by Bill James
(Photo © Scherl/SV-Bilderdienst/The Image Works.)
The execution of Ruth Snyder.
(Photo © Tom Howard/New York Daily News Archive via Getty Images.)
A newspaper headlines the acquittal of those accused in the murders of Reverend Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills. A caption in the original states that Prosecutor Simpson would seek a new trial, although how that was possible after an acquittal I do not know. The legal interpretation of the constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy may have been a little different at that time.
(Photo: New York Daily News, December 4, 1926. Courtesy of Franklin Township Public Library.)
Thalia and Thomas Massie, 1932. Thalia Massie’s paternal grandfather was Teddy Roosevelt’s uncle. Her maternal grandfather was Charles Bell, who was the first president of Bell Telephone Company. He was a cousin of Alexander Graham Bell.
(Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.)
Samuel Leibowitz and the Scottsboro Boys. Truman Capote was 8 years old, Harper Lee 6 at the time that the story was most in the news. The story is thought to have inspired To Kill a Mockingbird.
(Photo © New York Daily News Archive via Getty Images.)
Richard Hickock. Everybody liked James Dean, but nobody liked him as much as the criminals did.
(Photo courtesy of the Kansas State Penitentiary.)
This photo, which shows Caryl Chessman acting as his own attorney at his 1948 trial, was taken six years before he became a national figure.
(Photo © Archive Photos/Getty Images.)
Albert DeSalvo holds up a necklace—a “choker”—that he made while he was incarcerated in Walpole, Massachusetts. DeSalvo—who almost certainly was not the Boston Strangler—enjoyed having people think that he was.
(Photo © Hulton Archive/Getty Images.)
Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. The name Sid Vicious was suggested by his band mate, Johnny Rotten, after Rotten was bitten by his pet hamster, who was named Sid.
(Photo © Steve Emberton/Getty Images.)
Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy, California.
(Photo © Tony Avelar/The Christian Science Monitor /Getty Images.)
Addendum to the Paperback Edition
Before the publication of the paperback version of this hyar book I have been given the opportunity to include a little bit of new material. This new material consists of three things:
1) Errata,
2) A list of 100 good crime books, and
3) Three new articles.
Errata. All of us who write books make mistakes in our books; we all say things that aren’t true. To write a non-fiction book without making any mistakes is entirely impossible. Suppose that you are a realtor. Are you a perfect realtor? Do you ask every client every question that should be asked, and none that should not be asked? Do you know every house that is on the market as well as you would like to know it? Is every word that comes out of your mouth always the gospel truth, as honest as you may be, or do you occasionally misunderstand what you have been told, and accidentally mislead the client?
Me, too; I occasionally misunderstand what I read, and pass on to you bad information. I occasionally trust sources that turn out to be unreliable. This happens. I do my best to minimize those events, but … it happens.
However, this book has been out for a year, has been read by a dozen or more people in the United States, England and Australia, not counting a couple of hundred reviewers, many of whom have actually read the book, and I have been made aware of only one error in the text. This is very unusual; normally I am bombarded by people who think I have screwed something up—and I’ve heard from a couple of other people, too, who have objections to things I have written that they believe are wrong, but which I still think are correct. The error has to do with the case of Grace Roberts/Maizie Colbert, which I wrote about in Chapter XI. Somebody who was a distant relative of Ms. Colbert (and no, it wasn’t Stephen) wrote to me to straighten out some things. He had several points that frankly I couldn’t quite grasp, but the two that I did understand were 1) that “Maizie” Colbert was a nickname, not her “real” name, and that she was sometimes called “Grace” by her own family, and 2) that Ms. Colbert’s father, who I described as an unskilled laborer, was in fact a relatively skilled worker who provided for his family a comfortable home. That’s all I got for errata.
After the book came out I heard from a number of people who asked me, “Why didn’t you include a list of the 100 best crime books?” to which I replied, of course, “Why don’t you mind your own damned business?” But after I heard this suggestion a couple of dozen times I eventually had to concede that maybe I should have done that, so here it is.
I have to begin by apologizing to the many authors of very good crime books that I have not yet had the time to read, and, more particularly, to the dozen or more authors of very good crime books that I have read, but have forgotten about and overlooked in compiling this list. This is not a list of the 100 Greatest Crime Books; it’s just a list of 100 Good Crime Books that I will recommend to you, and then we will assume that there are 1,000 more that I don’t know anything about. I’ve never read anything by Jack Olsen; they tell me he’s good, but I’ve just never gotten to anything. I’ve never read any of Shana Alexander’s books. I bought them, but somehow I never got around to reading them. Maybe they should be on the list. I don’t know.
One thing that you probably do know, if you read crime books, is that most books about crimes are terrible. I don’t mean to be disrespectful to the people in what is now “my” area, but … a lot of books about crimes are just God Awful. None of the books that I will list here are bad; they’re all pretty good. I’m going to give them “stars,” but I wanted to warn you that I’m grading here on a very, very tough scale; even the one-star books on this list are actually good books. I am recommending all of these books; I am just recommending some of them more highly than others. I will list the books alphabetically by the author and skip the publication data, since many of these books have been re-published numerous times.
1) Privileged Information, Tom Alibrandi and Frank H. Armani, 1991 (**).
2) Bird Man: The Many Faces of Robert Stroud, Jolene Babyak, 1994 (*).
3) The Defense Never Rests, F. Lee Bailey, 1972 (*).
4) Nightmare in Wichita: The Hunt for the BTK Strangler, Robert Beattie, 2005 (*).
5) He Made It Safe to Murder: The Life of Moman Pruiett, Howard K. Berry, first publication variously reported as 1944 and 1951 (***).
6) The Murder Trial of Judge Peel, Jim Bishop, 1962 (**). A monster crime story in its day. So many copies of this book were printed that it turns up in every library book sale ever conducted.
7) Kansas Charley: The Story of a 19th-Century Boy Murderer, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, 2003 (***).
8) The Ice Man: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer, Anthony Bruno, 1993 (*). There are two books called The Ice Man, both of them about Richard Kuklinski. Philip Carlo’s book, which was written years later, is probably a little better.
9) Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry, 1974 (**). Perhaps the only book ever written by a prosecutor in which the cops he worked with are portrayed as bumbling incompetents. He must have been a lot of fun to work with.
10) In Cold Blood, Truman Capote, 1965 (*****).
11) The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, Philip Carlo, 2006 (**).
12) The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized and Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century, Howie Carr, 2006 (***).
13) Harvard and the Unabomber, Alston Chase, 2003 (***). One of the problems of crime books is that they are generally intellectual deserts, totally devoid of ideas. The problem with Harvard and the Unabomber is exactly the opposite: it is a jungle of ideas. The book is so tightly packed with ideas, theories and arguments that it’s difficult to read; you feel like you’re hacking your way through the Congo, just trying to track the story. This makes a nice change of pace.
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br /> 14) Cell 2455, Death Row, Caryl Chessman, 1954 (***).
15) The Face of Justice, Caryl Chessman, 1957 (*).
16) The Girl on the Volkswagen Floor, William Arthur Clark, 1971 (**).
17) Last Rampage, James W. Clarke, 1990 (****).
18) The Murder of Helen Jewett, Patricia Cline Cohen, 1999 (***).
19) The Red Ripper, Peter Conradi, 1992 (**). A book about Andrei Chikatilo, a Russian serial murderer who killed more than 50 victims. Not here to argue, but here’s a spectacularly absurd quote from page 57 of this book: “It would be nice to think that in the more open societies of the West, the first signs of such abnormal behavior would likely have been picked up. Later, if not sooner, Chikatilo would have been obliged to leave teaching, and even be prosecuted. But in the Soviet Union, this simply did not happen.”
Here and in numerous other parts of the book, Conradi is suggesting, if not quite arguing, that Chikatilo’s sexual dysfunction resulted from the prudishness and lack of sexual openness in Russian society; page 176, “with a kind of naivety that was itself a product of Soviet society’s prudish attitudes towards sex, none of the boys seemed to foresee the sexual designs that this apparently normal, elderly man could have upon them.” Page 32: if he had been “of another, more liberal generation, in another, more liberal country, Chikatilo would probably have discussed this sadistic streak with his wife, if not with a psychiatrist. With help, maybe he could have found a way to integrate it into his normal sexual life and somehow neutralize it. But this was southern Russia—not southern California—and Chikatilo could not imagine how he could bring up such a delicate matter with his straight-laced wife.”
If only Chikatilo had lived in Southern California, he could never have become a serial murderer!
Except, of course, that Southern California has more serial murderers per capita than anyplace else on the planet, except possibly Florida. Openness about sexuality doesn’t protect us from sexual deviance; it exposes us to sexual deviance. The idea that the emancipation of our sexuality will free society of the unfortunate side effects of perverse desires is fifty years behind the curve—and yet we cling to it, as a society, because it was the liberal notion of our youth, and we are afraid to admit that the progressive ideas which we adopted in the best of faith did not turn out to be good investments.
20) A Grave for Bobby, James Deakin, 1990 (**). Deakin is a little too clever for his own good. Zero at the Bone is a better account of the same case.
21) The Dungeon Master, William Dear, 1984 (**).
22) Please … Don’t Kill Me: The True Story of the Milo Murder, William C. Dear and Carlton Stowers, 1989 (*).
23) I Know My First Name Is Steven, Mike Echols, 1991 (*).
24) True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa, Michael Finkel, 2006 (***). A very unusual accidental intersection of two unrelated crime stories.
25) The Boston Strangler, Gerold Frank, 1966 (**).
26) Birdman of Alcatraz, Thomas E. Gaddis, 1955 (**).
27) Killer: A Journal of Murder, Thomas E. Gaddis, 1970 (**). Based on the journals of Carl Panzram, an articulate murderer executed at Leavenworth in 1930. You can’t believe anything that Panzram says (or Gaddis either, for that matter), but Panzram’s murderous nihilism is voyeuristically compelling.
28) The Court of Last Resort, Erle Stanley Gardner, 1952 (**).
29) The Killing of Bonnie Garland, Willard Gaylin, M.D., 1982 (***).
30) A Little Girl Is Dead, Harry Golden, 1965 (***). The murder of Mary Phagan.
31) Stories of Scottsboro, James Goodman, 1994 (***).
32) Zodiac, Robert Graysmith, 1996 (*. OK, maybe **). Graysmith, having written about six or eight books now, still has no idea what he is doing as a writer, but there is some appeal to his earnest obsessiveness.
33) The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town, John Grisham, 2006 (**).
34) The Alice Crimmins Case, Kenneth Gross, 1975 (***).
35) Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease, John Heidenry, 2010 (***). I believe there are six different crime books named Zero at the Bone, but this one is pretty decent.
36) Double Jeopardy, Bob Hill, 1995 (**). Mel Ignatow.
37) The Sheppard Murder Case, Paul Holmes, 1961 (***).
38) 3 Lives for Mississippi, William Bradford Huie, 1965 (***). Huie was a very interesting writer, a Southerner who wrote about the Civil Rights cases of the 1950s and 1960s, and did so with quite exceptional integrity. In some cases he takes on the legend of a Civil Rights victim, and argues that the supposed victim was in fact a vicious criminal. In most cases he is on the side of the Civil Rights movement, but he doesn’t seem to care what you think: He prints the facts and lets the chips fall where they may. Huie launched the career of William F. Buckley Jr., worked briefly as a butler for Bugsy Siegel, co-authored a book with Zora Neale Hurston, wrote The Execution of Private Slovik, and made Ira Hayes famous (hero of Iwo Jima, portrayed in a film by Tony Curtis, sung about by Johnny Cash). Martin Luther King, Jr.—yes, that Martin Luther King, Jr.—wrote the introduction to the second edition of 3 Lives for Mississippi.
39) A Death in Belmont, Sebastian Junger, 2006 (**).
40) The Boston Stranglers, Susan Kelly, 1995 (**).
41) The Michigan Murders, Edward Keyes, 1976 (**).
42) Murder One, Dorothy Kilgallen, 1967 (**).
43) A Cast of Killers, Sidney Kirkpatrick, 1986 (**).
44) The Trial of Levi Weeks, Estelle Fox Kleiger, 1989 (**).
45) The Minister and the Choir Singer, William M. Kunstler, 1964 (**).
46) The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson, 2004 (***).
47) Thunderstruck, Erik Larson, 2007 (****).
48) 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, Warden Lawes (Lewis E. Lawes), 1932 (**).
49) The Falcon and the Snowman, Robert Lindsey, 1979 (***). The Christopher Boyce spy case.
50) The Flight of the Falcon, Robert Lindsey, 1983 (**). Christopher Boyce breaks out of jail and robs banks. This is not fiction.
51) Irresistible Impulse, Robert Lindsey, 1992 (**). I think this must be Lindsey’s least successful book, but it tells a very interesting story about a California girl who married into the wealthiest family in England, other than the royals.
52) Where the Money Was, Ed Linn and Willie Sutton, 1976 (***). Willie Sutton was a famous bank robber of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s—an entertaining and generally pretty harmless rogue. When asked why he robbed banks, he supposedly said “Because that’s where the money was,” although in the book he denies that he ever said this. Ed Linn was a wonderful biographer, and I recommend all of his books. This, however, is his only crime book.
53) The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot, Thomas Maeder, 1980 (*). Petiot was a Frenchman who took advantage of the chaos of World War II. There is also a more recent book about him which I have not yet read.
54) The Rabbi and the Hit Man, Arthur J. Magida, 2003 (*).
55) The Executioner’s Song, Norman Mailer, 1980 (***). Pulitzer Prize, my ass.
56) Killing for Company: The Story of a Man Addicted to Murder, Brian Masters, 1993 (**). British serial murderer Dennis Nilsen.
57) The Dreams of Ada, Robert Mayer, 1987 (**).
58) Mortal Error, Bonar Menninger, 1992 (**). Plodding and almost unreadable at points, but a serious book proposing a serious and credible explanation for the tragedy in Dallas. Who in the hell would name their kid “Bonar”?
59) The Basement, Kate Millett, 1979 (*). The story of the abuse to the point of eventual death of Sylvia Likens, a 16-year-old girl who died in a basement in Indianapolis in 1965. Millett spends half the book in stream-of-consciousness rants in which she pretends to be Sylvia, pretends to be her murderer, or pretends to be somebody else. This is maddening, but the case itself is extremely interesting.
60) The Rose Man of Sing Sing, James McGrath Morris, 2003 (****).
61) Torso: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for the Mad Butcher of Kin
gsbury Run, Steven Nickel, 1989 (*).
62) The Wrong Man, James Neff, 2001 (**). I guess Sheppard was innocent after all.
63) The Implosion Conspiracy, Louis Nizer, 1973 (**). The best of the interminable books about the Rosenbergs.
64) Two of a Kind: The Hillside Stranglers, Darcy O’Brien, 1985 (**).
65) The Devil’s Rooming House, M. William Phelps, 2010 (**).
66) Case Closed, Gerald Posner, 1993 (***).
67) The Monster of Florence, Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi, 2009 (***). A remarkable book badly damaged by the irresponsible accusation of a probably innocent young man.
68) Courtroom: The Story of Samuel S. Leibowitz, Quentin Reynolds, 1950 (**).
69) The Stranger Beside Me, Ann Rule, 1980 (**). Bundy.
70) The Want-Ad Killer, Ann Rule, 1983 (*).
71) The I-5 Killer, Ann Rule, 1984 (**).
72) Homicide!, Charles W. Sasser, 1990 (**).
73) Scapegoat, Anthony Scaduto, 1976 (**).
74) American Tragedy, Lawrence Schiller and James Willwerth, 1996 (**). I think I’m required to have one O.J. book on the list.
75) Perfect Murder, Perfect Town, Lawrence Schiller, 1999 (**). JonBenet. Schiller is unpretentious, but very professional.
76) Natural Born Celebrities, David Frank Schmid, 2006 (**).
77) Invitation to an Inquest, Walter and Miriam Schneir, 1965 (*). Rosenbergs.
78) The Shoemaker: The Anatomy of a Psychotic, Flora Rheta Schreiber, 1983 (**). Creepy but compelling.
79) Death Sentence, Joe Sharkey, 1991 (**). One of several books about the John List murders; I haven’t read the others.
80) Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, David Simon, 1991 (***).
81) The Search for the Green River Killer, Carlton Smith and Tomas Guillen, 1991 (*).
82) And I Don’t Want to Live This Life, Deborah Spungeon, 1983 (***).
