Jonathan Goodman - Bloody Versicles. The Rhymes of Crime

Like its author, Bloody Versicles is an original.

It is an anthology of amusing, informative doggerel about true crimes committed in the United States and Great Britain over the last two centuries or so. As such, there is nothing quite like it. But its true distinction is in the canny contextsreally introductions-cum-commentariesin which Goodman sets his crhymes. They are so stamped with his unique authority as a collector and antiquarian and historian of crime that they become autonomous brief histories of the deeds themselvesas well as of the society they at once violated and expressed. And they are colorfully illustrated with precise word-pictures of the malefactors in all their vainglory. Bloody Versicles has something for every taste!

Readers with a primarily literary or anthropological interest will find a fresh store of folk art, part of a tradition reaching back to the broadsheet ballads that were the poor persons newspapers from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. One of my favorites, a theological couplet that might have been written by a Miltonized Larry Hart, was inspired by Isaac Sawtells murder of his brother Hiram in the 1890s in New Hampshire:

Two brothers in our town did dwell;

Hiram sought heaven, but Isaac Sawtell.

Eminent literary names decorate the text as well, from Lamb and Dickens to Oscar Wilde and Cole Porter. And Goodman even salutes a disturbing notion raised by the weight of some of his entriesthe possibility of a deeper link between poetry and murder than most poetry lovers (save, of course, the wives of certain poets) would care to think about.

And readers inclined toward the psychology and sociology of crime will take special delight in the commentariesespecially the notes appliquing them. If one benchmark of a historians mastery of his craft is his handling of endnotes, then on this count alone Goodman ranks very high indeed. His notes are never merely occasions for the freeze-drying of indigestible morsels of data. With his deft hand and keen eye for what he has called the connectedness of things, he makes truffles from trifles. Three cases in point: commenting on the eating habits of murderees (as F. Tennyson Jesse called victims), he posits a link between their diets and the way they die; he specifies a four foot drop [as] dead right for hanging a person of twelve stone; and he informs us that incest did not become a crime in English law until 1900, when the Punishment of Incest Act was passed.

Finally, readers with an appetite for mayhem and murder, whether fictive or true, will find fresh food in Goodmans exact and elegant accounts of crimes both notorious and obscure. His summaries are models of the economy of wit: Despite Thurtells long and impassioned speech, ending with a plea not to upset his parents by having him hanged, the jury found him guilty and he was executed outside Hertford prison in January 1824. And he has a special gift for the arresting detail, telling us that at least until the end of the nineteenth century police on the Arran Isles would bury a murderers shoes in order to discourage his ghost from walking about.

Bloody Versicles belongs to that species of social history called, accurately if inelegantly, true crime, which has never been more widely popular, nor more widely malpracticed, than it is at present, when a savage murder seems somehow unfinished until at least two more-or-less factual retellings are available at the checkout counter. The general estate of his extravagant brainchild would surely fascinate Thomas DeQuincey, its improbable fatherfascinate in the exact sense. Its prosperity would attract him even as its bad taste would alarm, thus immobilizing him in that delicious state of moral and spiritual stasis best suited to indulging the presiding passion of his life, daydreaming. Although one might expect to find an understanding of the reasons for the enormous popularity of accounts of truethat is, realcrimes in historiography or literary realism, it would be far wiser to rummage around in the dark humus from which it sprang: romanticism.

True crime is one of the few kinds of literature whose lineage and birth are matters of public record. In 1827 Thomas DeQuincey, a diminutive, delicate, and down-at-the-soul-and-heel literary journalist of high ambition and low achievementthe sensational Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822) having come from trading on his conspicuous vicepublished in Blackwells Magazine the first installment of his essay On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, the second and third appearing in 1839 and 1854 respectively. Writing in the baroque musical style he had worked hard to perfectall arpeggios and conceits, rallentandos and paradoxesDeQuincey argued, with tongue only half in cheek, for the cultivation of our natural taste for violence, a sort of training up of the sensations on the trellis of aestheticism, to produce a sensibility capable of collecting and savoring a good murdermuch as one would, say, appreciate a Raphael nude on the wall. After all, he happily observed, something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to be killed and to killa purseand a dark lane. Design, grouping, light and shade, and of course poetry and sentimentall are essential ingredients. So, too, time and style, which alone can tranquillize the actual grief, anesthetize the human hurt, by providing the impersonal detachment of aesthetic distance so essential to enjoying the fine arts. Proximity always spoils pleasure for the true romantic, which DeQuincey certainly was.

His theory was grounded in a key romantic conception of art as an anodyne for ennui. The mental image fashioned by the imagination displaces the void within the self, thus enabling it, in Byrons words, to live, however briefly, a being more intense. It was this passion for ever greater intensities of experience, which the inner dialectic of romanticism tended to exalt into an absolute value, that made murderand the genre of true crimea matter of romance for DeQuincey. And, just as he transposed the religious confession of St. Augustine into a peculiarly romantic prose-chorale to the god of his own idolatry, opium, so, too, he volatilized the generally benign personal essay of Lamb, Hazlitt, and Hunt into a species of historiography.