Neither interest was encouraged by his teachers. James has since joined a rather long list of boy geniuses who survived algebra and book reports for English class to become, post-high school, rich and famous via their offbeat passions. James parlayed his fascination with sports numbers into a statistics-based analysis of baseball that revolutionized our understanding of the game. His hefty, 482-page Popular Crime is the fruit of his second obsession, the result of his reading more than a thousand crime books. It will not displace his fame as a baseball guru, but it displays the same talent for argument and analysis.
The book itself is an argument for taking crime stories seriously. “If you try to talk to American intellectuals and opinion-makers about the phenomenon of famous crimes, they immediately throw up a shield,” James writes. “I will not talk about this. I am a serious and intelligent person. I am interested in politics and the environment.” But who is to say what is “serious”? As James points out, “That which is symbolically significant, like the Super Bowl and Michelle Obama’s sleeves, often turns out, over time, to be of far more real importance than that which is tangibly significant, like Middle East policy and economic reform.” He offers a number of arguments as to why crime stories are socially useful — they remind us to lock the doors at night — but these arguments are not necessary. I recall watching Bill Clinton give a state of the union address on the evening that the jury in the wrongful death lawsuit against O.J. Simpson arrived at a verdict. Television coverage switched from the halls of Congress to the jury entering the courtroom and part of me was perturbed. Hey! I thought. We’re listening to an important speech here! Stop this tabloid intrusion!
A moment’s thought, however, reminded me that the O.J. verdict was far more important than anything Bill Clinton had to say. I’m sure most novelists, suckers for the dark corners of the human heart, would agree. James tells the story of Charles Dickens visiting some Boston highbrows, such as Oliver Holmes, and asking to see the room where a famous Boston murder had recently taken place. “Oliver Holmes gritted his teeth and conducted the tour, Dickens beaming and almost beside himself with excitement,” James writes.
There are some 80 odd cases presented here, beginning with a couple of murders in the Roman Empire, and they all make compelling reading. James has a breezy, incisive style that occasionally lapses into crudity — things are “half-assed,” “frigging stupid” and so on — but not to the great detriment of the book. He connects many of the cases to developments in criminal justice, with particularly harsh words for Earl Warren’s Supreme Court and its “careless application of the principles of prisoner’s rights.” That carelessness, according to James, “unleashed upon us a torrent of criminal violence which pitched the nation backward into atavistic attitudes about crime and punishment. We have yet to regain our footing.”
It is hard to remember, James writes, that “the dominant American attitudes about crime and criminals in the late 1950s were far more liberal than those which prevail today.” Movies such as the 1958 I Want to Live!, the 1959 Compulsion and the 1962 Birdman of Alcatraz dwelt on the humanity of the convict. The Birdman, in particular, Robert Stroud, was portrayed as a rather gentle soul. It is dismaying to learn he was in fact a vicious psychopath. The movie got it wrong, as movies get a lot of things wrong in the world of crime. (Are we surprised?) In The Silence of the Lambs, for example, the arch-fiend Hannibal Lecter is, according to James, “50 times more organized, more in control of his actions, than any real-life serial murderer.”
Movies sometimes get it wrong not because they deliberately exaggerate or distort but because they follow a real-life narrative agreed upon by police, courts and media. It just so happens that the narrative in question is fallacious. The 1968 movie The Boston Strangler, for example, follows the official version of the case, identifying the strangler as small time hood Albert De Salvo — despite the complete lack of any evidence linking De Salvo to the murders, other than his confession. De Salvo, James notes, was a pathological liar.
James is hardly infallible. He has spent a lot of time, in a rare instance where his two passions combine, attacking the case against Pete Rose, the ex-ball player accused of having bet on games while a manager. There seems no doubt in this instance that Rose did what he was accused of doing, James’s analysis of the evidence notwithstanding. In this book he makes a curious error in claiming that John F. Kennedy, during the 1960 presidential campaign, advocated U.S. defence of two tiny Nationalist-held islands, Quemoy and Matsu, off the coast of mainland China. In fact, it was Nixon who advocated fighting over these islands if necessary, while Kennedy demurred. It may seem an obscure point, but James uses it to muddy an important and otherwise clear argument.
Perhaps the crux of the book is his analysis of the JonBenét Ramsey murder. This occurred in 1996 in Boulder, Colo., when Mrs. Ramsey, wife of a wealthy businessman, called the police one night and told them she had discovered a ransom note for her six-year-old daughter, JonBenét. The girl was missing from her bed. Several hours later her body was found in the basement.
Thanks to a murder investigation bungled by the police from the start, we will never know the truth of what happened, but it is safe to say that a majority opinion among followers of this case is that the parents were guilty of the murder, not some hypothetical intruder and kidnapper. James disagrees. “My greatest fear, in writing this book, is that I will be unable to convince you that John and Patsy Ramsey had nothing to do with the death of their daughter,” he states. After following James’s arguments I can say that he does make it seem highly improbable that the parents were guilty. On the other hand, the only alternative explanation, involving an intruder, also seems highly improbable. There seems to be no truth we can take away from this horrifying episode except the reflection — another argument of James’s book — that the world is a very strange place and often beyond our comprehension.
