The Man From the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery, by Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James

9781476796253
Scribner, 2017
464 pp

hardcover

It's very rare that I choose to sit down and read a true-crime account, since it's not my really my thing, so the topic has to be something that piques my interest enough to get me to take a look.  So when I heard about this book last July that involves an axe-wielding serial killer who in the early part of the 20th century  rode the rails and left carnage behind him, that got my attention.  For one thing, this was a case I'd never heard of, and the deal was sealed when I discovered that this all went down over one hundred years ago.

The dustjacket blurb describes this book as a

"compelling, dramatic, and meticulously researched narrative about a century-old series of axe murders across America, and how the authors came to solve them."  

Bill James, who says here that in his "day job" he is a "baseball writer," is also the author of another book, Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebrations of Violence (2012). In a 2016 interview in The New Yorker', when Evan Hughes asked the author about the book he was currently working on, James said the following:

"You know the story of the murders in Villisca? All right, a hundred and four years ago eight people are found dead, murdered with an axe, inside this locked house, in a quiet, small town in the southern part of Iowa. It's a famous crime, and the reason that it became famous is that at the time it was obvious that it was the latest in a series of similar attacks. I had the idea that I'll bet there are others like this which have not been tied to the same murderer, because at the time they didn't have the methods you have now to connect the dots between unrelated events. So I started looking for them, and I found several."

 James hired his daughter Rachel as research assistant and this book is the result of their work.  As James writes in the preface,

"With modern computers, we can search tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of small-town newpapers, looking for reports of similar events."

And not only did he find them, but he also claims that they even discovered the culprit, the true identity behind person they label as "The Man From the Train."  It's a great premise, to be sure; on the flip side, though, rather than being the "compelling" or "dramatic" book promised by the dustjacket blurb, this has to have been one of the most frustrating, amateurish and utterly confusing true-crime accounts I've ever read.

There are no footnotes or endnotes;  there is no bibliography, and he handles the lack thereof in the acknowledgements section where he says that "it is inadequate to acknowledge in a footnote those whose work you use," and that he feels that "sources should be directly acknowledged in the text." He says that he "tried to do this throughout the book," but that's not always the case. While he does mention things said in old newspaper accounts here and there, and quotes one or two of his sources once in a while, for the most part, there are several places where I found myself while taking notes writing "Source???"  or "Citation?" especially when it came to things like statistics he gives, or phrases that start with "It has been written." In putting together a work involving historical research, the lack of sources is not just astounding, but downright appalling.

Another major issue here is that the author makes assumptions about the killer that have absolutely no factual basis; not only that, but then after he's made one statement, he contradicts himself later.  One huge example of an assumption about the killer is that the author believes that the Man From The Train "likely" lived and worked near Marianna Florida between 1901 and 1903, and then doesn't say why. There is no elaboration on the topic, and frankly, I was flabbergasted.   Another example  of his kind of waffly logic  is found on page 310 where the author is going through a list of "let's say for the sake of argument," about whether or not the killer "stalked" his victims.  There, in a brief paragraph about a murder which happened in Maine in 1901, he states the following:

"The murder of the Allen family in Maine in 1901 is him, but that this was an unplanned event that resulted from an eruption of anger on the murderer's part, when Mr. Allen insulted the murderer and drove him forcefully away from his door.

There is no evidence given anywhere that this scene occurred,  and back on page 226 he implies that one of four factors that "strongly suggest" this murder was the work from The Man From the Train was "the presence of Carrie Allen" (the daughter) since Mr. James claims that many of the murders were based on the killer's "perversion" or his penchant for young girls.  Then, on page 228, he says

"But it may not have been Carrie; it may also be that he knocked on the door and asked for a drink of water, and Wesley Allen came out at him in a bad temper, and told him to get on down the road and be quick about it."

Note the "it may also be" here as opposed to what he says on page 310.  And then he reflects on an episode of Dexter for his statement that The Man From the Train "particularly hated large men who tried to push him around," again, a statement that has absolutely no factual basis.  In fact, the entire book is filled with scenarios like this -- guesswork, lots of probablys, maybes, "it may be thats."   My point is that when you have a whole book filled with speculation it's kind of hard to take anything seriously.

Then there's the pattern that the author has established that is supposed to convince us that these murders are the work of the same man and that they go back further than anyone who's already written about the links between these axe murders has discovered. Admittedly, there do seem to be similarities and these were already noted in 1911; however, when a murder doesn't fit the pattern, the author still finds a reason that it should.  As just one example when he tries to justify including a murder in North Carolina in 1906 when the pattern the author has established here doesn't quite fit, in this case a murder where potential victims were left alive  (301), he says that the killer "heard a train coming."  Not "may have heard a train coming," or "probably heard a train coming," but "heard a train coming" and therefore decided to catch it, implying that he was in a hurry to leave.  There's no evidence for this at all unless Mr. James has a timetable of trains running through that section of North Carolina on that particular day, which he doesn't.    This sort of things occurs more than once; not only that, but he takes us through several murders that have nothing at all to do with the case  that could have been left out all together.  By the end of Section IV (330),  Mr. James notes that so far,  121 murders "have been discussed in this book."  And while the research is impressive, what's frustrating is that after he's taken us through these 121 cases,  he says that while "the authors do not believe that all 121 murders were committed by the same man,"  they do believe that a "substantial number" can be attributed to him; that gets narrowed down on page 336 to "  "perhaps fourteen crimes about which we have enough information to be certain they were committed by the same man."  So why write about all 121 and not focus just on the fourteen? That makes no sense at all and fills the book with a lot of unnecessary details and way more conjecture than fact. 

Honestly, it's enough to make your head spin and I haven't even touched on the writing style which absolutely grates.

This book is actually getting some really great reviews and high ratings, but not from me. I will say that I was impressed with how he pointed out several instances where the police or other members of the justice community were too quick to arrest or judge suspects based on race, opportunity or other factors --  that was done very well.  I also found the subject matter intriguing especially because I'd never heard of any of these murders, but as one of "today's modern readers," a phrase he uses throughout the book, speculation, guesswork, and a lot of "maybes" just aren't enough to make this a convincing story.  It's sad, really, because I had been looking forward to it for months.

*The Widow Lerouge, by Émile Gaboriau

9781515097372

CreateSpace, 2015

originally published in serial form, 1863, Le Pays

originally published in novel form, 1866 as L'Affaire Lerouge

(no translator given here)

290 pp

paperback

"...let it be a lesson for the remainder of your life... remember it is useless to try and hide the truth; it always comes to light!" 

                                                                           

This book is yet another entry in this year's reading project involving the history of crime/mystery fiction. I had thought I'd be somewhere in the 1880s by now (since this year was my reading was supposed to have taken me through to 1914) but it seems that the 1860s were a banner decade for mystery and crime writing so I'll be hovering here for a while yet. 

just a tiny bit of history before we get to the mystery:

French crime writer Émile Gaboriau should be much more well known, more widely read in the realm of crime fiction than he actually is by modern crime readers, since he was a prolific author of twelve books and a volume of short stories.    According to Professor Stephen Knight in his Towards Sherlock Holmes: A Thematic History of Crime Fiction in the 19th Century World, Gaboriau also gave readers "the first major police detective in crime fiction."  He goes on to quote Yves Oliver-Martin from his work Histoire du roman populaire en France de 1840 à 1980), who said that Gaboriau's Dectective Lecoq was, in fact,  "the prototype" (56).  While Lecoq makes only a brief, introductory appearance here in L'Affaire Lerouge, he will become involved in four more cases, and even the great Arthur Conan Doyle would bandy his name about in A Study in Scarlet, where he is referred to by Sherlock Holmes as a "miserable bungler."  While Holmes may not have thought much of Lecoq, his creator revealed that Gaboriau's "neat dovetailing of his plot" attracted him to the author, while Daniel Stashower (Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle)  notes various similarities between Holmes and Lecoq (80).   And really, it  takes no time at all once inside of The Widow Lerouge to discover Gaboriau's influence on Conan Doyle's great detective. 

frontispiece from Mémoires de Vidocq

Since coincidences abound in The Widow Lerouge, it seems appropriate here to throw in an interesting real-life coincidence before moving on to the book itself.  Going back for a moment to an earlier post, it seems that in 1862, while Paul Féval was putting together his Jean Diable,  he had taken on Gaboriau as his secretary.  Molly Carr in her book In Search of Dr. Watson notes that while Gaboriau's M. Lecoq was based on the very real Eugene François Vidocq, "a man who began as a thief and then became a high-ranking police official in Paris," a certain "villainous" Lecoq showed up as a character in  Féval's first novel of his seven-book Habits Noirs (Blackcoats) series.  Her idea is that Gaboriau may have 

"quietly appropriated the name for himself, giving it to an upholder of the law rather than to someone who was not." 

 Whether or not that's how things went down, it's still an interesting factoid.

... et maintenant, 

Original title page of L'Affaire Lerouge, from The First One Hundred Years of  Detective Fiction, 1841-1941 

As noted above, L'Affair Lerouge began as a serialization or feuilleton, in Le Pays in 1863.  (For more info on the history of the feuilleton, click here.)  It was published in novel form in 1866 by E. Dentu, and since then it has been translated into a number of languages.  The story begins when, on Shrove Tuesday, March, 1862, "five women belonging to the village of La Jonchere" turn up at the Bougival police station to report that no one had seen their neighbor, the Widow Lerouge,  for two days.  Evidently this "sudden disappearance" was not only out of the ordinary, but it was alarming, since the women were concerned that some sort of crime may have occurred.  Crime is a rarity in Bougival, but the gendarmes went to check it out along with the commissaire. They find the door to the widow's home locked and while waiting for the locksmith to get it open, a young boy hands them the key which he'd found in a ditch.  When they walk in they discover that the place is a mess with furniture that had been "knocked about," and various trunks and drawers had been forced open.  As they go deeper into the house, they discover not only that there's even more of a mess, but that the missing Widow Lerouge is dead, with her face buried in the ashes of the fireplace. Witnesses and neighbors are questioned to discover exactly who this woman was during her lifetime, and then the investigating magistrate, M. Daburon, appears on the scene, along with the chief of detective police Gevrol and his "subordinate," Lecoq. He was

"an old offender, reconciled to the law. A smart fellow in his profession, crafty as a fox, and jealous of his chief, whose abilities he held in light estimation."

It is Lecoq who asks for a certain M. Tabaret (nicknamed Tirauclair), who had discovered the truth in an earlier  case for a which an innocent man was found guilty and nearly guillotined.  Tabaret is an amateur sleuth, who "goes for playing the detective by way of amusement."  He is, however, widely respected by Lecoq, and so he joins the investigation. As it turns out, his involvement is a good thing, since Gevrol decides to follow one slim lead, leaving Tabaret to continue his "researches" outside of Gevrol's. As he says, "I am, I search, and I find," and it isn't very long until we get a taste of Tabaret's capabilities as an armchair sort of detective. I swear, it's like reading the part of a Holmes story where he dazzles everyone with his observations.   The case will continue until the culprit is discovered, although things change quickly throughout the story, meaning once you think you know the "who," don't be surprised that as circumstances change so will your guess.

I will say that while The Widow Lerouge is a solid mystery story, it's a bit frustrating because there are a number of coincidences that turn things on their heads and that have a bearing on the later parts of the tale. Normally I want to scream when a writer does this, but actually, to my surprise, once I got past my own prejudices on that issue, I realized that it sort of worked here. And  then, there's the ending, which I won't divulge, but suffice it to say that I don't think it was thought out very well at all. I can't say why without spoiling the story, but the "who" started to  become very obvious and I have to find fault with the author for his methodology here. Hopefully he improves in the later books, but in this one, well, it's amateur.    Still, as in most books like this one, for me it's all about the journey, and that was truly great fun.  There's a good story underlying it all, making this book well worth reading.  Perhaps it's time to give those domestic noir novels that are hot right now in the crime world a rest and give something classic a chance instead.

***

ps/find a better version than this one -- I was appalled a) that there was no translator given and b) that there weren't even page numbers!

a Maigret triple play: The Carter of La Providence, The Late Monsieur Gallet, and The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, by Georges Simenon

9780141393469
Penguin, 2014
originally published as Le Charretier de la Providence, 1931
translated by David Coward
152 pp
also translated as Lock 14, Maigret Meets a Milord, The Crime at Lock 14
paperback

Sometimes when I've finished a book and have all the relevant information in my head, I can't help but to feel sorry for the villain, and that's certainly the case in this second novel in Simenon's Maigret series. This one is set along France's Canal latéral à la Marne,

from French Waterways

where two kilometers from Dizy stands Lock 14 and the nearby Café de la Marine, where "the rhythm of life ... was slow. " For a few days, life here is interrupted when something strange happens.   A body has been discovered by a carter on waking up and getting his horse ready for the day's work.  As he is moving his hand around under the straw to find his whip, next to where he'd been sleeping, he feels something "cold," and the dead woman is revealed in the light of his lantern. This discovery, we're told, is "about to bring chaos to Dizy and disrupt life on the canal."  And that it does, as Maigret takes the case, beginning with the mystery of how she got there since there was no road, and since anyone who walked there would have found him/herself knee deep in mud.  The woman's shoes are clean and there are no traces of mud on her dress; in fact she's dressed more for a night out on the town. One mystery is cleared up after yacht owner British Sir Walter Lampson identifies her as his wife, but knowing who she is doesn't answer all of Maigret's questions. It has the opposite effect, actually. 

Once again, we find ourselves steeped in atmosphere from the beginning -- rain, gloom, mud and life on the river.  Set against Lampson's yacht, the canal is filled with barges, some motorized, while some, like La Providence depend on horses and their carter to get them through.  And while Maigret follows the details of the case, it will once again be his knowledge of human nature that will solve it.  

this photo  is on the Barrow in England, but you get the idea

The Carter of La Providence is a slow burner, with a number of potential suspects and motives, but as I said, once the case was solved, I couldn't help but feel sorry for the murderer, and I think it would take someone with a heart of stone to feel otherwise.

***

9780141393377

Penguin, 2013

originally published as M. Gallet décédé, 1931

translated by Anthea Bell

155 pp

paperback

"Peace, for heaven's sake, that's what he was waiting for."

Moving on to book number three, The Late Monsieur Gallet is completely different from its two Maigret predecessors, but as in the case of The Carter of La Providence, Simenon managed once again to worm his way under my skin and right into my empathy zone. I am beginning to believe that this man must have been one of the keenest observers of human nature ever, something that becomes quite obvious here as the story unfolds, layer by layer by layer. 

Left pretty much on his own on 27 June 1930, Maigret receives a telegram informing him that a commercial traveler by the name of Émile Gallet was murdered two days earlier at the Hotel de la Loire in Sancerre. His home address was also given, and it's there that Maigret has his first exposure to the dead man in a photo. That picture, along with another photograph of the dead man's son, will come to haunt him over the course of this case, which begins with his premonition that it  "had all the hallmarks of a particularly distasteful investigation."  And as things turn out, he was right. Aside from the photos that will replay in his mind, when Gallet's widow at her home in Saint-Fargeau is told that her husband was killed in Sancerre, she produces a postcard from Rouen dated the day after Gallet was dead, proving in her mind that Maigret is wrong. Accompanying him to Sancerre, Mme. Gallet is annoyed that she's likely off on a wild-goose chase, but changes her tune when indeed it turns out to be her husband.  Then, when Maigret talks to a local inspector, he discovers that whenever the dead man stayed at the Hotel de la Loire, he'd registered as a M. Clément from Orleans.  Thus begins the strangest investigation to date in this series, which will expose much more than a murderer.  

Georges Simenon with Commissaire Marcel Guillame, his inspiration for Maigret, from France Today

When all is said and done, this book turns out to be a bit of a gut-wrenching sort of experience as Simenon basically lays bare some of the ugliness of which humans are capable;  it also, in my opinion, begins to bring out the very human (as opposed to strictly investigator) side of Maigret not yet seen in the two books prior to this one.  That trend continues to grow in the last of the books under scrutiny here, The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien,

9780141393452

Penguin, 2014

originally published as Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien, 1931

translated by Linda Coverdale

138 pp

which has also been translated as The Crime of Inspector Maigret, which, incidentally, is the first chapter heading.  Following a "shabby traveller" from France to Bremen, Maigret and his quarry have arrived at the Gare de Neuschanz at the German border, along the northern edge of Holland.  There, the man sets down his cheap suitcase, leaving it alone for two minutes. During his absence, Maigret swaps it with an exact replica that he'd picked up earlier, and the two men board the train for Bremen. He tails the man as he buys two sausage rolls (small detail but it bugs Maigret throughout the story) and then makes his way into a "poorer neighborhood," where he takes a room in a "seedy-looking" hotel.  Maigret, of course, is in a connecting room, where he puts his eye to the keyhole and watches as the man opens his suitcase, realizes that the contents are missing and goes into panic mode; he also follows as the distraught man makes his way back to the station to check for his lost bag. At around midnight, the two return to the hotel where Maigret once again peers through the keyhole, only to see the poor man put a gun in his mouth and shoot himself.  As the local police arrive, Maigret informs them that it is suicide, that the man's French, and that he would like their permission to investigate privately while they do so officially.  Maigret returns to Paris, where he 

"...was not far from -- indeed quite close to -- thinking that he had just killed a man."

And to top it all off, it was

"A man he didn't know! He knew nothing about him! There was no proof whatsoever that he was wanted by the law."

This is the point where the story begins, going back first to Brussels where it all began a day earlier,  then moving ahead as Maigret tries to find out exactly why  Louis Jeunet would take his own life. His investigation takes him into the past and into a dark secret that people will kill for rather than have it come to light.

The notions of guilt and justice are writ large throughout this novel, and  I can't help but feel that Maigret's involvement -- his need to see the case through to its end -- after Jeunet's suicide is his own way of trying to assuage the guilt he feels over his role in the man's death. However, that's just one facet of the role guilt plays in this novel.  As for justice, well, that becomes obvious along the way  and once again, as in M. Gallet, Maigret's understanding of human nature and his ability to move away from the job and into his conscience serves him well here as he has to make a decision that could change a number of lives.

It would be a grave mistake to read the Maigret novels as just another set of police procedurals or to think that Simenon is the male equivalent of Agatha Christie.  No.  These books move straight to the heart of human nature, and as I said earlier, Simenon is a master of observation.  I have seventy-one novels to go and by god I'm going to read them all.

back to the present with A Nest of Vipers, by Andrea Camilleri

9780143126652
Penguin, 2017
originally written in 2013 as Un covo di vipere
translated by Stephen Sartarelli
261 pp

paperback

"... it was one thing to send the killer of a good man to jail, and it was something else entirely to put away someone who had killed a stinking scoundrel."  -- 43

Here we are at book 21 -- I don't believe that I've ever stuck with a single crime series for this long, but anyone who's even read one of my Camilleri posts knows what a fangirl I am for the escapades of Salvo Montalbano and his colleagues.  According to stopyourekillingme.com there are only three more books left to be translated/published as of 2016, and it will seriously be the end of an era for yours truly when the last one is released. As for this one, the title is beyond appropriate and although I won't say why or how, it moves into a zone of darkness in which  Camilleri found himself  lacking  "courage" enough to fully explore at one time in his writing career.  I don't mean to be intentionally cryptic, but once you read this novel, you'll understand.

The Dream, by Henri Rousseau, from MOMA

Those dream sequences that have been used by Camilleri to open these books for the last several years are not just throwaways -- they will, in time, come back around to have something to do with the actual plot. That is very much the case here as Montalbano becomes involved in the case of the murdered Cosimo Barletta, a wealthy widower who was found dead in his seaside home.  With very little to go on except for some strands of hair, the police start looking into Barletta's background and discover that he had not only, as the cover blurb notes, "a history full of greed and corruption" including loan sharking, but also a rather sadistic hobby involving a number of young women, any of whom may have had a motive to kill him.  That's about all I give away about plot and even that can be found from the cover description, but the story, as I said, reveals a darker side that just might start twisting your guts as it starts winding down to a solution.

Normally I would have nothing but praise for one of Camilleri's novels, but this time around I think that Camilleri didn't go his normal distance.  To be sure, the things I enjoy about this series are still here -- the camaraderie between Salvo and his colleagues, the jokes built around the prosecutor and the doctor, the lovely feel of this little slice of Sicily and Salvo himself -- but despite the somewhat horrific story which unfolds, this is definitely not up there with the author's best books in the series. First of all, I cottoned on to what was going on long before Salvo figured it out which is never good; second, there's the introduction of a somewhat enigmatic character whose purpose isn't quite clear until the end, where he provides a sort of verbal  deus ex machina (that I won't discuss) that gives Salvo a bit of  a nudge in the right direction.  Considering that Camilleri had actually written (but not published) this novel in 2008 after writing The Potter's Field (2007) which later won him the International Dagger Award,  well, it could have been a much stronger book than it actually turned out to be. 

Still, as I said, once I became aware of where this story was headed, my stomach was churning, so it did provoke a strong reaction; I was also quite impressed by one of the main themes in this book in which Montalbano spends time pondering,  as the back-cover blurb and  the quotation with which I opened this post reveals,  "where justice lies," and in this case, readers are left with an outright serious conundrum. And now that I'm actually thinking about it, the way in which Camilleri sets up the question within the titular "nest of vipers" is very nicely done. It's too bad I can't explain this thought in more detail  but careful readers will understand.  

 I am pretty much unyielding (okay, downright persnickety)  about reading books in series order, so my advice is to not let A Nest of Vipers become your starting point in this series -- each book builds on the previous so you'll miss way too much if you don't read them in order.  And while it may not be Camilleri's  best, this book is still well worth reading, especially for die-hard fans of the series among whom I count myself. 

crime fiction from Italy