Kathleen A. Cairns, the author of The Enigma Woman, is a fine historian and writer. The Enigma Woman stands up over time as a great read. It should be coming soon on Kindle. (An academic press moves slowly.) But, as the promoters say, you don't have to take my word for how good this book is. Read below what reviewrs had to say in 2007, when the book was first published.
-- Larry L. Lynch, February 2011
“A new book out this month finally tells us the entire tale of Nellie Madison for the first time, and it is so terrifically researched, so well put together, you might forget the story took place in 1934. . . . A physically lovely, beautifully produced book. . . . The Enigma Woman is top-shelf stuff for votaries of high quality historic crime stories. Professor Cairns will keep you mesmerized in contemplation of a most curious murder case, one in which our recalcitrant heroine could not speak until she was within the shadows of the gallows, one in which the victim may well have had it coming in spades and by golly got it.” —Laura James, in a May entry in CLEWS, The Historic Crime Blog
“By charting Madison’s experiences from the 1910s to the 1940s, Cairns offers critical insight on the deeds and misdeeds of one remarkable woman, who in many regards was a victim herself. By framing events the way she does, Cairns gives Madison’s story the context it needs and deserves.”—Christina Eng, San Francisco Chronicle
“Cairns tells her story with considerable sociological and psychological acuity. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this tale is how the cut-and-dried, seemingly heartless justice system of the 1930s ultimately produced a punishment that was just and enlightened and would generally satisfy today's more liberal attitudes toward spousal abuse and homicide.”—The Atlantic
Nellie was pegged by the media as a femme fatale, a character out of a noir tale. The author has done considerable research in this well-written true crime chronicle, but what happened in Nellie's bedroom in 1934 still remains an enigma. --- Publishers Weekly
Nellie May Madison got off on the wrong foot in life. …She eloped at 13, married several times, chain-smoked, drank whiskey and…shot husband No. 5. Convicted of murder, she was sentenced to death. In 1935, the state Supreme Court upheld the sentence — the first time it had done so against a woman. Madison's aloofness earned her such newspaper monikers as "Sphinx Woman" and "Iron Woman." … Supposedly on the advice of her lawyers, she lied on the witness stand, omitting the circumstances of the killing and claiming that the dead man in her apartment was a stranger. Her conduct alienated nearly everyone. "They really wanted to nail her," said Cal Poly San Luis Obispo history lecturer Kathleen A. Cairns. "They didn't like her lifestyle [nor] the fact that she didn't break down and cry." --- From a pre-publication story by Cecilia Rasmussen that appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Feb. 4, 2007
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
About this blog
As of February 2011 this true crime blog is still on hold.
This pause will continue for the time being. We may bring it back with the publication of a new book.
This pause will continue for the time being. We may bring it back with the publication of a new book.
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Watch for RememberingTheArgus
My blog RememberingTheArgus is becoming more active with the publishing of my novel Farewell Bend on Kimble.
-- Larry L. Lynch, February 2011
-- Larry L. Lynch, February 2011
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Don't Miss Ann Rule's list of the best
For true crime aficionados, I doubt that there is a current writer who is more respected than Ann Rule. At least among those who love modern page turners. If you haven't run across her list five favorite true crime books, the sooner you check it out the better. Who knows how long it will last as a free column at the Wall Street Journal site. To get it Goggle on the news side for "Ann Rule true crime list."
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Engaging portrait of the human mystery, yes, but what about the idea behind it?
Frequently we are stunned by examples of how evil strikes without warning to take away our loved ones. The shooting deaths at Virginia Tech are only the most recent example. Why? we ask. And Why? again. Paul LaRosa’s new book, Nightmare in Napa, is a sympathetic, human retelling of one of those stories, set in a middle class enclave of California wine country. All who knew the two young women who were brutally stabbed to death in a tiny Napa cottage they shared with a third girl friend could not have been more shocked by the murders. Family and some friends may never really recover from that shock. LaRosa details the lives of these people with an engaging, clear style of writing. He takes us through to the surprise confession of the murderer. He confronts the why. And still it hangs in the air. In the end, as with many a good true crime recounting, what remains with the reader are the questions not the answers.
Nightmare in Napa is a book is of more than passing interest because it grew out of a decision by the CBS TV show “48 Hours Mystery” to track the people involved during the investigation and to have a book written in connection with their production. In the end, the TV show’s staff members were shocked to learn that the murderer was so close to people involved that he had attended their tapings, urging one participant not to cooperate but otherwise attracting little attention. LaRosa writes of all of this without a trace of self indulgence. His book is a good piece of journalism but one that unlikely to be followed up with the same professionalism if the idea of writing books off true crime TV shows becomes a trend. Story tellers are just too tempted to make themselves the story and to hype the facts out of some misguided idea that leads to more sales.
Nightmare in Napa is a book is of more than passing interest because it grew out of a decision by the CBS TV show “48 Hours Mystery” to track the people involved during the investigation and to have a book written in connection with their production. In the end, the TV show’s staff members were shocked to learn that the murderer was so close to people involved that he had attended their tapings, urging one participant not to cooperate but otherwise attracting little attention. LaRosa writes of all of this without a trace of self indulgence. His book is a good piece of journalism but one that unlikely to be followed up with the same professionalism if the idea of writing books off true crime TV shows becomes a trend. Story tellers are just too tempted to make themselves the story and to hype the facts out of some misguided idea that leads to more sales.
Sunday, May 6, 2007
How true crime birthed the Western
On July 20, 1899, a robust hog farmer and prostitute and her innkeeper friend were strung up on a stunted pine overlooking Spring Creek Gulch. A detective working for the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association led the gang of lynchers..
Johnson County’s hard-up cowboys turned homesteaders, whom the cattlemen labeled cow “rustlers,” reacted with anger and fear and began arming themselves.
But the association initiated a plan to deal with that. It assembled a small army of 19 cattlemen, 21 Texas gunslingers, another hired killer brought in from Nampa, Idaho. Their intent was to eradicate somewhere between 19 and 70 Johnson County “rustlers” --- homesteaders the cattlemen decided didn’t deserve to occupy a piece of the open range.
Things came to a head during the blizzardy spring of 1892 when the cattlemen’s “army” detrained at Casper and rode off toward the town of Buffalo, Wyoming where its leaders hoped to corner most of their victims.
The army of “regulators” began by surrounding the small ranch of Nate Champion, labeled “the bravest man in Johnson County” by one of the newspaper writers who chronicled the Johnson County war from its roots in the 1890s spring roundups to the lawlessness that followed.
Warned by the slaying of Champion, a spontaneous citizen militia made up of homesteaders from Buffalo and environs, maybe 200 strong, surrounded the gunslingers at a cattlemen’s ranch and threatened to obliterate them.
President Benjamin Harrison was forced to send in the Calvary to rescue the cattlemen’s crew, marching it off to Cheyenne where the whole gang was more or less incarcerated (mostly less) until they were cleared of all criminal charges.
This true crime story --- if the West could have true crime before it actually had much law --- is recounted in wonderful detail by Helena Huntington Smith in her 1966 book, The War on Powder River, still available from the University of Nebraska press.
Smith tells this story with an engaging true to life flavor. To accomplish this she uses letters written by the cattlemen themselves, an abundance of not-quite-objective but many sided accounts by writers from the East and by Wyoming’s country editors at the time. All this is supplemented with information from a few books and “confessions” produced by participants.
For anyone who has been fascinated by Westerns in film and on TV, this book should become a must read. Larry McMurtry not withstanding, it is probably as close as anyone is likely to come to “the true story” behind the myth that underlies the West.
As mentioned in an earlier blog, I was tipped to Smith’s book by LSU film theorist Patrick McGee at the recent Colorado Springs conference on media and violence. In a 2006 book of his own, McGee traces how the events in Johnson County inspired the seminal Western novel The Virginian by Owen Wister and many Western films that followed. (McGee’s book is From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western.)
For a web-based quick history that may be intentionally short on some details, try out the “wyomingtalesandtrails” reference that comes up when you Google “The Johnson County War Wyoming.” Wikipedia also has a useful but incomplete rundown. It fails to mention Smith’s book but suggests that the disastrous 1980s movie Heaven’s Gate came close to following the true story, which is not correct. That flick is bad history as well as bad moviemaking. Somewhat ironically, the movie went so far over budget and did so poorly at the box office that Hollywood’s money men aren’t likely to have another go at the actual story anytime soon.
In his conference presentation, McGee discussed his personal fascination with the way the stories of the old west based on The Johnson County war have moved over time from being sympathetic to the capitalist cattlemen to showing how the common homesteaders were victimized. I have yet to read his book, but it has moved to the top of my list along with The Virginian.
Anyone interested in the story with plans to visit Wyoming might check out Buffalo’s city web site before heading out. It looks like some there are beginning to relish the story. They have just this spring erected a statue of Nate Champion.
Johnson County’s hard-up cowboys turned homesteaders, whom the cattlemen labeled cow “rustlers,” reacted with anger and fear and began arming themselves.
But the association initiated a plan to deal with that. It assembled a small army of 19 cattlemen, 21 Texas gunslingers, another hired killer brought in from Nampa, Idaho. Their intent was to eradicate somewhere between 19 and 70 Johnson County “rustlers” --- homesteaders the cattlemen decided didn’t deserve to occupy a piece of the open range.
Things came to a head during the blizzardy spring of 1892 when the cattlemen’s “army” detrained at Casper and rode off toward the town of Buffalo, Wyoming where its leaders hoped to corner most of their victims.
The army of “regulators” began by surrounding the small ranch of Nate Champion, labeled “the bravest man in Johnson County” by one of the newspaper writers who chronicled the Johnson County war from its roots in the 1890s spring roundups to the lawlessness that followed.
Warned by the slaying of Champion, a spontaneous citizen militia made up of homesteaders from Buffalo and environs, maybe 200 strong, surrounded the gunslingers at a cattlemen’s ranch and threatened to obliterate them.
President Benjamin Harrison was forced to send in the Calvary to rescue the cattlemen’s crew, marching it off to Cheyenne where the whole gang was more or less incarcerated (mostly less) until they were cleared of all criminal charges.
This true crime story --- if the West could have true crime before it actually had much law --- is recounted in wonderful detail by Helena Huntington Smith in her 1966 book, The War on Powder River, still available from the University of Nebraska press.
Smith tells this story with an engaging true to life flavor. To accomplish this she uses letters written by the cattlemen themselves, an abundance of not-quite-objective but many sided accounts by writers from the East and by Wyoming’s country editors at the time. All this is supplemented with information from a few books and “confessions” produced by participants.
For anyone who has been fascinated by Westerns in film and on TV, this book should become a must read. Larry McMurtry not withstanding, it is probably as close as anyone is likely to come to “the true story” behind the myth that underlies the West.
As mentioned in an earlier blog, I was tipped to Smith’s book by LSU film theorist Patrick McGee at the recent Colorado Springs conference on media and violence. In a 2006 book of his own, McGee traces how the events in Johnson County inspired the seminal Western novel The Virginian by Owen Wister and many Western films that followed. (McGee’s book is From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western.)
For a web-based quick history that may be intentionally short on some details, try out the “wyomingtalesandtrails” reference that comes up when you Google “The Johnson County War Wyoming.” Wikipedia also has a useful but incomplete rundown. It fails to mention Smith’s book but suggests that the disastrous 1980s movie Heaven’s Gate came close to following the true story, which is not correct. That flick is bad history as well as bad moviemaking. Somewhat ironically, the movie went so far over budget and did so poorly at the box office that Hollywood’s money men aren’t likely to have another go at the actual story anytime soon.
In his conference presentation, McGee discussed his personal fascination with the way the stories of the old west based on The Johnson County war have moved over time from being sympathetic to the capitalist cattlemen to showing how the common homesteaders were victimized. I have yet to read his book, but it has moved to the top of my list along with The Virginian.
Anyone interested in the story with plans to visit Wyoming might check out Buffalo’s city web site before heading out. It looks like some there are beginning to relish the story. They have just this spring erected a statue of Nate Champion.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Virginia Tech massacre leads to thoughtful true crime blogs
This seems like a watershed moment for true crime. The genre flicks are filling up the big screen as well as TV screens. Books are multiplying so fast even a serious blogger-reviewer can’t keep track. And now comes the massacre at Virginia Tech.
We want to credit the people who write for and edit the TrueCrimeBlog and CrimeBlog.US with keeping their response to the Virginia mess both informative and thoughtful. In her entry, Laura James, who is a senior contributor to Crimeblog and has her own historic true crime blog CLEWS, reminds us that this rampage is not unprecedented in American history going back as far as the 1920s. In 1927 in Bath, Michican, an angry and no-doubt mentally ill school trustee blew up a school full of students, then himself and the school superintendent, killing 45 students and townspeople.
If that event, which spawned at least two books, was mentioned in the coverage of the atrocity at Virginia Tech, I missed it. The TV anchors were, instead, intent on calling this week’s tragedy the “the worst school shooting” in American history, or the worst shooting at any location in the history of the country.
The story of the Bath School Disaster suggests there must be multiple reasons for people to do insanely destructive things. Limiting the impact of modern video games and media coverage that encourages copycat killers might help forestall some acts of violence. But the way that the human thought process sometimes goes awry ultimately causes the damage.
At the same web site, true crime author Kathryn Casey succinctly captured the terrible personal impact of these events in her guest blog at CrimeBlog.US., title “Making sense of losses.” Her point, ultimately, is that some people whose family members are killed in these events can go on to turn their experiences into “painful” personal “gains.” She takes note of the effort of a mother of a young woman who was brutally murdered to encourage the Texas legislature to provide counseling to jurors who must learn all the details of such crimes.
Of course, if readers here are dedicated true crime surfers of the Internet, they have undoubtedly discovered these entries themselves before coming to this site. But I couldn’t help but applaud the perspective of these two bloggers. They have advanced our theme of finding important lessons in the crimes that plague our lives.
To further that end, I offer up brief reviews of two books in the entry below. The books focus on what I think are truly instructional stories of two quite different types.
BUT FIRST A NOTE: I plan to continue the practice of leading readers to news stories and other blog entries that I think are informative --- usually items from small newspapers or blogs that are missing from the mainstream media. My excuse for not being more creative is that I’m deeply involved in other writing projects. And I’m caught up in reading Helena Huntington Smith’s 1966 work, “The War on Powder River” published by the University of Nebraska Press. It’s the story of a seminal conflict in the history of the American West, culminating in the killing of Nate Champion, who Smith describes as “the king of cattle thieves and the bravest man in Johnson County.” One day I’ll post some thoughts about that conflict and it’s importance in Western Literature. But more on that later. The point of this aside is to remind readers that if they want to be alerted when a new posting is made here, linking them to a story I fiend interesting, I believe Google will do that. Or maybe most readers are already overwhelmed with true crime stimulus, I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s become enough to make me rethink my own involvement. I’ll try hard not to be duplicative
We want to credit the people who write for and edit the TrueCrimeBlog and CrimeBlog.US with keeping their response to the Virginia mess both informative and thoughtful. In her entry, Laura James, who is a senior contributor to Crimeblog and has her own historic true crime blog CLEWS, reminds us that this rampage is not unprecedented in American history going back as far as the 1920s. In 1927 in Bath, Michican, an angry and no-doubt mentally ill school trustee blew up a school full of students, then himself and the school superintendent, killing 45 students and townspeople.
If that event, which spawned at least two books, was mentioned in the coverage of the atrocity at Virginia Tech, I missed it. The TV anchors were, instead, intent on calling this week’s tragedy the “the worst school shooting” in American history, or the worst shooting at any location in the history of the country.
The story of the Bath School Disaster suggests there must be multiple reasons for people to do insanely destructive things. Limiting the impact of modern video games and media coverage that encourages copycat killers might help forestall some acts of violence. But the way that the human thought process sometimes goes awry ultimately causes the damage.
At the same web site, true crime author Kathryn Casey succinctly captured the terrible personal impact of these events in her guest blog at CrimeBlog.US., title “Making sense of losses.” Her point, ultimately, is that some people whose family members are killed in these events can go on to turn their experiences into “painful” personal “gains.” She takes note of the effort of a mother of a young woman who was brutally murdered to encourage the Texas legislature to provide counseling to jurors who must learn all the details of such crimes.
Of course, if readers here are dedicated true crime surfers of the Internet, they have undoubtedly discovered these entries themselves before coming to this site. But I couldn’t help but applaud the perspective of these two bloggers. They have advanced our theme of finding important lessons in the crimes that plague our lives.
To further that end, I offer up brief reviews of two books in the entry below. The books focus on what I think are truly instructional stories of two quite different types.
BUT FIRST A NOTE: I plan to continue the practice of leading readers to news stories and other blog entries that I think are informative --- usually items from small newspapers or blogs that are missing from the mainstream media. My excuse for not being more creative is that I’m deeply involved in other writing projects. And I’m caught up in reading Helena Huntington Smith’s 1966 work, “The War on Powder River” published by the University of Nebraska Press. It’s the story of a seminal conflict in the history of the American West, culminating in the killing of Nate Champion, who Smith describes as “the king of cattle thieves and the bravest man in Johnson County.” One day I’ll post some thoughts about that conflict and it’s importance in Western Literature. But more on that later. The point of this aside is to remind readers that if they want to be alerted when a new posting is made here, linking them to a story I fiend interesting, I believe Google will do that. Or maybe most readers are already overwhelmed with true crime stimulus, I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s become enough to make me rethink my own involvement. I’ll try hard not to be duplicative
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