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Crime Anthology Is More Than Just The Facts, Ma'am

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By ROGER K. MILLER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 16, 2008

"True Crime: An American Anthology," edited by Harold Schechter (Library of America, $40)

If truth is stranger than fiction, it is because, as Mark Twain said, fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth is not. This outstanding collection of ghastly American crimes from Puritan times down to our own day is evidence of the gruesome possibilities that truth can get up to when it comes to one human being dispatching another - or, usually, many others.

Truth is also at least as readable as fiction. And it is often the model for fiction, as the editor, Harold Schechter, professor of American literature at Queens College and author of two dozen true-crime books and crime novels, points out. Close to half of the cases became the subject of a novel and/or film, sometimes more than once.

Schechter's introductions, to the volume and to each entry, are helpful. For the most part, he deals not in gangsters, assassins and other professional bad guys, but "those peculiarly horrific and unsettling crimes that have from the beginning haunted the American imagination."

Such as "The Black Dahlia," the 1947 Los Angeles murder of Elizabeth Short - tortured, slashed and sliced in half - one of the most written-about crimes of the 20th century. Here it is told by Jack Webb, the actor who in "Dragnet" pioneered true-crime stories as television drama.

The story is written surprisingly well in a businesslike recounting of the facts that recalls Webb's own monotone delivery as an actor. The murder has never been solved.

Awful as that homicide is, it pales in comparison to the atrocities of Ed Gein.

Shechter rightly says that "all modern American horror comes from the outrages of Ed Gein," the creepy, reclusive psychopath in central Wisconsin who in the 1940s and '50s robbed the fresh graves of women or murdered them.

He then turned their body parts "into various appalling artifacts."

Gein was the inspiration for the novel, and later movie, "Psycho," as well as for other fictional monsters.

Aside from the macabre fascination of the subject matter, the other attraction of this volume is the excellent writing.

My favorite is A.J. Liebling's rollicking "The Case of the Scattered Dutchman," a 1955 New Yorker article about an 1897 murder in which the victim is revealed to police and reporters (and to the reader) in separate pieces found wrapped in oilcloth and floating in the East River.

Liebling has never done better what he does best: write about his beloved New York City and its oddities, both animate and inanimate, with great brio.

To have such fun with murder - why, it's almost criminal.

Roger K. Miller, author of the novel "Invisible Hero," is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.

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