CRIME: VICTORIAN MURDER LEGACY
Murder In The First-Class Carriage: The First Victorian Railway Killing
by Kate Colquhoun (Overlook)
On a summer evening in Victorian London, a railway worker was alerted to a disturbing scene in one of the first-class carriages: Blood was soaking the seat cushions and had been splattered over the floor and windows.
Soon after, authorities found the body of banker Thomas Briggs lying near the train tracks. The 1864 murder set in motion an investigation that captured the public imagination and became the subject of chatter in living rooms and taverns across Britain.
Relying largely on primary sources, Kate Colquhoun’s “Murder in the First-Class Carriage” sketches out the moves of London detectives as they worked to solve the case and bring the perpetrator to justice. It reads like a 19th-century version of a “Law & Order” episode, with every break in the case making readers wonder which witnesses are fallible, which leads are worth following, and what clues the police may have missed or botched. It adds up to a suspenseful, well-paced account of a baffling mystery.
But Colquhoun’s book isn’t just about the investigation itself. It’s about how the case came to transfix Londoners and what that obsession said about the zeitgeist. “The murder had occasioned a public clamor for detective success, for evil to be contained and order reimposed,” Colquhoun writes. “What the country wanted was superhuman sagacity and ingenuity on the part of their police force, for heroism that would confirm that they were protected.”
The killing had more concrete effects, too. Colquhuon explains that the case led to changes in train-safety regulations and new rights for criminal defendants. And it served as a clear example of the power of the penny press, which played a major role in stirring readers’ feverish interest in the case.
— Sarah Halzak, The Washington Post
NONFICTION: SELF-DESTRUCTIVE ARTIST
Jackson Pollock
by Evelyn Toynton (Yale University Press)
“There is something particularly thrilling about watching an artist destroy himself,” writes Toynton, who has also published a novel based on the painter’s doomed marriage to fellow artist Lee Krassner. “The buttoned-down can watch the unbuttoned act out their own aggressive and nihilistic urges, while the cachet of the other’s fame lends the spectacle a special excitement.”
There was no shortage of aggression and nihilism in Pollock’s short life. A taciturn, sometimes violent alcoholic who depended on his wife to sell his paintings and trim his fingernails, Pollock emerged from obscurity to become king of abstract expressionism. He earned sneers from Time magazine, which called one of his works a “snarl of tar and confetti,” although its sister publication, Life, wondered whether he was “the greatest living painter in the United States.” The praise seemed not to have helped; five years after a 1949 article in Life made him famous, the 44-year-old artist drove his car off of a rural Long Island road in a drunken rage, killing himself and a friend of his mistress. Instead of destroying his reputation, however, his death secured it.
While alive, he had been as watchable as his art. “These are images of freedom, of exultation, in almost the same way that the paintings themselves are,” Toynton writes of iconic photographs of Pollock in action, which may be better known than his chaotic works “Number 29, 1950” and “Blue Poles.” “In some of them, he looks as though he’s literally dancing.” Toynton ably chronicles Pollock’s gambol over the edge.
— Justin Moyer, The Washington Post
NONFICTION: MIND READER’S SECRET
The Nazi Seance: The Strange Story of the Jewish Psychic in Hitler’s Circle
by Arthur J. Magida (Pallgrave Macmillan)
Erik Jan Hanussen made his living as a psychic in Weimar Germany during the interval between the two world wars. He packed theaters and wowed audiences with astounding mental abilities and divinations. His private consultations were popular.
Hanussen’s life was as phantasmagoric as his skills. During World War I, he had managed to avoid the trenches by performing mind readings. After the war, he conducted shows before the Austro-Hungarian royal family. He once used his skills to evade conviction in court, his vatic showmanship leading the judge to release him.
Hanussen’s life is deftly told in “The Nazi Seance.” Arthur J. Magida, a journalism professor at Georgetown University, weaves a fascinating tapestry of 1920s Berlin — vibrant, corrupt, gilded, brittle, teetering toward Nazi control. Hanussen had enemies. Some judges thought him a fraud, the police a nuisance. Because of his political associations, communists detested him. For protection, he attached himself to Adolf Hitler’s security service, the ill-fated brownshirts. “In time,” Magida writes, “he would become so close to the Nazis that he pledged to ‘be the first, if necessary, to devote everything I own and am … to the altar of Germany.’ “
His Nazi friends proved the most dangerous enemy of all, for Hanussen had a secret. He was Jewish. If Hanussen had any psychic abilities, they failed to warn him of what the Nazis would do when they found him out.
— Timothy R. Smith, The Washington Post
