Jill Lepore: Foul Play
Edmund Lester Pearson, a librarian and sometime hoax-artist who spent most of his career at the New York Public Library, wrote true-crime stories for The New Yorker from 1933 to 1937. He wasn’t the first person to write about murder in the magazine and he wasn’t the best, not by a long stretch. He wasn’t the most famous and he wasn’t the most notorious (those last two titles being held, in any event, by the same person). But give E. L. Pearson this: he was the least compassionate.
Pearson, born in 1880, published his first book of true-crime stories, “Studies in Murder,” in 1924. He’s best known for his lifelong obsession with Lizzie Borden. (He thought she was guilty. He thought most people were guilty.) As a murder writer, Pearson was keen to distinguish himself from both the moralist and the sensationalist. True crime has a dark history: early American execution sermons and gallows confessions (which I talk about in an essay on murder in this week’s magazine) were followed by the Gothic, blood-soaked sensationalism of nineteenth-century tabloids like The National Police Gazette. Pearson disavowed both Puritan piety and Victorian pornography. He wanted to write classy murder stories: modernist, urbane, ironic, and sardonic.
In “The Corpse on the Speakeasy Floor,” Pearson’s first story for The New Yorker, he told about a trial that he had gone to watch in Harlem, of a man accused of committing a murder during a botched robbery. He began with a pointed description of the accused man: “Mr. Amos Peters: small, neat, white-haired, chocolate-colored, and so like another agreeable, middle-aged Negro whom I used to know—steward of a country club—that I expected to see him advance toward me with a well-cooked omelet, or a check to sign.” A third man had fled the scene of the crime and had evaded the police for more than a year but as he was “a lad who varied the commission of felonies by the commission of misdemeanors, he did not remain forever obscure.” The description of the murdered man Pearson used as an opportunity to ridicule the defense:
Never was the victim of a shooting so anonymous, so insignificant…. What was that name? No one could remember, and the lawyers more than once were on the point of calling him Mr. Whoozis, or Whatyoumaycallit. He was just a playboy who, with a friend and two guns, had gone in there to rob the proprietor. No idea of becoming a corpse had entered his mind—nor did he or his friend desire to kill anyone.
Pearson didn’t have much sympathy, really, for anyone. That’s because his sympathies lay somewhere else altogether: in the discrediting of sympathy. He wanted to see murderers prosecuted and killed, and believed that the spooky and the sensational—and even the sorrowful—dimmed the prospects for conviction. “The vision of American criminal law as a ravening monster, forever hounding innocent people into the electric chair, is one with which emotional people like to chill their blood,” he wrote in a story from 1935. “It is a substitute for tales of ghosts and goblins.” Edmund Pearson was not one of those emotional people.
James Thurber wrote about murder at the same time as Pearson. In “A Sort of Genius,” a story published in 1937, just months before Pearson died of pneumonia, Thurber revisited an unsolved double murder. He begins:
On the morning of Saturday the 16th of September 1922, a boy named Raymond Schneider and a girl named Pearl Bahmer, walking down a lonely lane on the outskirts of New Brunswick, New Jersey, came upon something that made them rush to the nearest house in Easton Avenue, around the corner, shouting. In that house, an excited woman named Grace Edwards listened to them wide-eyed and then telephoned the police. The police came on the run and examined the young people’s discovery: the bodies of a man and a woman. They had been shot to death and the woman’s throat was cut. Leaning against one of the man’s shoes was his calling card, not as if it had fallen there, but as if it had been placed there. It bore the named Edward W. Hall.
You feel sort of bad for everyone. For the kids, coming across the corpses. For Grace Edwards. For the man and woman, shot to death. Even the road is lonely. And the calling card leans, fondly: bereft.
