TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/022089/02208900.071

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.0 KB | 138 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 98

Out to Make Killings


Crime pays, at least for the many authors who write about it

By Stefan Kanfer


    Criminal trials used to have four main components:
defendant, attorneys, judge and jury. Now they have a fifth:
writers, eager to make a killing of their own. The more
notorious the case nowadays, the longer seems the line of
authors in and around the courtroom, armed with notebooks and
contracts. Last year's "preppie murder" trial of Robert
Chambers for strangling Jennifer Levin in New York City's
Central Park, for example, will soon yield Wasted, a book by
Linda Wolfe (The Professor and the Prostitute). The Tawana
Brawley affair has inspired a team of six New York Times
reporters and an editor to collaborate on a volume projected for
release in late 1989. Politics and sex were the surefire
ingredients of the fraud, bribery and conspiracy trial of former
Miss America Bess Myerson, and, sure enough, they are soon to
be clothbound in a book by Shana Alexander, whose previous
titles chronicled the murders of a diet doctor and a Utah
millionaire.

    The Joel Steinberg case, decided two weeks ago, dwarfs them
all. The Manhattan lawyer was accused of brutalizing his lover
Hedda Nussbaum and was convicted of manslaughter in the death of
their illegally adopted daughter Lisa. Here was every ingredient
of the true-crime blockbuster: cocaine, an S-M relationship, a
beautiful six-year-old and a battered woman, all set against the
background of Greenwich Village. Most important, in a city
afflicted with racial malaise, it starred what Tom Wolfe
identified in The Bonfire of the Vanities as the Great White
Defendant.

    From the trial's opening statements, aspiring authors
jockeyed for space on courtroom benches. Joyce Johnson, a
contributing editor for Vanity Fair, began work on What Lisa
Knew. Free-lance writer Maury Terry launched into The Dark Side
of 10th Street. Sam Erlich, a fellow free lance, undertook
Lisa, Hedda, Joel. Marie Winn, author of a television critique,
The Plug-In Drug, jotted notes for an untitled book of her own.

    Winner of the race to print is Susan Brownmiller, whose
novel Waverly Place (Grove; $18.95), published this week, was
completed long before the verdict came in. In this fictive
version of events leading to Lisa's death, Nussbaum (thinly
masked as Judith Winograd) is programmed for catastrophe. Her
childhood begins with abuse: "Whack. Where were you? Whack. Ma, I
got lost. Whack. I told you . . . always to come straight home.
Whack."

    Once she moves in with Barry Kantor (Steinberg), himself a
victim of childhood beatings, sadomasochism reigns supreme: "He
didn't mean to bang my head against the wall . . . This is a man
who cares so deeply, who feels so much pain."

    Brownmiller attempts a novelist's overview, tracing the
domestic tyrannies that slowly escalate to mutilation and death.
But her squabbling adults have little more personality than
Punch and Judy, and their maltreated daughter is a mere shadow.
Waverly Place takes 294 pages to express what W.H. Auden did in
a quatrain: "I and the public know/ What all schoolchildren
learn,/ Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return."

    Today that evil is worth millions in hard-cover and
paperback sales. "More crime books are being written for larger
advances than ever before," says Daphne Merkin, an editor at
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Merkin cites the $200,000 she paid to
Newsday reporter Steve Wick, who had never written a book
before, for Bad Company, an anatomy of the 1983 Hollywood
murder of producer Roy Radin. John Baker, editor of Publishers
Weekly, estimates that 10% of all nonfiction best sellers are
chronicles of true crime. "The number has possibly doubled over
the past decade," he claims.

    So popular have these books become that two studies of the
same crime were selected last year as Literary Guild
alternates: Daddy's Girl by Clifford Irving, and Cold Kill by
Jack Olsen. Both focused on a teenage Texan who hired a
boyfriend to kill her parents. This kind of multiple offering
is not unusual. In 1985 two works also focused on a single
crime: the murder of Franklin Bradshaw, engineered by his
socialite daughter and carried out by her son. Both Alexander's
Nutcracker and Jonathan Coleman's At Mother's Request became
best sellers; both were made into separate network mini-series.
There have been five books about the executed serial killer Ted
Bundy.

    Analyses of the true-crime phenomenon range from the cosmic
to the cruel. Publishers Weekly columnist Paul Nathan believes
that readers feel "surrounded by the possibilities of violence
and the threat of some kind of nuclear or biological or
chemical warfare. So in a way it's a kind of relief to channel
your apprehensiveness into something as specific and neatly
rounded as a crime story." Michael Korda, editor in chief of
Simon & Schuster, has a chillier view: "We're in an age of
intimate crime. Back in the '70s it would have seemed almost
inappropriate to write about a rapist who kills his victim in
Utah, when we had people offing the most important figures in
the land."

    Whatever the reasons for their success, the authors
generally have elaborate rationales for their exploitation of
human misery. Linda Wolfe uses the Emma Bovary defense: "Many of
the writers I admired had treated themselves to the inspiration
of current events. Flaubert had been told by a friend about a
doctor's dissatisfied wife who had killed herself after having
a series of lovers, and invented Madame Bovary . . . It's not
a new phenomenon." Olsen takes the educational approach: books
about psychopaths, he asserts, make it easier for people to
identify them: "The date rapist can be spotted even before he
tries to hold your hand, and any book on that subject should
help elucidate that." Says Brownmiller: "I hope for a subversive
effect, reaching people who would not read a 400-page nonfiction
history of a crime and theoretical discussion of child abuse."
Alexander deals with the true-crime genre by denying its
existence. "I don't recognize it," she says. "I think there are
two categories -- fiction and non. And I am unable to do one,
so I do the other."

    Not all writers and critics are receptive to these
arguments. Olsen admits that "there's no field more prone to
charlatanism than nonfiction crime writing. There is more crap
being written under that guise than any other genre because
there are no checks and balances." And Nathan has deep moral
concerns. "There's something rather ghoulish about seeing a
number of people getting together competitively, each with a
project based on somebody's death," he says. Steinberg's is a
case in point: "It's hard to know where to draw the line
between simple sensationalism and something that is socially
valid." That line grows a little dimmer every time a new
defendant gets measured for a dust jacket.