If you read about a crime in a small town, you will encounter frequently the comment that these people lived in the kind of quiet place where nothing very interesting ever happened. This is a despicable thing to say. It is a form of bigotry directed at the past, and bigotry directed at people who live in small towns – and worse yet, it's ignorant. Pardon my French, but it's an ignorant asshole comment, and if you ever say anything like that, you are revealing yourself to be an ignorant asshole.
The Man from the Train just may be one of the most poorly written books I've ever read. I should really keep track of what prompts me to seek out a book – something made me put this book on hold at the library – but whatever it was in this case, I was led astray. I had a vague idea that this was written by someone who is well known for his many books on baseball stat analysis (the fault is mine that I conflated author Bill James with Michael Lewis of Moneyball fame) and it seemed like an interesting concept that he used his statistical modelling to track down an unsolved, hundred-year-old serial killer cold case; in many instances linking a murder in one part of the country to another very far away for the first time. When I noted that this book was co-written with Bill's daughter Rachel McCarthy James – who studied creative writing at Hollins University – I reckoned this would be at least readable. But it's really not – dull when it's not hectoring the reader (that's a nice, authorly quote I opened with, eh?), The Man from the Train could have easily been cut down to article length to share what the Jameses ultimately put together and saved me many eyerolling hours.
I will assume that between the Jameses, they competently scoured the records and were able to trace their serial killer, making a reasonable case for the murders they say he committed between the years of 1898 and 1912; they are even able to give him a name in the end, and I have no reason to distrust their conclusions. But it seems like their book was written as an antagonistic rebuttal to an argument that I wasn't aware of. They quote other researchers into these crimes and let us know which sources are partially correct, which are laughable, and which “pollute” the field. They preemptively accuse the readers of “irrational skepticism” if they refuse to follow their logic, and I kept getting the feeling that they were speaking to specific imagined readers with bits like:
Late in the day on February 17, Big Bill Haywood was arrested in Idaho in connection with the murder of former governor Steunenberg. I know the Man from the Train did not kill Steunenberg; I am just trying to help those of you whose knowledge of history is mostly from crime books keep track of where we are in time.I wasn't personally offended as my imperfect knowledge of history is not “mostly from crime books”, but who do the authors think they're “helping” with shade like that? So, I don't want to trace their logic or conclusions, because I somehow don't think I was the primary intended audience, but do mean to demonstrate what I think of as bad writing. This bit comes rather early:
The nickname “Billy the Ax Man” has been picked up in the twenty-first century and is sometimes used to refer to our criminal. But while we have tried to minimize the gore, we are dealing here with perhaps the most despicable criminal in American history, a truly ghastly felon who enjoyed hitting small children in the head with an axe, and who may have killed around a hundred people. Giving him a cutesy nickname that sounds like it came from a kid's cartoon seems to us not fitting, and there will be no further reference to that nickname in this book.Again, the Jameses seems to be scolding other true crime researchers/readers who would desecrate the memories of the killer's many victims by employing this “cutesy nickname”, but they are not above using questionable humour in their narrative. In writing about the murder of the Pfanschmidt family in Illinois in 1912, they note that the surviving grown son, Ray Pfanschmidt, attracted police attention and write, “When the Schmidt hit the Pfan...”. That line is not clever or funny enough to warrant its inclusion, and neither is either of the following:
After their marriage they moved to Centerville, Ohio, where they boarded with Mr. and Mrs. George W. Coe. (We might say they coe-habited with them; it's a very dark story and we're desperate for relief. Anna's maiden name was “Axxe” – really – but we're going to let that pass without comment.)
A man named George Wilson, a neighbor of the Cobles, confessed to murdering them, sort of. Wilson was not of sound mind (no Dennis the Menace jokes, please).Despite maintaining that they, and they alone, have finally cracked the century old mystery, the Jameses, bizarrely, make this offhand statement about crimes that they insist couldn't have been committed by the Man from the Train:
So what happened in this era, and who killed all of those families in Texas in 1912? We don't know. We're not sociologists or psychologists or criminologists or detectives. We're not even real historians. We're just writers. These are just the facts as best as we can tell.But just in case that might make you think that the Jameses are humble in their conclusions (they are not experts, after all), this back-handed statement near the end should put you to right:
1. What could have been done to stop him?
2. How many people did he kill? and
3. What happened to him?
We don't absolutely know the answers to any of those questions, but we have thought about them a lot more than you have or will, so we'll share our thoughts with you; take them for whatever you think they're worth.I can 100% concede that the authors have thought about these key questions more than I have or will, but again, I get the feeling that they are speaking directly to other readers who have devoted a lot of time and research to these matters; and that's some aggressive condescension to throw at them. The bottom line: The Jameses make a convincing case (to me, anyway) as to who the killer was, how he operated, and which murders can be attributed to him. Because they seem to be speaking to readers who have some preconceived ideas about these theories, the authors tell the stories of many murders that seem linked, but in their minds, are only similar: the inclusion of these ultimately unrelated cases made a too-long book too-much-longer. And because the authors deemed themselves to be (for whatever reason) in aggressive rebuttal mode, their antagonism for the reader is palpable and off-putting. Not for me; probably not for you.
