Portrait of a Killer: Case Closed? Hardly!
Apr. 1st, 2003 05:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pantryslutI have just finished the second-worst book I have ever read all the way through. (for my view of the worst, go here. And to think, it was a bestseller, too.
Patricia Cornwell should stick to fiction, apparently. (I've never read any; I'm not a mystery fan.)
That's right, I was reading Portrait of A Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed. I picked it up because I read an excerpt in Vanity Fair and thought that she'd been seduced by narrative, and that it would be interesting to see how her (obviously flawed) theory played out, what evidence she'd collected and how she arranged it. It might be flaw ed (in fact, it suffers from the most common flaw of all Jack the Ripper books, that is, deciding who the culprit is beforehand and then selectively sifting through the evidence on that basis), but it might be a good read nonetheless. Like a good novel, e ven if the author was convinced she was writing fact.
Well, it didn't even reach that high.
Patricia Cornwell is deranged. She's obsessed. She *hates* Walter Sicker, hates his art. She thinks he's creepy, and she really wants to pin this awful series of murders on him (plus several unrelated deaths, too), just because he's so obviously an eeevil man.
She's written a mess of a book. It does, often, read more like a novel, but not a well-written one.
Plus, there are pages and pages of what modern forensic medicine might be able to extract from the murder sites -- for each and every death. For god's sake, I got the point the first time!
In the end, I finished the book because I was so fascinated by the breakdown of reality as Cornwell pursued her theory to the edges of ridiculousness. At the way she mangled her material and evidence (and the order that she presents it in) The way she slowly constructs Sickert to be the cleverest, smartest monster the world has apparently ever seen. The middle-class pity that drips from her words when she discusses the Ripper's victims, and two of Sickert's wives. Wow. This is a primer on how to write a book that undercuts your credibility as a serious investigative author.
Nobody doubts that Sickert's art was morbid, that he was obsessed with Jack the Ripper. But her evidence is so thin, and so subjective, that one might as well argue that the German painters in the 1920's Grosz and the other Lustmord artists, were all psychopaths, too.
I am intrigued at the idea that Sickert may have been a Ripper letter *hoaxer,* though.
Three other perspectives on the book:
Casebook.org's discussion
A review at PopMatters
Caleb Carr's NY Times review.
(We can discuss why I'm interested in this topic another time.)
Patricia Cornwell should stick to fiction, apparently. (I've never read any; I'm not a mystery fan.)
That's right, I was reading Portrait of A Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed. I picked it up because I read an excerpt in Vanity Fair and thought that she'd been seduced by narrative, and that it would be interesting to see how her (obviously flawed) theory played out, what evidence she'd collected and how she arranged it. It might be flaw ed (in fact, it suffers from the most common flaw of all Jack the Ripper books, that is, deciding who the culprit is beforehand and then selectively sifting through the evidence on that basis), but it might be a good read nonetheless. Like a good novel, e ven if the author was convinced she was writing fact.
Well, it didn't even reach that high.
Patricia Cornwell is deranged. She's obsessed. She *hates* Walter Sicker, hates his art. She thinks he's creepy, and she really wants to pin this awful series of murders on him (plus several unrelated deaths, too), just because he's so obviously an eeevil man.
She's written a mess of a book. It does, often, read more like a novel, but not a well-written one.
Plus, there are pages and pages of what modern forensic medicine might be able to extract from the murder sites -- for each and every death. For god's sake, I got the point the first time!
In the end, I finished the book because I was so fascinated by the breakdown of reality as Cornwell pursued her theory to the edges of ridiculousness. At the way she mangled her material and evidence (and the order that she presents it in) The way she slowly constructs Sickert to be the cleverest, smartest monster the world has apparently ever seen. The middle-class pity that drips from her words when she discusses the Ripper's victims, and two of Sickert's wives. Wow. This is a primer on how to write a book that undercuts your credibility as a serious investigative author.
Nobody doubts that Sickert's art was morbid, that he was obsessed with Jack the Ripper. But her evidence is so thin, and so subjective, that one might as well argue that the German painters in the 1920's Grosz and the other Lustmord artists, were all psychopaths, too.
I am intrigued at the idea that Sickert may have been a Ripper letter *hoaxer,* though.
Three other perspectives on the book:
Casebook.org's discussion
A review at PopMatters
Caleb Carr's NY Times review.
(We can discuss why I'm interested in this topic another time.)
