“Popular Crime” is a very entertaining book, and it will instigate arguments even as it scores many important points. But first, it’s necessary to say what it isn’t. It is not a book about criminology, crime in America or crime policy, and it is not a work of history, sociology or journalism. There is no original research here. It is, quite simply, a book about crime stories, written by a guy who says he’s read about a thousand of them. By popular crime, James means “tabloid crime,” or what is called in the bookstores “true crime,” mainly murder. He’s interested in the big stories that dominate and drive — or are driven by — the media: JonBenet Ramsey, O.J. Simpson, the Zodiac Killer, the JFK assassination, Sam Sheppard, the Black Dahlia, the Lindbergh kidnapping. All the greatest hits are here, and so are many more that have been forgotten by history: Elma Sands, Mary Phagan, George Parkman, Caryl Chessman and on and on.
The deep historical perspective James gets from plumbing all these secondary sources is his great strength. He can tell you that the murder of 22-year-old shop girl Sands in Manhattan on Dec. 22, 1799, was the first big popular crime story of 19th-century America, with both Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton engaged as defense lawyers for the accused, a laborer named Levi Weeks. After a two-day trial, the longest in the history of the city, Weeks, who was guilty as sin, was acquitted in five minutes.
James can tell you that the murder of 19-year-old cigar-store girl Mary Rogers in 1841 and the subsequently botched investigation led to both Edgar Allan Poe’s detective story “The Mystery of Marie Roget” and a reorganization of the New York City police department. He can tell you that in 1892Lizzie Borden couldn’t have taken an ax and given her mother 40 whacks because she would have been covered with blood spatter with no way to clean it off. And that the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan in Atlanta in 1913 led to the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan and the creation of the Anti-Defamation League, as well as the lynching of Leo Frank. And so on.
James marks the first golden age of tabloid crime from roughly 1880 to 1925, its last gasp coming in 1932 with the Lindbergh case, after which newspapers began to clean up their act in pursuit of respectability as the business began a long consolidation. A second golden age began around 1990, after the Menendez brothers murdered their parents in Los Angeles, and it reached new heights when O.J.’s escapades converged with the explosion of cable channels.
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