Category: true crime

This Crazy Thing Called Love

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

I was trying to rearrange things on my bookcase to make room for my latest treasures after last week’s trip to the Friends of the Ferguson Library book shop (stoked I found an almost pristine copy of the Mitford sisters letters in hardcover but it’s a doorstop and a half!) when I managed to knock over the knee high stack of mass market paperbacks next to my dresser. I really need to buckle down and write those V.C. Andrews reviews I’ve been planning one of these days. But instead of settling down with Clan Dollaganger, I found myself putting aside Dominick Dunne’s The Two Mrs Grenvilles. But Friday afternoon found me combing the stacks of the Avon Free Public Library and adding This Crazy Thing Called Love: The Golden World and Fatal Marriage of Ann and Billy Woodward to my armload of books.

Now given my fascination with true crime and the life of the very very rich, you would think I would have reviewed  This Crazy Thing Called Love: The Golden World and Fatal Marriage of Ann and Billy Woodward ages ago. This weekend’s reading wasn’t the first time I’ve encountered the book. Back in 1992 when This Crazy Thing Called Love was published I was right on the library reserve list behind all the old ladies who where old enough to remember the case and in one or two cases, ran in the right circles to have met the Woodwards back in the day. The old ladies in my home town? Full of surprises!  What boggles the mind is there are people out there who devoured Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers and Dominick Dunne’s The Two Mrs Grenvilles and took those embellished stories as the gospel truth. That’s like reading Jackie Collins writing about her late night soap opera diva Sugar Anderson and assuming you now know all there is too know about Joan Collins and Shirley Maclaine. The true story is so much more interesting.

For those of you who have never heard of the Capote or Dunne books or even know who the Woodwards were, here are basics. In 1955, socialite Ann Woodward shot what she thought was an intruder at her family’s country home. Only, instead of an intruder who had been targeting their neighborhood, Ann Woodward had killed her banking heir husband Billy Woodward. The Woodwards had a stormy marriage with affairs on both sides and many people thought Ann Woodward had killed Billy Woodward in cold blood to keep him from divorcing her to marry someone from his own class. Billy Woodward’s family stood by Ann Woodward but she spent the rest of her life under a cloud of suspicion and died just before Esquire magazine published part of Truman Capote’s uncompleted novel Answered Prayers that included the story of a scandalous woman who shoots her very rich husband.

Thanks to Susan Braudy, the picture of the Ann and Billy Woodward is treated with fairness and a steady hand. Ann Woodward (born Angeline Luceil Crowell) wasn’t a saint, but she wasn’t the whore that Dominick Dunne and Truman Capote paint her to be in their stories. There wasn’t a secret hick first husband she was hiding from Billy Woodward. Given the changes in Billy Woodward’s will as their marriage crumbled, Ann Woodward would have been better off financially as the former Mrs Billy Woodward vs the Widow Woodward. Believe it or not…there really was a burglar prowling in their exclusive neighborhood the fateful night Billy Woodward died. And you can’t help but feel that if Ann Eden (the stage name Angleine Crowell used before her marriage) had never meet Billy Woodward or at least if their affair had been just a passing thing versus a marriage, both parties might still be alive and thriving in their own worlds.

If you’ve read Answered Prayers and The Two Mrs Grenvilles, make an effort to track down and read This Crazy Thing Called Love. Ann and Billy Woodward and their family deserve that much.

Careless People

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

Now it might not a be a huge secret I’m not the most literary person. Sure I read oodles of books, have planned vacation days around trips to bookstores and was just on the phone with the Most Evil Sibling Ever (Andy) last night planning a trip to the Friends of the Ferguson Library Book Store for Wednesday (hooray for flex holidays!) but just because you read books doesn’t make you literary. You’ll never find me singing the praises of the literary canon far and wide. Actually you’re more likely to find me proclaiming how Melville should have just made out with Nathaniel Hawthorne more than how much I enjoyed Moby Dick and Billy Budd (loathe both books so very much).

So imagine my surprise when I’m cruising by the New Biography section at the Berlin-Peck Memorial Library and snap up a book on F. Scott Fitzgerald. And not just any book about F. Scott Fitzgerald, but one about The Great Gatsby, a novel that is right up there in Gwen Loathes It list right next to Moby Dick, the complete works of Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemingway. If you love love love F. Scott Fitzgerald and think I’m a savage, it’s totally okay to stop reading now. Before you shriek too much, remember I have actually read The Great Gatsby (a horrid school experience against my will) and have of my own free will read several books about the Fitzgeralds. They’re my Kardashians, a train wreck of people who I know more about than I ever intended too. I mean, you can’t read about the Murphys or Dorothy Parker without encountering Scott and Zelda. And the best of these books? Explore the society the Fitzgeralds interacted with right down to the bootleggers and publishers and the rest.

Don’t check me for pod marks. The book in question is Sarah Churchwell’s Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, an interesting exploration of both one of my most loathed books and a unsolved murder from the 1920s that has intrigued me since I was a wee thing. True crime has always been in my wheelhouse and when you combine true crime with a greater look at society I’m in. With all my reading it never fully occurred to me a crime as well known (it was consider one of the crimes of it’s decade) as the Hall-Mills Murder would have influenced the fiction of it’s time. (For people who never heard of the Hall-Mills Murder, in 1922 the Reverend Hall and his married mistress Mrs Mills were found dead in a lane under a tree with love letters scattered around them.) Let alone a book many people (not me) consider one of the best books ever written.

But that is the basic premise of Careless People, the Hall-Mills Murders influenced and impacted F. Scott Fitzgerald as he plotted and planned his greatest novel. And Sarah Churchwell’s carefully researched details (right down to things from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s scrapbook that dispute certain details you come to expect when you read enough about Scott and Zelda) give you an excellent picture of what life was like as the Fitzgeralds partied and Scott tried to write and the horrifically inept handling of the Hall-Mills murder case.

Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, doesn’t solve the Hall-Mills Murder (sadly we are more likely to solve the Jack the Ripper murders than who killed Reverend Hall and Mrs Mills due to the bungling police work) but it does do something even my most dedicated professors could never do, made me understand and think about The Great Gatsby beyond something I was being forced to read to pass a class to get that degree. Any decent writer can make Scott and Zelda come alive on the page just due to the force of their personalities but it takes a talented and thoughtful author to make me care about Fitzgerald’s works.

Will Careless People make me snatch up Mr Kindle and buy The Great Gatsby right this second? Will I be tracking down a Norton Critical Edition to get the full Gatsby experience like I did after reading Dreiser’s Sister Carrie for the first time? Never in a million years. But is Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby a book I would read again? Certainly.

The Poisoner’s Handbook

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Things you shouldn’t Google at work unless you have a Very Understanding Boss and Department Head: Poisoner and Handbook.

Let me explain. So I’m at Company X, innocently laying waste to my work drawer and listening to scary episodes of Stuffed You Missed in History Class like you do because it’s late October. And I’m listening to the “Who Was America’s Lucrezia Borgia?” episode and they mention a book and of course my brain is all “Ooohhh must read book” but I’m busy cranking out the work and don’t have time to write down the title and can only remember it had the words “poisoner” and “handbook” in it once my work day is almost over. And of course, just as I’m checking the library system for the book, that’s when Boss Lady and Department Head walk past my desk…

But like I said, I have a very understanding boss and department head. And if anyone is going to get poisoned it’s me with my bad habit of “well the date on the cheese says X but it’s been in the fridge the whole time and cheese is just spoiled milk so sure I’m going to eat this”. And you don’t need the amazing and dedicated people under the leadership of Charles Norris circa 1918 to figure out why I’m going to be very sick after eating said cheese.

What do you need Charles Norris and his staff for? Well, that’s exactly what Deborah Blum explores in her brilliant The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. Who needs CSI and it’s ilk when you can read about how one man (Charles Norris) and his dedicated staff turned the lackluster medical examiner’s office into a lean, functioning and crime solving machine. Add in different poisons and cases the medical examiner’s office handled and I am in HEAVEN. It’s all the things I loved in Caleb Carr’s fictional forensic detective novels without the Teddy Roosevelt cameos and John is a drunkalunka LOSER bits. There’s unsolved murders (just who poisoned the dough at the lunchroom? Still unsolved to this day), guilty as heck people, people who might have gotten away with murder (Mary Frances Creighton but don’t worry…she doesn’t learn and gets her eventually), innocent people (the bookkeeper whose family is decimated by poison, you want to give him a hug and better life) and the men who managed to try and solve all these cases of the leanest of budgets in a corrupt city.

If you’ve gobbled up Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul (a most excellent book), The Devil in the White City, In the Garden of Beasts, Thunderstruck and Midnight in Peking: The Murder That Haunted the Last Days of Old China, stop reading this review and read The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York ASAP!

The Terrible Axe-Man of New Orleans

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It’s no secret I adore graphic novels and true crime (ask the staff at the local Borders and Barnes & Noble). And it’s also no secret that upon spying another installment of Rick Geary’s A Treasury of Victorian & 20th Century Murder series I let out a little yelp of excitement and stuffed the slender tome in my book bag so quick I almost ended up wearing my Whole Foods small hot chocolate no whip. By now the local librarians are used my antics and didn’t even turn their heads. Now, the good people of West Hartford on the other hand…oh well…at least crazy girl read books right? Whatever…

Telling the true story of axe murders that rocked New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century, The Terrible Axe-Man of New Orleans hits all the classic Geary highlights. A true, unsolved crime, meticulous research, and the spare yet compelling drawings that both make the people almost real and draw you right into the story no matter the time or place.

A hundred years later and the Axe-Man’s crimes are still unsolved. Geary’s treatment doesn’t sensationalize the murders but lays out the known facts, giving an almost forgotten true story a much deserved exposure. At the end you’re left wanting to know more and what case will be brought back to life by Geary’s pen.