DARK LONDON: A Journey Through the City's Mysterious and Macabre Underworld, for the ghoulish giftee closest to your heart

DARK LONDON: A Journey Through the City's Mysterious and Macabre Underworld
DR. DREW GRAY
Frances Lincoln Ltd (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Dark London brings together the history of the city’s seamier side, picking out the most scandalous, curious and bizarre aspects of London’s shadowy and fascinating underbelly.

From dark crimes of passion to shocking tales of grave robbing, gruesome murders, dens of iniquity, Victorian séances, and haunted houses—not far beneath London’s everyday bustle and glitter there has long been a fascinatingly rich underworld of criminality, superstition, scandal, and macabre debauchery.

In Dark London, social historian Dr Drew Gray, a specialist in the history of crime and punishment, delves into the city’s grim yet compelling past, uncovering the people and places that shaped its darker identity.

Across more than 100 real-life cases and curiosities, he explores how London became both the heart of a growing empire and a stage for vice, greed, and human fallibility.

Highlights include:

The London Burkers, a notorious gang of resurrectionists whose leader confessed to stealing and selling nearly 1,000 bodies to London’s medical schools in the 1830s.

The Whitechapel Murders of 1888, still the world’s longest running serial murder mystery.

The prisons of Newgate and Pentonville, where shifting attitudes towards justice revealed the tension between punishment, reform, and moral control.

The legend of Spring-heeled Jack, the terrifying, leaping figure who caused panic across London’s streets.

The Great Stink of 1858, when London’s polluted Thames brought the city to a standstill and forced a revolution in sanitation and public health.

Dark London brings together the history of the city’s seamier side, picking out the most scandalous, curious and bizarre aspects of London’s shadowy and fascinating underbelly.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: London's been a world city, most of the time, since the Romans lost Colchester in 60CE and moved their colonial government there. Lots of scope for serious weirdness of the supernatural stuff sort, and viciousness (or just misguided trying to help) of the human sort. Both leave separate kinds of stains on the memory of society, locally as well as internationally.

Author Drew Gray's biography as provided by Frances Lincoln Ltd:

Dr. Drew Gray is a social historian of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who specialises in the history of crime and punishment. Drew is Head of Subject for Culture (Humanities, Media, & Performance) at the University of Northampton and teaches modules on both the History and Criminology programmes. His previous works include Murder Maps: Crime Scenes Revisited; Phrenology to Fingerprint 1811-1911 and London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City.

That's one helluva CV. The gent knows how to present the facts and images in tandem, all illustrated books from him to date, so why would this one fail? Spoiler: It doesn't.

The history of crime, the historical context of punishment, the social context of these dark patches of London's history aren't exhaustively explored in this handsome gift book. I felt the illustrations were well-chosen and -presented; but sometimes pulled well above their weight in explication of societal details. I can't give full five stars because I was niggled by this, despite this being the book's literal purpose for being an illustrated overview.

We all have a well-loved ghoul somewhere on our gifting list. Someone who really enjoys the frisson of crime and punishment, who wants that extra thrill of knowing what humans are capable of...and this is the book for them. It's also very much a book for your Londonphile/Anglophile giftee. I think you, faithful reader, might like it for your own coffee table.

Here, look at some of the more than a hundred images:

contents

punishment

murder

spooky stuff

humanitarian harms done

A very nice gifting idea for Yule...especially suitable for the Goth nibling/grandchild.

THE UNTOUCHED CRIME, what's a Chinese mystery novel like?

THE UNTOUCHED CRIME
ZIJIN CHEN (tr. Michelle Deeter)
AmazonCrossing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: For three years, a serial killer has walked among the citizens of Hangzhou, China. With each new body come the same a jump rope, a cigarette, and a slip of paper that says, “Come and get me.”

In the same city, Luo Wen wanders into a park just as a young woman stabs a local thug to death in a desperate act of self-defense. A former criminal investigator who lost his own family in an unsolved case, Luo Wen is familiar with the slippery nature of justice. So he makes the split-second decision to help the terrified woman cover up her crime, leaving behind no trace of evidence.

Luo Wen’s friend Yan Liang, a criminologist and professor known for solving each case like a mathematical equation, is called in to help the police on the recent homicides. As he digs deeper, he discovers more questions than answers―and variables that simply don’t add up. While Yan Liang follows his suspicion and Luo Wen covers his tracks, a battle of wits plays out―with the winner’s version of justice as the ultimate prize.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Not really any great shakes in the whodunit genre, more a howsolvedit...the solution to the mystery is uncovered in bits by Luo Wen and Yan Liang; honestly, why did they choose this case to invest in isn't clear to me. There are other cases as urgent...but it's not really a fruitful speculation. It's also interestung that these two are pretty critical of their lazier colleagues. Cutting corners seems offensive to these quixotic crime-solvers. Wuxia deeply influenced this story.

I'm really interested in other cultures' attitudes to crime fiction. US crime writing is pretty solidly copaganda; I'm wondering if other country's crime solvers are the same. These two, well, they're motivated by ma'at but also seem not to have institutional investment. They're really influenced by the Rightness of crime solving. It's deeply refreshing.

I'm not hugely excited by the prose; it does its job, but it's not very energetic. I'm not that interested in superintelligent cat-and-mouse battles of wits. I've seen and read the Sherlock Holmes œuvre. Do something unusual with it and I'll get more intrigued.

So that's why we're at a quarter-star less than four. I'm not trying to be discouraging, I am not a bit sorry I read the story. I'm not going to shove it at you but I definitely think its ebook is very good value for money spent.

THE COMMITTED (The Sympathizer #2), a different, still very powerfully caustic, look at illusions and their costs

THE COMMITTED (The Sympathizer #2)
VIET THANH NGUYEN
Grove Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The long-awaited new novel from one of America’s most highly regarded contemporary writers, The Committed follows the Sympathizer as he arrives in Paris as a refugee. There he and his blood brother Bon try to escape their pasts and prepare for their futures by turning their hands to capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing.

No longer in physical danger, but still inwardly tortured by his reeducation at the hands of his former best friend, and struggling to assimilate into a dominant culture, the Sympathizer is both charmed and disturbed by Paris. As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals and politicians who frequent dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese “aunt,” he finds not just stimulation for his mind but also customers for his merchandise―but the new life he is making has dangers he has not foreseen, from the oppression of the state, to the self-torture of addiction, to the seemingly unresolvable paradox of how he can reunite his two closest friends, men whose worldviews put them in absolute opposition.

Both literary thriller and brilliant novel of ideas, The Committed is a blistering portrayal of commitment and betrayal that will cement Viet Thanh Nguyen’s position in the firmament of American letters.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: My 5* review of The Sympathizer from 2016 is here: https://tinyurl.com/2p9he4wj.

"The American Way of Life! Eat too much, work too much, buy too much, read too little, think even less, and die in poverty and insecurity. No, thank you. Don't you see that's how Americans take over the world? Not just through their army and their CIA and their World Bank., but through this infectious disease called the American Dream?"
–and–
But the only revolution you can commit to is the one that lets you laugh and laugh and laugh, because the downfall of every revolution is when it loses its sense of absurdity. This, too, is the dialectic, to take the revolution seriously but not to take the revolutionaries seriously, for when revolutionaries take themselves too seriously, they cock their guns at the crack of a joke. Once that happens, it’s all over, the revolutionaries have become the state, the state has become repressive, and the bullets, once used against the oppressor in the name of the people, will be used against the people in their own name. That is why the people, if they wish to survive and to dodge those bullets, must be nameless.

Home truths, not dodgeable conversational bullets, but full-on machine gun nests of home truth.

It is Author Viet Thanh's stock in trade, isn't it? Follow the link to my 2016 review if you haven't encountered him and his cleaning-vinegar acidulated prose. Powerful the takedowns, sick the burns, and no human is spared from the collateral-damage list:

Those who believe in revolutions are the ones who haven’t lived through one yet.
–and–
......you, yourself, human and inhuman, are demented enough to believe that if the human species does not self-destruct—an IF that should be capitalized, it is so big—then one day the nobodies of the world with nothing to lose will finally have enough of not having enough and realize that they have more in common with the nobodies on the other side of the world, or just the other side of the nearest border, than they do with the somebodies of their own kind, who care nothing about them, and when these nobodies with nothing finally unite, stand up, take to the streets, and claim their voices and their power, the only thing that the somebodies with something must do is nothing, realizing that their Ideological State Apparatus cannot stop all these people, because for all of its might their Repressive State Apparatus cannot kill them all. Can it?"

It can now. It hasn't started to yet. But AI-plus-facial-recognition drones? You'll see 'em soon enough. I guarantee you they're being or have been prototyped and now can be deployed...what's a few extra dead who were "innocent" whatever that means? "God" will know her own, after all.

I have never been a chirpy optimistic sort. I fall into the Butlerian Jihadist camp these days. I do not know Author Viet Thanh, so I speak without certainty of his opinion on matters facing us today. I think, having read his exploration of revolution in these two (to date) novels about the Sympathizer, that it is likely to be the case that he does not view anything that increases the capacity of humans to oppress and exploit each other ever more efficiently in a positive light.

...what the most sympathetic Federico García Lorca, assassinated by the Spanish fascists, once said, “I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace,” an empathetic principle that, if followed with action, whether it is doing something or doing nothing, depending on the dialectical need of the situation, will never lead you in the wrong direction, even if that direction is death, since so many people are committed to the exact opposite principle, to side with those who already have something and want everything, and if you were sane you would side with them, too, but revolution is always an act of insanity, because revolution is not a revolution unless it is committed to the impossible.
–and–
There was only one solution to this alienation that was created not by the Negro or the bastard, but by the real bastards, the racists and colonizers who blamed the victim for the conditions that the victimizer created. And that solution was “to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and, through one human being, to reach out for the universal.”

That is exceedingly well-put and inarguably accurate; it's also the next thing to impossible to achieve. In reality, no one escapes reaching out for the universal's darkest spot:

Organized religion was the first and greatest protection racket, an economy of perpetual profit built on voluntary fear and coerced guilt. Donating money to churches, temples, mosques, synagogues, cults, et cetera, to help ensure a spot for one’s soul in the express elevator to that penthouse in the sky known as the afterlife was marketing genius!
–and–
This was the silence my father encountered every day during his prayers, the silence that hundreds of millions heard every day as they beseeched God to say something, anything. He always said nothing, which hardly disabused His legions of fans. For someone who never said anything, God certainly spoke to a lot of people.

Religion has become the Way and the Life for those too scared to rebel, too lazy to think, too smug to see past their own privilege.

No, of course I'm not bitter and rage-filled, why ever would you ask?

There remains the matter of my missing half-star. I've quoted the book at you to show how deeply I liked the read, to give the percentage of you who won't read it a taster of the treasures you're disinclined to see for yourselves. I was not as utterly swept up in this part of the Sympathizer's tale for several reasons. One was, I'm not coming to it fresh; I've been in his head before, so the impact is lessened as the flint cores of meaning flake into eye-surgery-grade blades. Another is deeper: howinahell did these men get into this awful, messy business? "Why not" is the only answer I can find in the story. It allows Author Viet Thanh to ladle on the Perils-of-Pauline hairsbreadth rescues and other coincidences. I'm not a massive fan of that kind of storytelling. It shows the author, unlike in The Sympathizer, already knows the ending, so we're along for the (entertaining) ride.

I forgive it all, almost unreservedly, for this moment where I felt so Seen: "You are upset because I made you see yourself. You like to think of yourself as just a man, not a white man, unless you call yourself white, with a certain kind of self-aware irony. But for me to call you a white man is unacceptable, downright racist, even if you yourself and all white people routinely say of someone “an Asiatic woman” or “a black man,” as if a black man were not just a man as you are just a man. So what if I noticed your whiteness—how unforgivable!"
Ouch...yes.

THE NEW TRUE CRIME: How the Rise of Serialized Storytelling Is Transforming Innocence, just what it says on the tin

THE NEW TRUE CRIME: How the Rise of Serialized Storytelling Is Transforming Innocence
DIANA RICKARD
NYU Press
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: How serialized crime shows became an American obsession

TV shows and podcasts like Making a Murderer, Serial, and Atlanta Monster have taken the cultural zeitgeist by storm, and contributed to the release of wrongly imprisoned people―such as Adnan Syed. The popularity of these long-form true crime docuseries has sparked greater attention to issues of inequality, power, social class, and structural racism. More and more, the American public is asking, Who is and is not deserving of punishment, and who is and is not protected by the law? In The New True Crime, Diana Rickard argues that these new true crime series deserve our attention for what they reveal about our societal understanding of crime and punishment, and for the new light they shine on the inequalities of the criminal justice system. Questioning the finality of verdicts, framing facts as in the eye of the beholder―these new series unmoor our faith in what is knowable, even as, Rickard critically notes, they often blur the lines between “fact” and “fiction.”

With a focus on some of the most popular true crime podcasts and streaming series of the last decade, Rickard provides an in-depth analysis of the ways in which this new media―which allows for binge-listening or watching―makes crime into a public spectacle and conveys ideological messages about punishment to its audience. Entertainment values have always been entwined with crime news reporting. Newsworthy stories, Rickard reminds us, need to involve sex, violence, or a famous person, and contain events that can be framed in terms of individualism and conservative ideologies about crime. Even as these old tropes of innocent victims and deviant bad guys still dominate these docuseries, Rickard also unpacks how the new true crime has been influenced by the innocence movement, a diverse group of organizers and activists, be they journalists, lawyers, formerly incarcerated people, or family members, who now have a place in mainstream consciousness as DNA evidence exonerates the wrongly convicted.

The New True Crime questions the knowability of truth and probes our anxieties about the “real” nature of true crime media. For fans of true crime shows and anyone concerned about justice in America, this book will prove to be essential reading.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I chose to read this in spite of my serious problems with making victimhood the center of yet another cultural conversation. The howls of outrage when another Black man is convicted, on the flimsiest of evidence, of raping a white woman, center her whiteness and the racism of the laughingly labeled criminal-justice system.

Many parts of the conversations we should be having are entirely missing, eg, Black women raped by white men get no podcasts, murders of Black men and male adolescents get fewer than the statistically appropriate number of hours devoted to them, and let us not even bring up trans folk and/or sex workers of any skin color or gender...why go on, it is all part of the entertainment industry and its long, deep relationship with Othering.

This is not, however, the story...or even more than a glancing part of the story...that Author Rickard tells in this book. It was not intended to be, so this is not a failing of execution but of design.

There is no point yelling at someone for not doing what *you* want done.

The book, as written, makes a strong case for the net positives of a field of entertainment that focuses cultural attention on the failings of a system designed to operate out of the majority’s sight. The techniques of the entertainment industry...heightened language, elisions of tediously bulky chains of evidence into more narrative-friendly sound bites...mirror the long-standing prosecutorial tricks of evidentiary manipulation that these podcasts and shows highlight, only from the other side.

Since the system we have is an adversarial one, with rules that...while on the surface even-handed...frequently get bent or ignored when convenient for those representing institutional authority, we will always need independent actors with the access and the desire to turn over the rocks plopped on top of the holes in evidence in service of the narrative needed to get a conviction. Everyone is guilty if the right/wrong storyteller gets hold of the narrative. (Side note: NEVER TALK TO COPS WITHOUT A LAWYER. NO ONE IS INNOCENT IF THEY SAY YOU ARE NOT.)

So this new use of the entertainment media does indeed do Society a solid service by shining harsh and unflattering light on the actors for the State. It highlights the miscarriages of fairness and honest dealing that are so very common in US society. These are net positives for all concerned. Right?

Crimes have victims or they are not crimes. Victims, living or dead, have no say in who, or how, or why, their trauma is presented, whether during or after the crime, its investigation, or its rehashing. Very few people are Alice Sebold or E. Jean Carroll, those eloquent enough, well-favored enough, or just willing enough to see processes like those needed to re-investigate their horrific personal and, all too often, intimate violations bandied about in public again and again. I dont know if you are aware of this,but there are truly shitty people out there on the internet who absolutely **love** making their ugliest opinons public. These already-traumatized people are all too often targeted by those rotten-souled jerks.

This book is not intended to solve these issues. That it does not is not a reason not to read it. This new use of entertainment to correct flawed narratives instead of spread copaganda is, in my own view, a net positive for society. It comes with problems and abuse vectors that are, sadly, not new. The possibility is that the new true crime could shine a bright enough light on those cyberissues that they will get onto the radar of the ones who can solve them, too.

Ain’t holdin’ my breath, mind you, but the possibility exists, and that is a good thing. Author Rickard makes the outlines of the emerging true-crime media landscape clear and comprehensible to non-expert readers. Her prose is up to the reportorial task at hand; her eye for the narrative strand is at the least as good as the podcasters and showrunners she reports on.

A read I recommend to any media junkies, all leftists, and the passively consuming podaholics who might read this review.