Americans are generally not too kind when our cherished icons, literary or otherwise, indulge their interests in something other than what they are known for. No one really wanted Michael Jordan to play minor league baseball, or Stephen King to write about dragons, and I am certain no one wants to listen to Russell Crowe sing. Of course, there are exceptions. Paul Newman did make a mean balsamic vinaigrette.
More reviews from the Book Review's Summer Reading special issue.Bill James is not exactly a household name, but to baseball fans, especially those of us who immerse ourselves in box scores, he is indeed an icon. It was James who by and large introduced modern statistical analysis to baseball decision making, an approach he termed “sabermetrics.” His series of “Baseball Abstract” books was enormously influential, to the point where he now serves as a senior adviser to the Boston Red Sox. This one evil connection aside, there is no denying he is the George Washington of baseball stats.
Little did we know that James is also a polymath, or at least a bimath. In his spare time, it turns out, he is a stone true-crime nut. From Helen Jewett to the Lindbergh baby to Sam Sheppard to Ted Bundy to JonBenet Ramsey, he has quietly mastered the minutiae of hundreds of American tabloid murders going back 200 years. In “Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence,” James takes the analytical eye he normally lavishes on Honus Wagner’s Monday afternoon on-base percentage and applies it to, among other things, each of Lizzie Borden’s 40 whacks. Or maybe there were 38.1275. It might depend on which way the flags were flying. Or if she was a southpaw.
The book’s subtitle is a tad highfalutin. What “Popular Crime” amounts to is an intellectual walkabout consisting of James’s musings on just about every major American murder case you can think of, the more lurid the better. He is aware that some may find this obsession a bit, well, down-market; he couldn’t care less. His overarching theory, one he pushes lightly and sometimes lightheartedly, is that tabloid murder cases possess actual significance, that we can learn something about American history by the kinds of murders that interest each generation. Moreover, “popular crime stories are an expression of our impulse to draw a protective circle around ourselves,” James writes. That the most popular often involve young white women he finds unsurprising. “The murders of men tend not to alarm us because, on a certain level, we perceive men as voluntarily accepting risks by leaving the protective bubble of the community to go on hunter-gatherer missions,” he says. “When a pretty young girl is murdered, we tend to internalize that as ‘Somebody is after our women.’ ” The murders of black people, he goes on, simply don’t interest white people. “If you want to say that this is racist and archaic . . . well, yes, of course it is.”
But really, all this big-picture chitchat is just an excuse for James to happily roll around in the ephemera of knife thrusts and bullet trajectories and ligature marks, allowing him to unleash all manner of wry, random observations. He’s not so interested in the forest, in other words. But a tree, a root, a branch, a bark disease, an acorn, the sexual proclivities of the wood-burrowing Asiatic weevil of Celebes — he’s got that stuff down cold.
For true-crime aficionados, this book is a hoot. James has to be the least starchy serious writer I’ve run across in years. He has the gift of writing the way a person talks — no easy task, believe me — giving “Popular Crime” a folksy, conversational feel. On cable television’s preoccupation with the disappearance of attractive white women: “As far as CNN knows, you’re not missing unless you’re cute.” On his — and a reader’s implied — preference for ax murderers, cannibals and headless torsos over historically “significant” cases like Sacco and Vanzetti: “We are trying to have a serious discussion about Trash here. Stop distracting us with serious topics.”
Bryan Burrough, a special correspondent at Vanity Fair, is the author of “Public Enemies” and “The Big Rich.”
