Death In One Writer’s America

by

Paul Clark

None of the 16 stories are about infamous cases—they all involve people you have likely never heard of, unless you live or lived in Jeremiah, Kentucky; West Chester, Pennsylvania; Center Junction, Iowa; Gallup, New Mexico; Cleveland, Tennessee; Riverside, California; or any of the places where these events happened from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

I generally don’t read true crime books. Although I read a lot of mysteries, the true crime variety of story has never appealed to me. The exploitation factor is certainly part of the reason. I’m not THAT interested in the gruesome details of people who suffer horrible deaths through the actions of family members or strangers. I’m also not interested in the psychology of the criminal mind. So, ordinarily, I would not have been interested in the stories that Trillin tells here. In the 1980s, however, I regularly “devoured” Trillin’s food-related books. I had met him a couple of times when he came to the bookstore for a signing. I enjoyed his robust descriptions of eating adventures and his low-key humorous style of writing, so even though the subject matter of Killings was grim the fact that he wrote the articles was enough reason for me to read them.

In his introduction Trillin writes, “These stories are obviously not meant to reflect a statistically balanced picture of how or where Americans meet sudden death.” Indeed, they are one man’s creative distillation of the many causes that lead to a particular tragic event. I imagine he first read about these “killings” in a way similar to that in which Truman Capote found out about the Clutter Family murders that served as the basis for In Cold Blood—reading about them in some back page of a New York paper. But Trillin accomplishes in miniature what Capote did on a grand scale. Trillin’s stories fall somewhere between a newspaper article and a mystery story.

The stories have held up so well over the years because they are, at their core, timeless. Petty jealousies, mental illness, unexpected life changes, family discord, money problems (either too much or not enough) ignite the events of these stories.

There is one constant—a dead body. But the stories don’t start with a dead body. Trillin is as much interested in the geography and social settings of the killings. He is, at heart, a reporter and it shows in the way he includes telling details that enrich the stories.

In the town of Harlan [Kentucky], benches advertising Bunny Enriched Bread stand outside the front door of the county courthouse, flanking the First World War monument and the Revolutionary War monument and the plaque recalling how many Kentucky courthouses were burned down by each side during the Civil War.

Seabrook, New Hampshire, has the look of those towns that have grown up over the years along Route 1 the way algae sometimes grow along a ship’s line that has been left underwater too long.

Bluebloods still have enough power to be taken seriously in Savannah partly because Savannah has been the sort of place that respects their credentials, partly because Savannah has not been the kind of place that attracts a lot of ambitious newcomers who might shoulder them aside.