Popular Crime

Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence by Bill James
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Bill James is an unusual writer. He is best known for sabermetrics, a new way of collecting baseball statistics that better reflects the performance of players. But during all the years that he has been writing his baseball books and advising teams he has also been reading books about crime. Not mysteries or thrillers, true crime. He estimates he has read about 1,000 of these books, about murders ranging from Lizzie Borden to Jon Benet Ramsey.

James approaches any subject in an almost entirely unbiased manner and with as little emotional input as he can manage. Using a detailed timeline, he makes a pretty convincing case, for example, that Lizzie Borden could not have killed her father, given the time it would have taken her to clean up all the blood from attacking him with an axe. She was neat as a pin five minutes later. Of course, anyone else’s having done it is almost as unlikely. And whether you like Lizzie Borden or not, what the neighbors thought about it, and the moralizing of various law enforcement and judicial figures are not part of the equation.

Popular Crime touches on almost all the famous cases of American murder including the Lindberg kidnapping, the Scottsboro Boys, the Boston Strangler, the O J Simpson case, and a hundred others. I don't always agree with him but I have respect for his arguments and every page of the book fascinated me. One of the top 10 books I’ve read in the last two years.

2011 No 78 Coming soon: Ann Veronica, by H G Wells

View all my reviews