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Celebrated writer and contrarian Bill James has voraciously read true crime throughout his life and has been interested in writing a book on the topic for decades. Now, with?Popular Crime, James takes readers on an epic journey from Lizzie Borden to the Lindbergh baby, from the Black Dahlia to O. J. Simpson, explaining how crimes have been committed, investigated, prosecuted and written about, and how that has profoundly influenced our culture over the last few centuries? even if we haven?t always taken notice.
Exploring such phenomena as serial murder, the fluctuation of crime rates, the value of evidence, radicalism and crime, prison reform and the hidden ways in which crimes have shaped, or reflected, our society, James chronicles murder and misdeeds from the 1600s to the present day. James pays particular attention to crimes that were sensations during their time but have faded into obscurity, as well as still-famous cases, some that have never been solved, including the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Boston Strangler and JonBenet Ramsey. Satisfyingly sprawling and tremendously entertaining,?Popular Crime is a professed amateur?s powerful examination of the incredible impact crime stories have on our society, culture and history.
Editorial Reviews
?James is a rare combination of amateur logician and sociologist, stylist, humorist, and stern moralist.??Time
?Some people think Bill James is God. They overstate, but not by much.??Vanity Fair
?Popular Crime will remind you of just how wonderful a writer Mr. James is. Incisive analysis and encyclopedic knowledge tempered by a sometimes morbid, but never jaded, dose of Americana: it?s sabermetrics meets the Coen Brothers.??Nate Silver
?I would read Bill James on anything. I would read him on the price of burlap in Des Moines. Yet here, as with baseball, he has found a subject worthy of his obsession.Popular Crime is the best kind of guilty pleasure: sure to inspire countless bar-stool digressions, and brimming with arguments about why these tabloid stories, and the ways we often misunderstand them, actually matter. James may be our foremost forensic historian.??Ben McGrath
?Bill James is an American original who has an original take on everything he writes about, on criminals as much as catchers.?You may feel compelled to skip dinner, turning his pages, even when you think he?s out to lunch.??Adam Gopnik
Review
I?ve been reading Bill James since the 1982 Baseball Abstract, so I was going to read this, too.
Ironically, James is at his best in this book when he just has fun thinking outside the box and plays detective, challenging conventional wisdom on a variety of random crime cases. When he tries to play sabremetrician, however, the results are embarrassing. There?s a murder-classification system that he must have created for data analysis, but then there?s no data analysis?perhaps because he correctly realized there was little quantifiable about the series of anecdotes. He tries to create a 100-point guide to guilt or innocence, but the metrics are all pulled out of thin air and are entirely unpersuasive.
But it is good to hear James expose the emperor?s clothes on a feature of the American justice system: how much it is a gameshow of obfuscation on both sides, and how little criminal trials have to do with the truth. There are the obvious examples of recent Los Angeles celebrity cases, but the book earns its keep when it explores the historical record with tales of the corruption of Clarence Darrow and other noted criminal defense attorneys.
The book is entirely readable, but it?s less a coherent book than a series of anecdotes: your eccentric uncle shooting the breeze about things he wants to talk about on the subject of crime and crime books. One gets the sense that the book wasn?t published because it was finished, but it was finished because it was time to be published. So we see themes raised and dropped without rhyme or reason; the organization is chronological. Chronological, but not systematic: for example, the Stanford White case is disposed of quickly with the assumption that the reader already knows about it. (I don?t, so I felt let down.) Some crime books get extensive reviews; others don?t. As others have noted, it feels insufficiently edited.
I don?t regret purchasing it, as I enjoyed reading it, but I can see the potential for disappointment. Don?t think of it as a Baseball Abstract revolutionizing the field; it?s more like the baseball books James wrote in the 1990s with Rob Neyer where the two dug through the historical archives to tell interesting anecdotes about baseball players in an alphabetical catalog that ended before it even got to the letter B: entertaining in places, inconsistent with spotty insights, and not remotely complete. ? T. Frank, Amazon.Com Customer Review
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