Edmund Pearson's Deadly Pleasures

After publishing his Studies in Murder in 1924 (which included his 120-page chapter "The Borden Case"), Edmund Lester Pearson (1880-1937) during the mere thirteen years of life that remained to him went on to write additional murder studies, all of which should be of interest to connoisseurs of the cerebral true crime genre, a literary cousin, surely, to Golden Age detective fiction.

I distinguish "cerebral true crime fiction" from exploitative real life serial killer books and such, in that the appeal of those books seems to be a kind of hog wallow in horror, while what attracts people to Pearson's cases is the allure of the puzzle {though, to be sure, the frisson provided by that hatchet or axe in the Borden case can't be denied).

Pearson's additional murder studies are: Murder at Smutty Nose and Other Murders (1926), Five Murders, with a Final Note on the Lizzie Borden Case (1928), Instigation of the Devil (1930), More Studies in Murder (1936) and The Trial of Lizzie Borden (1937).  Studies in Murder was reprinted in 1999 by the Ohio State University Press and varied collections of Pearson's previously published murder essays were issued in 1938 (Modern Library), 1966 (Avon) and 1967 (Signet).

The Borden house at the time of the murders
Lizzie Borden said she was in the barn loft on the left
when her father was murdered.
According to Edmund Pearson the barn
"on a sultry August day was about as uninviting a place
as the steam-room of a Turkish bath."

Although Pearson isn't so well-remembered these days (outside of the specialized world of Lizzie Borden studies), a few years ago he briefly attracted the attention of Jill Lepore, a Yale Ph.D. in American Studies who is a Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer for the New Yorker (Pearson, incidentally, graduated from Harvard in 1902, got a B.L.S. from the New York State Library School, was Editor of Publications at the New York Public Library and published numerous books, as well as articles in, yes, the New Yorker, as well as other journals).

Professor Lepore does not seem to have been too impressed with Pearson's work.  In her New Yorker article, "Foul Play," she writes:

Edmund Lester Pearson, a librarian and sometime hoax-artist who spent most of his career at the New York Public Library, wrote true-crime stories for The New Yorker from 1933 to 1937. He wasn’t the first person to write about murder in the magazine and he wasn’t the best, not by a long stretch....But give E. L. Pearson this: he was the least compassionate.

This quotation catches the tenor of the piece, which is filled with swipes at Pearson.  When Lepore writes that Pearson is "best known for his lifelong obsession with Lizzie Borden" she can't forbear adding "He thought she was guilty.  He thought most people were guilty."

Professor Lepore concludes that "Pearson didn’t have much sympathy, really, for anyone. That’s because his sympathies lay somewhere else altogether: in the discrediting of sympathy. He wanted to see murderers prosecuted and killed, and believed that the spooky and the sensational—and even the sorrowful—dimmed the prospects for conviction."

When reading Pearson's account of the Lizzie Borden case in Studies in Murder, I certainly was struck by the author's obvious belief that Borden was guilty of the axe murders of her father and her stepmother and his palpable disgust for a popular press that he believed had recklessly exonerated Borden long before the trial ever started.

sitting room in the Borden house
where Andrew Borden was killed
tourists evidently get photos taken on the sofa today

Pearson writes that when, in an admittedly gruesome display, the skull of Andrew Borden "was produced in court, for purposes of illustration of the nature of the wounds" (someone had hit him ten times in the head with an axe as he rested on a horsehair sofa in the Borden house sitting room; see above), the "mawkish and sentimental newspapers--and this included three-quarters of them at this stage--made great play with this fact, and dwelt upon how it affected the poor prisoner."

Pearson expands on this point, displaying definite sympathy--for the murder victims:

The newspapers were few which did not act as if the deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Borden ought to have been forgotten long ago; that the officers of the law were little better than brutes to have prosecuted anybody; and that the sole concern of mankind was to rescue, from her grievous position, the "unfortunate girl," and send her home amid a shower of roses.

Pearson quotes from the "usually sober" New York Times editorial about the case composed after Borden was found not guilty, and it does make surprising reading in its heedless embrace of Lizzie:

"The verdict, according to that paper, was 'a certain relief to every right-minded man and woman.'  The Times spoke of 'this most unfortunate and cruelly persecuted woman....There was never any serious reason to suppose that she was guilty'."

Anyone reading Pearson certainly would think otherwise, that there was in fact great reason to suspect that Lizzie Borden was guilty of the murders.

just like a detective novel house plan
the first floor of the Borden house
with the sitting room and couch
where Andrew's body was found

Cases such as this one have always attracted alternative theorists and certainly the Borden case has not lacked other candidates for the role of criminal culprit.  But Lizzie's visiting uncle had an alibi (not to mention no motive).  Lizzie's sister Emma had an alibi.  Bridget Sullivan, the Irish maid, was on the scene when the murders occurred, napping in her room, but she had no credible motive (it has been suggested she snapped because she was told, fatally, to "do windows").

Those were the surviving people within the household.  Another theory was that the killer was a homicidal maniac stranger--perhaps a passing tramp! Yet how could a stranger get in a house on a populated street, kill one person with an axe, then another with the axe an hour or more later, with two other people, Bridget and Lizzie, on the scene, then exit the house, without ever being observed?

This is a problem for John Dickson Carr!  The hollow man, indeed.

Add to this all the problems with Lizzie's story (see the book) and the fact that she had a motive (hatred of her stepmother as well as her stingy father, who kept her financially dependent) and she certainly seems the most likely candidate.  I found myself agreeing with Pearson that both the newspapers and the Massachusetts judges who heard the case seemed quite partial to Lizzie Borden, perhaps, as he suggests, from a "mental infirmity or bias resulting from an unwillingness to believe that a woman could murder her father."

And with an axe no less!  Pearson notes that "to suggest that a woman of good family, of blameless life and hitherto unimpeachable character [Lizzie taught Sunday School and was a member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union--The Passing Tramp] could possibly commit two such murders, is to suggest something so rare as to be almost unknown to criminology."

Even today, in this jaded age, people were shocked by the animal savagery of the Jody Arias killing of Travis Alexander.  Just imagine how incredulous people must have been 120 years ago to hear that these axe murders in a prominent home in Falls River, Massachusetts might have been done by a proper, church-going Victorian maiden!

moving on up
the house Lizzie Borden moved into after her acquittal

Pearson's commentary throughout Studies in Murder is filled with interesting and felicitously-written insights (whether or not one always agrees with him) and it is disappointing to see that a noted academic like Jill Lepore can be so stinting of recognition for any of his virtues as a writer and scholar of murder (and him a Harvard man too!).

Some excerpts from Pearson:

It is almost invariably noticed that a charge of murder, or of any serious crime, acts automatically to rob a person of all right to polite address; the public promptly makes free with the first name, especially if it is a woman. [just ask Lizzie, Casey and Jody-The Passing Tramp]

[After noting that a false story had early emerged that Lizzie Borden had quarreled with her father "about a man, a lover"] This seemed at last to bring into the case the "love interest," for which many newspaper reporters had almost pined away and died.

[On crank letters] From all parts of the United States they [letters] came; written on all possible colors and shapes of paper, in every type of hand-writing, and every degree of sanity.

Is Edmund Pearson's writing unpardonably elitist and aloof from human emotion, as Jill Lepore intimates?  This, I should note, is often a charge made against the Golden Age of detective fiction, that the novels written in this era are, deplorably, "mere puzzles," lacking spiritual depth and psychological complexity.

To be sure, Pearson's frequently expressed  disdain for the mass media reflects, I think, skepticism of the mental sophistication of "the masses."  It would be interesting to compare Person in this respect with Professor Lepore's book on the Tea Party movement.  It also would be interesting to read the New Yorker pieces authored by Pearson that led Lepore to render such a negative judgment on him.  However, those New Yorker pieces are behind a New Yorker pay wall (certainly no one would confuse the New Yorker with the penny press!).

However, I think it's unfair to claim that Edmund Pearson didn't have sympathy or compassion for anyone.  In the Borden case and the Mate Bram case (the latter to be explored this weekend), Pearson lamented a total of five men and women butchered with axes wielded by malign hands.  He thought that in heavily publicized trials the mass media of his day tended to make celebrities of accused (in his view almost certain) murderers.  Is this really such a desperately eccentric notion?

Renee Zellweger in Chicago (2002)

Victorian Tableaux Vivants, #1: The Blackheath Poisonings (1978), by Julian Symons

For the next week or so I want to write about Victorian mystery novels.  Not, to be precise, mystery novels written from the Victorian era, but ones written much more recently, and set in the Victorian era.  I have chosen four titles to look at: The Blackheath Poisonings (1978), by Julian Symons; Waxwork (1978), by Peter Lovesey; The Wench is Dead (1989), by Colin Dexter; and Asta's Book (1993), by Barbara Vine/Ruth Rendell (I'm cheating a bit with the last one, since the action only really starts in 1905).  Let the tableaux of Victorian crime novels begin!--The Passing Tramp

first edition of Bloody Murder,
Julian Symons' seminal mystery genre survey

I don't suppose it is true that people adept at examining darker emotions in crime novels necessarily experienced great unhappiness in childhood, but certainly it seems to be the case that Julian Symons (1912-1994) in fact did (more on this below).

Although today he receives much less attention than he did even two decades ago, Julian Symons is one of the major figures in English crime fiction from the second half of the twentieth century. Symons was a prolific writer, publishing 28 crime novels in a half-century period (1945 to 1994; a final novel appeared posthumously in 1996), as well as collections of short stories and works of biography, history and literary criticism (a short story collection was published in 2006 by Crippen & Landru).

Julian Symons

In my view, Symons' mystery genre survey, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (originally published in 1972 and reprinted in revised editions in 1985 and 1992) arguably is the single most important critical study of the genre (I say this though I often disagree with it!).

Symons was a key figure in that transition he writes about in Bloody Murder, the movement away from the puzzle-oriented detective story to the crime novel that places greater emphasis on characterization, setting, theme, psychology, the depiction of accurate police procedure, etc. He wanted to shift the mystery genre from its Golden Age preoccupation with puzzles over to the concerns of "realistic" mainstream novels. During his long writing career Symons himself did, however, produce some genuine "fair play" detective novels, including The Blackheath Poisonings, his twentieth crime novel.

Blackheath was published in 1978, when Symons was 66 years old.  It was to be the first of a Symons trilogy of Victorian crime novels, the others being Sweet Adelaide (1980) and The Detling Murders (1982) (in the United States The Detling Secret, a superior title). Symons admitted that he was getting older and losing touch with younger English life, probably as most any older writer to some extent would tend to do, and he thought exploring Victorian life would be an interesting change for him (though he went on to write seven more crime novels after the Victorian ones, all but one set entirely in the present day).

The Blackheath Poisonings (1992)

Of the three novels the best known is The Blackheath Poisonings. Sweet Adelaide is an exploration of a notorious true crime, the Adelaide Bartlett poising case.  The Detling Secret in my view is a superior detective novel to Blackheath, though it lacks emotional force. Blackheath was televised twenty years ago in a British film adaptation with a fine cast, including Judy Parfitt, Ian McNeice, Zoe Wanamaker and Patrick Malahide.  I believe it remains the sole Symons novel ever filmed.

It is hard for me to fairly assess Blackheath as a detective novel, because I encountered the tale through the film adaptation and thus already knew the solution when I first read the book. It seems to me that modern readers may guess the solution ahead of the author's revelation.  Beyond the puzzle aspect, however, The Blackheath Poisonings is quite an enjoyable and suspenseful tale.

The novel deals with multiple arsenic poisonings in a wealthy Victorian family.  There are actually two households involved: that of matriarch Harriet Collard, her spinster daughter Charlotte (who has an importunate suitor) and her nephew Bertie Williams; and that of Roger Vandervant, his wife Beatrice (Harriet Collard's other daughter), Roger Vandervant's son, Paul, and George Collard (Harriet's son) and his wife Isabel.

Roger Vandervant dies, ostensibly of natural gastric trouble, and at the urging of Harriet Collard the pompous family doctor gives a death certificate and an inquest is avoided. Another death occurs several months later and again the doctor gives a death certificate (it's all blamed on the oysters this time).

However when certain indiscreet letters come to the attention of the police, an official investigation begins, arsenic is discovered as the cause of death in both cases, an arrest is made and a trial commences.  A verdict is reached, but is it the right one? Then there is another death....

the Felony & Mayhem edition

Symons does an admirable job of subtly capturing Victorian atmosphere (in some such recreations, the authors are so anxious to parade their knowledge about the period the books resemble encyclopedia entries swallowed whole and regurgitated on the reader) and portraying repressed family antagonisms that may lead to murder.  Not surprisingly he seems more interested in sex and psychology than economic and business detail. The Collards have a family business, toy manufacture (Symons enjoyed playing with toy soldiers as a child). If this were a Golden Age detective novel by John Street or Freeman Wills Crofts there would be much more emphasis on this and less sexual psychology. But Symons is very good at what he deigns to do.

Unfortunately it is difficult to discuss interesting aspects of this novel without spoiling the solution for those who have not read it. And since it has been reprinted in a new edition by Felony & Mayhem, it is easily available for those who want to do so!  However I do want to say more about the characterization and how it draws from Symons' own life.

Julian Symons was quite a good writer, both of fiction and essays, and The Blackheath Poisonings is throughout a well-written novel.  However, most of the characters do not break out of the confines of (well-conveyed) stock.

Judy Parfitt as Harriet Collard

First, there's the iron-willed, "elderly" (about sixty) dowager matriarch, Harriet Collard (memorably played in the film version by Judy Parfitt, born to play such roles).  Harriet is stock, but of the very best grade.  She's the real man of the family, as more than one character thinks, confident and indomitable, though tragically wrongheaded in some of her decisions (I suspect she symbolizes Symons' view of the Victorian age).

Then there's Harriet's frustrated spinster daughter.  There's the daughter's on-the-make suitor.  There's Harriet's smugly pious, evangelical Christian nephew (here Symons really writes beneath himself, I think, giving poor Bertie every last one of the negative stereotypes one can give this sort of character--he even has the young man picking his nose and afflicted with acne). And there's the formal father (Roger Vandervant) and Harriet's wastrel son George. Harriet's other daughter never really emerges as even interesting stock.

Paul Vandervant:
something of an autobiographical portrait?

Yet there are two characters who are really interesting and multi-dimensional, young Paul Vandervant and his beautiful, enigmatic stepmother, Isabel. Without saying whether Isabel did anything she oughtn't to have done, I would suggest that with her Symons surely drew on the gallery of real-life, fascinating, Victorian suspected lady poisoners. She's quite a compellingly presented individual. Paul Vandervant thinks so too and has, indeed, rather fallen in love with her.

At its heart, The Blackheath Poisonings is a moving story of young male adolescent love (I find the epilogue a narrative tour de force).  I don't know whether Symons had a similar youthful passion, but I do know there are quite a few similarities between Paul Vandervant and Julian Symons.

Symons was born in 1912 to a Jewish father of obscure origins who was nearly fifty at the time of Symons' birth.  So his father was only a few years younger than Arthur Conan Doyle--in other words, very much a man of the Victorian era.  Symons' father was very much the stern, formal Victorian father, as Symons portrays him, someone who never failed to address his son as "sir."  The family's economic status was unstable (sometimes they had good money, but more often they didn't). Young Julian, obviously an extremely bright lad, left school at fourteen to find work as a clerk. This was the end of his formal schooling.

Julian had a stammer, which his father could not help but feel was deliberate ("Come on, sir, say what you've got to say, get it out").  "He was short-tempered at home," recalls Symons of his father, "shouting angrily about mistakes made or things left undone, savagely censorious in relation to any friend brought back to the house, prudish in a deep-seated Jewish way about sexual matters."  For example, he often exasperatedly criticized Julian's play or reading choices:

not for play?

If he saw me playing solitary games with soldiers on the bedroom floor he would tell me to get them cleared up and do some work; when I was reading an article about Napoleon's Marshall Lannes in the Encyclopedia Britannica he took the volume from me, turned the  pages until he found the name of Linnaeus and, frantic with irritation, said: "Read that, sir, read something useful."

"As much as I hated anybody at this time of my life," declares Symons bluntly, "I hated my father." When Symons' father died in 1929, when Symons was a  teenager, sixteen or seventeen, the son "was not conscious of deep sorrow, nor of any emotion except ignoble relief, and a feeling that life might be easier now."

Paul Vandervant gets along vastly better with his father than this (and he is sorry when his father dies), but the two do have bitter conflicts, in which his father sounds rather like Symons' father ("Well, sir?...Do you understand what you're saying? I am a liar, that is what you're saying.").  Paul writes poetry, he wants to leave school to write, to become a journalist, and Paul is notably socialistic in political orientation, all like Julian Symons.  Paul's father is frequently obtuse, unable to understand his son's feelings or appreciate his true talents.

In A Catalogue of Crime, Jacques Barzun criticized The Blackheath Poisonings, in part because he believed that "some of the attitudes about state, church and society [expressed in the book] are of the 20th century."  I suspect Barzun was thinking to a great extent about the character of Paul, who indeed often sounds more than a bit like Julian Symons.  The novel is set in 1892, twenty years before Symons was born, and perhaps Paul seems more a character of 1912 (there also is an epilogue set in 1930, which I don't think anyone could criticize on Barzun's grounds).  But much of the interest we have in Paul's story in The Blackheath Poisonings derives precisely, I believe, from the power of Symons' self-portraiture.