The Crime Lady V2, #10: Lethal Decisions
Dear TCL Readers:
March was positively lion-like over here, at least in terms of my workload. Somehow I traveled at a similar pace to last fall, doing events in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Ohio, and New Orleans. Book research and reporting continues as well, with more travel planned for that. But it means I’m not writing at a pace I would like, even though I accept it will happen in due time.
But one piece I did write last month, and that I am quite proud of, is up at CrimeReads this week. It’s about Sandy Fawkes, an ambitious British journalist with a traumatic past on a visit to America in the hopes of landing a new gig and furthering her career, and her weeklong fling with a younger man she would eventually learn had murdered about 20 people over the summer and fall months of 1974. Fawkes gave a firsthand account of her encounter with the man she knew as Lester Daryl Golden to the Atlanta Constitution in November 1974, and published a book about it called Killing Time in 1977.
I’d heard about Killing Time and Sandy Fawkes from Megan Abbott a few years ago, when she showed me her copy of the first edition. I hadn’t heard of Fawkes, or the killer, or the story, and it seemed utterly unbelievable to me. I filed it away, sensing I would write about it but not ready to do the work of peeling away the layers of ridicule and vitriol and dark comedy that accompanied the book’s initial release (and subsequent reissues.) At times, perhaps as a defense mechanism, I’d forget the title and Fawkes’ name. As if I couldn’t bear to have this story lodged in my memory.
I thought of Sandy again when Netflix released The Ted Bundy Tapes, the nonfiction documentary companion to Joe Berlinger’s upcoming biopic on that serial killer. I thought of her while reading feature stories and hot takes and measured criticism that the documentary didn’t center the victims. I thought of Sandy because her story doesn’t fit, and it cannot supersede the brutality of her brief lover’s crimes. But I also thought of her because when I learned why Fawkes broke up with the man she called Daryl — that she had work deadlines and a plane to catch back to London — honest to god, it was the most relatable thing I had read all year.
Sandy Fawkes had a sensational story to tell. Most of the tellings, including hers, amped up the sensation. Within two pages of reading Killing Time I suspected there was quite a different story at work. One of a fortysomething woman unafraid to be ambitious because she had paid a terrible price for trying out a more conventional life in her twenties and thirties. One of damage leading to more damage, terrible decisions cascading together like an unholy row of dominoes.
By the time Fawkes died in 2005, I believe she had a much fuller awareness of that damage, and that her brush with death, a near-miss that another earlier weeklong fling of “Daryl” did not live to share, wasn’t a joke and actually mattered. After writing my piece, I feel like I understood her better. I hope the rest of us can too, even a little.
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EVENTS
I mentioned this in the last newsletter, but it’s worth repeating that I will be at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Sunday, April 14 at 3:30 PM to speak about chasing hidden stories with Mark Bowden (whose new book, The Last Stone, I am reading right now), Margaret Leslie Davis, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, all of us moderated by LAT transportation reporter Laura J. Nelson.
And on Tuesday, April 23 at 7 PM, I’ll be giving a talk at the Soloway JCC in my hometown of Ottawa. I’ll already be home for Passover, so this is an added bonus.
READ/WATCH/LISTEN
I can’t stop marveling about Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. It’s a marvelous rethinking of black women’s lives from the 1890s through the 1930s, seeing their quest for autonomy and independence and sexual liberation for what they really were, not through the distorted societal lens of disapproval or criminality (and arrest for breaking laws that have long since been outlawed.) Reading it cracked my brain open to writing history differently, even as it also confirmed some of my own existing instincts and obsessions. We need this book, and far more books like it.
The new season of CBC’s Uncover podcast is all about a cluster of men who went missing from Toronto’s gay village between 2010 and 2014, and how their killer — Bruce MacArthur — should have been caught by police years before he was, if not for severe investigation mishandling. Justin Ling hosts and reports, and two episodes in I can tell this will be a standout podcast.
Us, the new film directed by Jordan Peele, was unbearably upsetting to watch. That’s on me, because I find horror films difficult to endure, but I also knew, even as the visceral reaction was to get the hell out of the theater, the cerebral one was to stay in my seat. I’m so glad I did. What a brilliant piece of filmmaking. There’s a lot going on, but more to the point, it’s masterful entertainment.
Forthcoming books I recommend highly: Patsy, by Nicole Dennis-Benn; Girls Like Us, by Cristina Alger; We Went To the Woods, by Caite Dolan-Leach; American Predator, by Maureen Callahan; and something outside the realm of crime but which I want to discuss with anyone who ends up reading it: Flash Count Diary, by Darcey Steinke.
The rest of Topic’s crime-themed issued rolled out over the course of March; my favorite piece was Michelle Legro’s Q&A with courtroom artist Marilyn French, reminiscing on the thousands of trials, famous and less so, she attended and drew.
Angie Kim’s Miracle Creek is a debut crime novel I am so looking forward to reading soon. Tiding me over, though, is this Q&A she conducted with Laura Lippman, Alison Gaylin, and Alafair Burke.
You may not have realized you needed a Yiddish explainer in your life, but you do, and Rokhl Kafrissen wrote it.
Leah Carroll published an amazing essay about befriending the daughter of her mother’s murderer.
I’ll always read Stacy Schiff on Vladimir Nabokov. And while I normally don’t call attention to negative reviews of my book, do feel honor-bound to mention Brian Boyd’s criticism (albeit mostly to express bafflement; I figured I’d ruffle some Nabokovian feathers but did not think it would take this long!)
That’s it for now. Pesach travel beckons later in April (which is why no Edgar Awards for me this year), as do some pressing deadlines. But around the time April turns to May, I’ll be back with another original story for subscribers to the paid edition. So if you want to get on that, there’s a button for it:
Until then, I remain,
The Crime Lady