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.