wainscoting. But then at the same time she spells one of Heinrich’s rivals’ last names two different ways in the space of a dozen words (270). I can’t imagine a journalism instructor doesn’t understand that it’s always best just to say what happened. The two true-crime authors I think I cite the most frequently, Bill James and Bob Kolker, do that; they come at that understanding of the job from two different directions, but the end result is the same, namely that you don’t have to keep unfogging your glasses while you’re reading, because James and Kolker don’t need us to think the writing is good. And it is, but usually you don’t notice either way, and not for nothing but James covers Los D’Autremont in a page and change in Popular Crime, and I got just as much out of it as I did from a full chapter on it here.
With all of THAT said, I don’t know where to come in on a recommendation; after said train-robbery chapter — which on top of the turgid writing did little to untangle a confusing crime scene — I went into turbo-skim mode, but more to the point I don’t think the filler-y look-Ma writing is going to bother others as much as it does me. Skimming worked great for me, because I didn’t get as tripped up by weird phrasings and idiomangling. It’s just too bad Dawson didn’t trust her material, and write the book that way — quick, purposeful, not looking down or right-clicking for the thesaurus widget. So you might try it that way, but if sweaty prose is a turn-off, skip this one. — SDB