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.

The New Journalism (1973)

I first read Tom Wolfe's polemic-as-anthology (or should that be anthology-as-polemic?) when it was much newer, in the mid-'70s. I checked it out of the library, read it, mostly forgot it after a few years, and never owned it until recently, when it came to my attention that Robert Christgau has a piece in it alongside such usual suspect luminaries of the time as Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, Hunter Thompson (twice), and many others. Michael Herr is also in it—another name I did not know until later. The collection is packed full of good and even some great pieces, including an early chapter in Wolfe's inchoate fulminations against the state of the novel and fiction, a hobbyhorse he would rock and rock again—though my dwindling interest in him finally evaporated for good when he attempted schooling us with 800-page novels of his own. Let me be clear that I believe in "the New Journalism" as much as ever—both in the sense that journalism remains one of the most direct and effective routes to greater truth, and in the idea that giving up the journalist's pretend game of objectivity remains valid and useful. In fact, Wolfe admirably argues for what he calls "reporting"—talking to people and writing down what they say. New Journalism then was criticized for its recklessness in embracing the subjectivity of reporting. I never had much problem with that, as it seemed a matter of common sense, not to mention fundamentally more honest, to acknowledge that every reporter has a personal point of view. Today, more and more, the word for reporting has turned into "access," a PR term, and most journalists in major reporting venues (broadcast and cable-TV news, and nationally distributed print news outlets such as Time, USA Today, and the New York Times) are practicing PR much more than they are journalism. That's the newer journalism, since some point in the '80s. On the other hand, in fairness, and for better or worse, it must be said that this book weirdly comes with an unexpected aura of those "Best American" volumes which also came from the '80s. I was particularly impressed with the journalism in the Best American Crime Writing series, for example, many of whose pieces (though not all) could sit alongside the pieces here as very good examples of New Journalism. Like disco, it was never that new and it never really went away. It was just called other things. Some of the best and earliest examples are here.

In case it's not at the library.

The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood (1991)

 

For this book, Julie Salamon won a surprising amount of access to Brian De Palma and other principals behind the film version of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, including all the stars and representatives from every phase of production. The expectation apparently was that the movie would be as spectacularly successful as Wolfe's book, and that Salamon's account would document that success from the inside out, no doubt providing one more successful promotion and merchandising cornerstone of the coming success empire. Instead, circumstances dictated that it turn into a fascinating chronicle of how a flop comes into existence. Films notoriously require colossal levels of collaboration, with thousands of moving parts set into motion on competing tight deadlines, which make them completely fraught with peril. Who can say, in the moment, what's right or wrong? That's what I appreciate most about Salamon's book—we know, from inevitable benefit of hindsight, what a disastrous mission these people are on. Yet for the most part their decisions rarely seem catastrophic in themselves (beyond that first one of ever pinning any hope on making a movie out of something written by Tom Wolfe, whose work is so entirely driven by a fever swamp of words on a page; even Wolfe, as Salamon shrewdly if quietly catches on early, knew enough to stay the hell away from it. At the same time, this is just rank second-guessing on my part). Salamon's tale is so compelling that I was driven to finally take a look at the movie just for the small victories she reported. And, yeah, it's bad all right—but that brief shot of the jumbo jet touching down is as good as promised.

In case it's not at the library.