Read-Handed: The Big Apple, the White House, and the frozen north
the true crime that's worth your time
Read-Handed is an occasional feature updating you on true-crime books, listens, research etc. that we're in the middle of right now. We hope you'll add YOUR recent reads -- whether you dug the book or DNF'd it partway through -- and what you're looking forward to, too.
new section! ...what's on sale at Exhibit B. Books rn
"New 'n' notables" -- stuff I've recently added to inventory -- are 15% off until January 10. Additions daily, including a whack of Manson-iana and a big stack of aughts Vanity Fairs
Every year, there's a themed section at the bottom of the homepage; for 2025, it's prolific genre authors -- and the fortnight's featured author is 20% off. Right now it's Vincent Bugliosi, with Kathryn Casey and Wensley Clarkson coming up.
And finally, 'tis the season to feel skint and try to sell off some stuff, so if you've got a box of reasonably well-kept true crime you'd like me to look at, here's how you do that.
just finished
The Elissas, Samantha Leach // Didn't quite work for me, as noted. Dumb Celebrity Memoir Club is tackling Paris next, so we'll see how that compares.
"Rosalynn Carter Hired a Wrongfully Convicted Murderer to Serve as White House Nanny. They Remained Lifelong Friends," Time // This story resurfaced after Jimmy Carter's death last week; Carter wrote about Mary Prince and her conviction in his 2006 book.
"Spilling Secrets," Vanity Fair April 2006 // Dominick Dunne opened his column that month with a remembrance of/re-introduction to Dorothy Kilgallen, the crime reporter and What's My Line? panelist whose own death is thought by some not to have been accidental, and to have been tied to her investigation into the JFK assassination. Dunne's editorializing on her appearance isn't his best look, and neither is the part of Dunne's interest in Kilgallen stemming from their shared status as objects of Sinatra's ire...
Kilgallen was not a pretty woman. She had an unfortunate chin, which robbed her face of beauty, but on opening nights and at El Morocco and the Stork Club she projected an aura of glamour with her magnificent evening dresses and jewels. She had wit, power, and a mean streak. Everybody read her, and a lot of people were afraid of her. Frank Sinatra hated her.
...but he does a good job, in that inimitable Dunne fashion, of bold-typing why Kilgallen's death continues to seem suspicious. The column goes on to discuss Michael Skakel, James Sansum, and...Paris Hilton.The Taking of New York City: Crime on the Screen and in the Streets of the Big Apple in the 1970s, Andrew J. Rausch // I reviewed it for paid subscribers last month; it wasn't quite what I'd hoped, and it seemed like it wasn't quite what the author hoped when he set out, either:
It's just not organized the way it wants to be organized, IMO, and inconsistent conviction means flaws in the prose are more glaring, at least to me. The "this was the city that never sleeps in 1972" intros feel like Rausch doesn't really care about them, but this is what he pitched on, so he has to, and neither Rausch nor his editor felt empowered to change the pitch to something more deeply felt.
The Munro sisters, with mother Alice holding Andrea, the youngest. (CTV)
current reads
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Nikolaus Wachsmann // Never sure whether to count war crimes as true crime, but the book is excellent, so why not. I'm listening to this one, in verrry small chunks, because it's a lot. Direct and thorough writing, though, and narrator Paul Hodgson is doing a brilliant job (the choice to pitch up his voice for Nazi "dialogue" so they all sound like Templeton the rat is quite something).
"Alice Munro's Passive Voice," the December 30/January 6 2024 New Yorker // Rachel Aviv does a quite extraordinary job conveying the continuing emotional journey after a trauma like the one Alice Munro's daughter, Andrea, suffered at the hands of Munro's partner, Gerry; the idea that some people just aren't cut out for raising children, and when society insists that everyone do it, slow-motion multiple-car emotional wreckage like this is what you get; and the way the Gerrys of the world, performatively contrary "your calling out my scabrous misbehavior makes YOU intolerant" narcissists who -- correctly -- don't expect consequences for any bad act, think this state of rude existence constitutes a personality, and just keep ruining things, parties, children's sense of safety, on and on, because it's too tiring or uncomfortable to push back or penalize them. That last thing isn't necessarily the point, but I do get the sense that a more unified and consistent "shut the fuck up"/shunning strat might have short-circuited the current political hellscape?
next up
Fred Thompson's Watergate memoir
Jessica Valenti's Abortion, which strictly speaking isn't true crime either, except oh wait Dobbs
Any notes on these texts 'n' tomes? Need therapy for your teetering TBR stack? Scroll down to the comments.