The Professor and the Prostitute (1986)

Note the subtitle, And Other True Tales of Murder and Madness, as this is a collection of nine short true-crime pieces by Linda Wolfe. She notes here that her specific interest in crime focuses on the middle class. I was disappointed at first that the book is smaller pieces, but they turned out to be very good—interesting cases, and interesting journalistic ways of chasing down the stories. She talks to lots of people, but she's also thoughtful and informed when she probes into the psychological aspects. I found out about it originally from Bill James's book on true-crime literature, Popular Crime (basically worth reading itself). These pieces reminded me how good those Year's Best annuals on true-crime used to be, for as long as they went in the 2000s. The title piece here is the longest. The most interesting to me now was a case that involved twin gynecologists who both died at age 45 in strange circumstances. The case served as an obvious inspiration for director and writer David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers movie from 1988 with Jeremy Irons playing both twins. The real-life version did not invent strange and disturbing gynecology tools like in the movie, but they were similarly innovative researchers who had some reputation before going weird. An amazing amount of the movie comes right from the case, which makes the case even more creepy. Wolfe, who died in 2020 at 87, had a good nose for true-crime cases that can haunt—maybe because she does keep the focus on the middle class, which makes them familiar to me in subtly uncanny ways. My copy is a lurid mass market paperback from the mid-'80s, part of my intermittent downsizing project. I felt a little trashy seeing it laying around but I liked it in some nostalgic way for that reason too. Wolfe was more self-deprecating than warranted in her introduction and throughout. I liked her straightforward way of getting at these cases. She has a lot of insight into the people and the incidents and how they all add up. A lot of books look like this one, but not many of them are this good. It was over too soon. I wanted more.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.