March 20, 2023

Say Nothing · Furious Hours · My Friend Anna

Plus: What we were considering this weekend

the true crime that's worth your time

Happy Sarah’s birthday week! That’s right, my favorite bookseller, partner in true crime, and fellow Deadwood-apathetic, Sarah D. Bunting, is turning 50 this week. As anyone here who has hit that milestone knows, it’s both an empowering and surreal birthday, and she tells me she’ll be spending it lazing around and reading. (She also got a stunning new hairdo, but I’ll let her tell you about that one.)

While Sarah enjoys her week, I’ll be flying solo, so thanks in advance for your patience with me and my quirks. We also have a special birthday treat for you: This week, you can celebrate her birthday with a Best Evidence sale of only $50 a year, a notable discount of the annual price of $55 and a big-time price chop off our monthly $5 subscription.

It’s a lovely way to mark Sarah’s birthday and help us keep this publication afloat.

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And now, to kick Sarah’s birthday week off, I’m resurfacing some of my favorite bonus book reviews from the earliest days of Best Evidence. Subscribers from day one might remember these reviews, and if so feel free to scroll on past to a little headline roundup at the bottom of this thing. Otherwise, settle in to some classic BE writing from the birthday girl, herself. Enjoy! — EB

Originally published on Dec. 31, 2019: Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe

The crime
The book jacket gets right to it: "In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never saw her again. Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as the Troubles."

The story
The jacket also calls Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland a "stunning intricate narrative," and I won't bury the lede; that is accurate. I gave Say Nothing five stars on Goodreads, and while it's more like four and three quarters, that quarter star is deducted because there are alleys the narrative moves past, glances down, that seem just as fascinating and steeped in bloody rue as the one Radden Keefe's chosen...but that's not really a sporting complaint, exactly. "Why didn't this excellent conveyor of such a complex and fascinating tale write MORE" is a problem you want in this job.

Radden Keefe's writing really is excellent, albeit mostly unobtrusive in that way New Yorker staffers have of being themselves, but also being "the house." He got me on the very first page, describing Jean McConville's straitened circumstances and then concluding his opening graf with "so Jean McConville wasn't looking for any prizes, and she didn't get any." A few sentences later, he uses "dank and hulking" to describe a public housing complex, which is exactly what they all are, all over the world. From there, he dives into the Troubles, moving from McConville's abduction to IRA soldier Dolours Price and back with flawless timing -- just when you think to yourself, "Isn't it time to get back to the McConville kids?", Radden Keefe clears his throat with a chapter break, and does just that -- and corralling an immense and contested history by focusing on a few key figures. (One Protestant unionist in particular, a "stout, jug-eared forty-four-year-old man named Ronald Bunting," was not a welcome addition to the narrative for this reader, but at least I'm no relation.)

The book's got everything this Bunting wants in historical/"prestige" true crime: fugitive procedural bits (the sequence on p. 83 detailing an entire pub's pitching in to help prison escapees by handing over their own clothes); clarity of timeline; a balance between including all the relevant facts of an event, often a disputed one, and maintaining pace in the prose. There's even some chilly shade, but in the best New Yorker style: crisp, but faint, like a thin ribbon of minty smoke. Radden Keefe repeatedly notes, but doesn't over-eyeroll, the way contemporary accounts of Dolours and Marian Price's exploits condescended to the Price sisters and to feminism. Even better is his depiction of Gerry Adams, who as the narrative moves through time becomes less of a brave, embattled rogue general and "acquire[s] the air of a hip, if slightly pompous, public intellectual. He published a book of gauzy remembrances about his childhood in the Falls. He stroked his beard. He appointed a press aide" (206). I think this is both a good shorthand for how many people also feel about Adams's evolution into a politician, and a function of Radden Keefe's frustration at Adams's refusal to participate, but whatever the case, if you need something withered, g'head and point "gauzy remembrances" at it.

Say Nothing slows down a bit in the back third, as the Boston College project begins to cause problems for investigators and participants alike -- but I'm not NOT here for a tale in which academics place fiefdom maintenance ahead of good journalistic practice, and as he does everywhere else in the book, Radden Keefe does an elegant job unpacking the issues without preaching. And there's a reveal about one of the Price sisters close to the end that's timed perfectly; again, just as you're wondering about a certain gap in that part of the story, Radden Keefe closes it to devastating effect.

Say Nothing is one of those books that may seem at first glance like homework: the black jacket, the decades of history many readers will have zero grounding in. It isn't; it's outstanding writing, and I hate the word "immersive" but sometimes I gots no choice. Great book to close the year on, and I highly recommend it. — SDB

Originally sent to subscribers in Sept., 2019: Furious Hours, by Casey Cep

The crime
It's more complicated than the book jacket's rendering, what with the voodoo rumors and the insurance fraud and whatnot, but the inside cover of Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee makes a start: "Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in the 1970s. With the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative shot him dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell's murderer was acquitted -- thanks to the same attorney who had previously defended the Reverend."

…Well, and thanks to the situation having long since shaped up as one of those "ain't a court in the land"-ers in which the local constabulary had to pretend Robert Burns hadn't done them, his prospective future wives and in-laws, and a dozen insurance claims adjusters a huge solid. But there's also the figurative crime that is Harper Lee's meticulous research into the various cases that she just couldn't turn into a book.

The story
Casey Cep is actually keeping four stories in the air in Furious Hours: Maxwell and his diabolically clever murder schemes; the vengeance Robert Burns enacted, and how it would be adjudicated; the attorney who represented them both while trying to have a political career as a deep-South liberal; and everything that brought Harper Lee to that crossroads with them. And I mean everything -- her childhood, To Kill A Mockingbird, her pivotal role in researching In Cold Blood with Truman Capote, and the nothing she wound up with after spending years in the Maxwell/Burns cases.

You'd expect a tiny-fonted doorstop of a result, but the main body of the book in hardcover is 276 pages, and "how'd she do that" was my reaction not just to the elegant length but to the ways Cep begins waaaaay back at the beginning of a significant figure's life, then drops the reader at the same crossroads after a well-written and pleasant but informationally dense drive through the contextual countryside. 

Book's damn good, is m'point. And Cep makes it look effortless, even covering fairly well-trodden ground; the section on Capote and Lee's travels in Kansas is terrain that's well known to me, an inveterate re-reader of Plimpton et al.'s oral-history biography of Capote, but the Lee-POV perspective makes it fresh. Cep writes with warm sympathy about Lee's lack of output, without getting too meta; provides flavor of time and place, but doesn't condescend.

Early on, I occasionally wondered if the writing weren't getting stalled in self-regarding descriptions of, for instance, the summer-afternoon shelling of peas or a brief history of the life-insurance industry -- but the prose is good enough ("hills that…make every sight a sudden one"; a courthouse "packed tight as a box of crayons"), and the intel provided pertinent enough, that a couple dozen pages in, I decided to trust Cep's judgment. Do I need to know this much about Tom Radney's run for office? Well, Cep left it in here, so: yes. 

Furious Hours strikes the right balance between scene-setting and reporting; she puts the things we can't know about how Maxwell made his victims' deaths look accidental, and the things we can't know about why Lee's career was mostly ellipsis, side-by-side as the deliciously frustrating sort of mysteries, but lets the comparisons remain subtext. When she writes on p. 240 of Lee's attempt to gather her reporting into a narrative, "she needed a protagonist to place at the center of her story but it wasn't obvious who that might be," it struck me that the same held true for Cep, but that she succeeded in choosing a protagonist, and that it may be the story itself. 

It's a crime story, but one that synthesizes that story with history, Capote goss, and inside-baseball publishing agita in the Buntnippiest way. A pleasure to read and to recommend -- thanks for picking this one for me! And, of course, as always, for your support. — SDB

Originally sent to subscribers in Aug, 2019: My Friend Anna, by Rachel DeLoache Williams

The crime
Subtitled, "The True Story Of A Fake Heiress" is Rachel DeLoache Williams's memoir, for lack of a better term, of her friendship with Anna "Delvey" Sorokin, and its literal cost. Sorokin was, as most of you will remember, the brightest star in last year's Summer Of Scam firmament and is currently a guest of the state of New York, doing four to 12 for larceny, grand larceny, and theft of services.

Strictly speaking, though, she's not on the hook for...

The story
...the 62K she chiseled out of DeLoache Williams (hereafter, RDW; it's faster to type) for a Marrakech hotel bill and various other charges RDW, a staffer at Vanity Fair at the time, couldn't afford to cover. RDW wrote about her experience with Sorokin -- the easy-luxury atmosphere that covered a many-card monte; the Clark Rockefellerian "forgetting" of the wallet, thus obliging others to cover dinners and spa treatments "for now" -- for VF last year when the story was just heating up, and one suspects that the account's expansion into a book is as much the publishing industry helping its own to cover a bill not eligible for restitution as it is a genuine belief that there's more to this particular story.

That's frequently the rub with books based on Vanity Fair pieces, and I'll get back to that in a second. First, the lede: the book is quite good. The publishing industry is helping its own with polished, clean prose, and the opening sequence -- the scene of the crime, the La Mamounia hotel at which RDW's Amexes got loaded up with tens of thousands of charges, "temporarily" -- gives an excellent sense of the vague disorientation of travel, and how it's unsettling and adrenalizing by turns, and the pacing mirrors the buzzed confusion of vacations and nights out that Sorokin leveraged. 

RDW also illustrates without underlining it the way a con will get you "into the deeper water with her," testing your financial fitness and your emotional vulnerability at the same time, sllllowly taking you farther from safety. And the last section of the book, in which RDW tries to report Sorokin and seek redress, is thought-provoking, because: what would you do? what is there to do, when you turned the card over willingly, and signed? whom do you call? and what con isn't counting on you, ashamed and overwhelmed, to do nothing?

It's not perfect, though; My Friend Anna comes in under 300 pages, but should have been even shorter. Vanity Fair does a lot of over-describing the literal appointments of wealth, and that's its brand, so you always expect a little bit of sweaty prose about the banquettes at exclusive restaurants or whatever, like, we know what bottle service is, get to the point.

My Friend Anna has numerous garbage-time passages of that sort: perfectly well-written and evocative grafs on the layout of the Library bar, or who wore what name brands to a pedicure. I don't love making this comparison because RDW's writing is so much smoother and smarter, but in those sequences, it brought Bachelorette Andi's books to mind. Stop "influencer"-ing and just tell us what happened, in other words.  

But that's not on RDW, whose work I'd read more of, because like the majority of Vanity Fair articles on true crime that leave you wanting more at the end, you wanted more not because there necessarily was any more but because that's the nature of the genre. To put it another way, we want to know exactly how and why, particularly with stories of cons, but we consume those stories because there is no knowing, not in spite of it. It's more of the story we want, not more of the teller. RDW is a very good teller; this is a very good story; the book has intel about how court proceedings ended that the original article doesn't. But if you read the original article, you don't "need" My Friend Anna, because the "more" you want from it, it can't give you.

If you find yourself at the airport with no battery, however, and the book's at a Hudson News? Grab it. Perfect for a plane ride, and you can leave it for the next person. — SDB

And now, three items from this weekend:

Police Killed His Son. Prosecutors Charged The Teen’s Friends With His Murder. [The Appeal]

This joint report with the Phoenix New Times is a tough read, especially if the seemingly endless supply of police misconduct and abuse reporting has you down. But if you’re up for it (as I was on Saturday afternoon, unencumbered by weekday stresses), this is an essential read about the lengths members of law enforcement will go to avoid accountability — and to punish those who dare question them. Snip:

It has been more than four years since a Phoenix police officer killed Jacob Harris, on January 11, 2019. The police department has since drawn a federal investigation into its use of deadly force. But Roland Harris’s fight for accountability has only left him with more questions: Why did police delete text messages from the night of his son’s shooting? Why are Jacob’s friends the only ones who have been held responsible for his death? How could anyone say his son’s killing was justified?

Harris’s search for answers has come at a significant cost: The cop who killed his son has demanded he pay the officer’s $40,000 attorney fees after a federal court dismissed Harris’s wrongful death suit. Harris and his wife split, in part, he says, because he became so deeply consumed by getting justice for his son.

“I have a void in my life that is never going to be filled,” Harris said. “Even when justice is served. It’s going to hit even harder. Because then I’ll have to focus on him not being here.”

True Crime and Punishment: An Exchange [The New York Review]

John J. Lennon is a currently incarcerated (murder, drug sales and gun possession) writer who earlier this month covered Sarah Weinman’s book on the Edgar Smith case, Scoundrel for the NY Review in a piece that suggested books like hers exploit criminals and “deepen a thirst for punishment.”

A number of readers who are also stakeholders in cases, Foreign Policy deputy editor James Palmer, and Weinman, herself responded to his piece — and then Lennon responded to the responses. It’s an interesting (and refreshingly civil, given contemporary discourse on, well, everything) back-and-forth, and Lennon refuses to back down…in fact, he arguably doubles down on his initial assessment.

How Doc Filmmaker Liz Garbus Became So Sought-After (Even Harry and Meghan Came Calling) [The Hollywood Reporter]

I didn’t really comprehend the breadth of Garbus’s work until reading this lengthy interview with her — I know her from The Farm: Angola, USA, of course, and The Execution of Wanda Jean, but the intro to this conversation prompted me to flip to her Wikipedia and realize that she’s also had a hand in many of my favorite non-true-crime docs (like Newark mayoral race doc Street Fight).

Reading about her background, and how she chooses projects, gave me a new perspective on her decades of work, and made me understand that my dismissal of her work on Harry and Meghan as a money job was pretty bogus (but I’m probably not going to watch it, still). Snip:

I have no regrets. I don’t know if it was the most watched doc series on Netflix ever, but it certainly was in the first few weeks. [Viewers] came for the love story, or the hot gossip, but were able to stay for other provocative and important stuff. To be able to discuss the history of colonialism with billions of people — when else are people going to pay attention to issues like this?

Tuesday on Best Evidence: Susan Howard on Slenderman

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