Murder by Candlelight (2015)

The first thing I noticed about Michael Knox Beran's Murder by Candlelight is that it's hard to figure out what it's about. Subtitle: The Gruesome Crimes Behind Our Romance With the Macabre. Blurbs and jacket copy are no more illuminating. The best way to describe it might be as a true-crime book written by an academic who is embarrassed by his interest in true crime. He discusses crime cases of the past, but Thomas Carlyle, Thomas de Quincey, and literary headnotes by the handful are here too for some reason. Detective fiction is specifically pilloried. Beran goes out of his way to throw shade at William Roughead, the great Scottish true-crime writer, who scoffed at de Quincey's account of the Wapping murders of 1811. (De Quincey does not strike me as more credible than Roughead.) The crimes Beran looks at are from the late Romantic or early Victorian first half of the 19th century. These cases were mostly new to me, with varying degrees of interest. The main attraction appears to be treating the Jack the Ripper case as having numerous precedents. They were new to me but not surprising crimes. Beran's argument is that the only thing that set Jack the Ripper apart was his taunting of police and media. Wait, what? That's like saying the only thing that set Babe Ruth apart was the homeruns (not that Jack the Ripper is to be glorified). As with Beran's intemperate lunges at detective fiction he more often makes the case against himself with views like that. Mostly these crimes remind again that crimes like these go on all the time. And whatever the age—Enlightenment, Romantic, Modern, 21st Century—that is the sad constant. Beran is incoherent on "evil" (as are we all, I guess) but seems to be trying to warn us of our own naivete. I never get any sense of what his prescription would be. I was interested to find the Goodreads community, usually mild-mannered (in my experience), in an uproar on this one. Murder by Candlelight has its defenders there, but they are drowned out by the naysayers, most of them responding to Beran's maddening arrogance in the face of being so muddled. I got the book as a public library discard within six years of publication, which suggests not even librarians are really on his side. The cases in this book are mostly interesting and he obviously researched it fairly thoroughly, whatever his "it" actually is. Beran could have done with a bit more of Roughead's clarity. Instead, he comes off as peevish and his arrogance unwarranted.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.