bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with murder

Oh no! I’m now out of Murderbot to reread!

I reread all of Fugitive Telemetry in one sitting, because I’m still 10% sick and welched out of doing literally anything else at all that evening. I regret nothing.

This one is a straight-up murder mystery, where someone has been mysteriously murdered on Preservation Station even though that sort of thing never happens. Murderbot reluctantly joins forces with the human-and-augmented-human Preservation Station Security team to collaborate on solving the murder and also, at Dr. Mensah’s explicit directive, to improve its working relationship with them. In attempting to figure out whodunit they end up exposing both a crime ring (the good kind, i.e., the crime is breaking Corporation Rim “contract labor” laws) and some corporate espionage (DEFINITELY the bad kind). Murderbot has to learn how to do crime-solving in a non-surveillance-state, which it finds frustrating but which I loved. Gurathin continually saves Murderbot’s ass and Murderbot is too self-loathing to realize that Gurathin doesn’t actually hate it anymore. Murderbot and Gurathin are just similarly task-oriented and it is clear to ME that Gurathin is taking care of Murderbot, he’s just not touchy-feely about it, which Murderbot OUGHT to be able to RECOGNIZE except that it doesn’t want to. Anyway. I’m definitely normal about Murderbot and the Preservation survey team, I promise.

In preparation for Nona I read Harrow the Ninth for the third time. This time I tried to read it more slowly, even though my reading-slowly-on-purpose skills have somewhat deteriorated over the years. I don’t think I’m quite clever enough to have figured out who’s in the last section, but I will only live in ignorance for another week or so. (I don’t usually try to guess twists, I just want to see how they happen, but I’ve been wondering Who Is Nona for like a year now so I tried to pay attention.)

Even knowing the big reveals, this was still a tricksy little hobbit of a book. Only part of this is due to the protagonist being possibly-insane-possibly-haunted-definitely-unwell; the rest is due to much of the rest of the cast also being possibly insane, haunted, dead, and various other things (and definitely unwell). God continues to be just some guy, and extremely cringe to boot. I can’t wait for the next book.

I really liked Katherine Addison’s The Witness for the Dead, a quiet little murder mystery set in the world of The Goblin Emperor, so as soon as I heard The Grief of Stones was out I put in a hold for it at the library.

This one again follows the quiet, tenacious Thara Celehar as he solves murders and meets interesting people and stumbles upon some plots that are bigger and more sinister than even the murders he is trying to solve.

Like the prequel, the book is fairly quiet, at least right up until the final showdown. Thara is provided, or perhaps landed with, an apprentice, a widow who discovered her ability to hear the dead late in life. Thara hangs out with his friend Anora, who works at the cemetery, and Pel-Thenhior, who continues to write scandalous (but successful) operas. He hears some petitions and meets a bunch of other interesting folks in varying levels of respectability and winds up uncovering a major scandal at a home for foundling girls, which results in him battling ancient monsters near the Hill of Werewolves again, though this time differently. The book does not feel at all repetitive but it does neatly reproduce all of the things I liked about the first Cemeteries of Amalo book, and it ends on a promising teaser for a third installment.

While it is definitely a comforting little cozy mystery it doesn’t feel lighthearted, as Thara’s office is a grim, dignified one and his entire personality is weighted down by grief. It is, in some ways, a fairly serious book about grief, even as it is also a delightful book about a quiet little priest solving murders with his friends and fretting about the state of his coats. (Thara’s not particularly vain, but his coats are in rough shape.) The elaborate system of titles and other fantasy words/names continues to be opaque to me in a way that could easily be goofy (so many zh sounds!) but is deliberate and consistent enough to end up lending some density to the worldbuilding, plus I find it nice that it’s not over-explained. Maybe someday Addison will release some notes on the language that we can all be big geeks about, Tolkien-style.

I don’t know what else to say about either this or its prequel; they’re just both lovely little jewels of books.

Occasionally people will talk about a book and it won't catch my interest too much because they are leaving out a key piece of information, and then when I get that key piece of information, the thing shoots up a million spots on my To Be Read list.

Such a book was Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth. A bunch of friends had discussed it, fairly positively, as being about lesbian necromancers in space, which is certainly a hook. But it took a promotional email from Tor with a link to an article titled Gideon's Guide to Getting Galactic Swole: An Epic Tale of Skele-Flex Trashbaggery for me to realize that the book is ALSO about a big obnoxious jock lady with big obnoxious biceps and an internal monologue in a register that can only be described as Extremely Online. Given that the internet doesn't exist in the necromantic space empire Gideon lives in, it's quite a feat for her to be as Extremely Online as she is.

Gideon Nav is a big dumb redheaded meathead of an orphan who lives in the Ninth House of a creepy and extremely Goth necromantic space empire. The Ninth House is the creepiest and Gothiest of all the houses, of which there are, predictably, nine. The Ninth House is basically a weird religious colony that occupies a big crack in a planet that is definitely not based on Pluto. Gideon hates living in the Ninth House's Isengardian fortress of Drearburh, and everyone in the Ninth House hates her right back, although possibly not in that order. The only other person Gideon's age in Drearburh is the Reverend Daughter of the House, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, who is Gideon's opposite in every way--tiny, dark-haired, a gifted necromancer, basically not a dumbass at all, deliberately and cunningly cruel, and completely lacking in anything resembling muscle. She is, however, also a lesbian, although not nearly as easily distracted as Gideon is. Of course, they hate each other's guts.

However, due to a series of events in varying levels of deliberateness, Gideon winds up being the only person even remotely suitable to serve as Harrowhark's cavalier when she is summoned off-planet to compete to become a Lyctor, which is basically a sort of immortal knight-saint to the Undying Emperor. Necromancers absolutely must be paired with cavaliers, because they always have been, and necros and cavs ascend to Lyctorhood in pairs as well. So either they will both become immortal or neither of them will. Then most of the book takes place on the planet of the First House, which isn't really a proper House--the First House is technically the Emperor (I think?) but he's not allowed on the First House's planet, which basically exists as a big, ancient, crumbling, but much-warmer-than-Drearburh temple complex. The challengers--i.e., the necro and cav pairs from the Second through Eighth houses--basically have to hang out there with three priests and a bunch of reanimated skeleton servants until they figure out how to become Lyctors. From there, stuff starts going wrong.

One of the things I realized about a third of the way through the book that made everything ten times more hilarious was the realization that if this were a normal adventure book about a competition between different feudal houses, it would definitely have had a different House as its viewpoint. One of the ones that dressed sort of normal, at least. Probably the Fourth House, whose challengers were both teens, if it were a YA book. But the Ninth House would be the mysterious fan favorites--the weirdest, most distant House, with a lot of mystery surrounding them, both of its representatives aloof and inscrutable, wearing black robes and skull makeup and skulking in and out of scenes without talking to anyone. Harrowhark forbids Gideon from talking to anyone, so everyone else thinks she's taken a vow of silence because she's a creepy shadow cultist penitent, and are therefore spared from Gideon's walking-pile-of-memes thought processes until much later in the book, where they are (unsurprisingly, but hilariously) floored to hear how she actually talks. Just the contrast between the Ninth House's aesthetic and Gideon and Harrow's actual personalities makes me want to see this book adapted for TV; it would be the absolute funniest shit ever.

Even not filmed, it's still pretty funny shit. I made the mistake of reading it on the T a lot this weekend because I had to take the T a lot, and I was having the hardest time not absolutely losing it in public every time some absolutely idiotic meme got snuck in in a way that somehow made perfect sense, or whenever Gideon dramatically put on her sunglasses over her skull face paint or busted up the tone of some courtly dialogue by calling somebody an assmunch.

Another thing I liked about this book is that there is not very much romance! None of the romance that there is is robust or explicit enough to constitute a romantic plotline. There is a lot of Gideon being easily distracted and telling very bad suggestive jokes, and there is some unresolved but very tense tension in and among Gideon and Harrow's incredibly fucked-up lifelong loathing of each other, but nobody actually wastes any time on fluffy stuff because they are all very busy fighting epic bone constructs and getting completely covered in gore repeatedly and in the grossest ways Tamsyn Muir can think of (which are pretty gross; I am quite impressed).

So, in short: Goth stuff, ultraviolence, jokes, skellingtons, upsettingly large biceps, and no wholesome fluffy shit. This one definitely falls under the "It's like it was written just for me!" category.

I picked up an ARC of C.L. Polk's debut gaslamp fantasy Witchmark back at Murderbooze 2017, when it was in ARCs, but I only just got around to reading it last week, and damn, am I kicking myself for not pouncing on it earlier!

I had heard it was good, and I think I had seen it pop up on a couple of queer fantasy book recs but since I'm not actually a romance reader that kind of went on my "Well, that's good news, politically" mental list instead of "That's a thing that really makes me want to read it more" list. I had not actually heard a damn thing about what the book is actually about? I gleaned it had bicycles in it because there's a guy on a bicycle on the front cover. I pretty much gravitated towards picking this up instead of any of the other hundred or so books on my "unread fiction" bookcase (yes, it's an entire bookcase) because it was short and not a series, and, well, I'd heard it was good. Maybe it would be light and fluffy; you can't get too dour with bicycles, yes? (Although I think I made the same assumption about circuses and Mechanique and was dead wrong.)

Anyway, I started reading it during dinner on Friday, stayed up two hours later than I had intended reading, woke up Saturday morning, blew off doing yoga to just make a cup of espresso and read, took a short break for breakfast and a shower sometime around 11 a.m. because it had gotten hotter than 90 degrees and I hadn't noticed until the sweat literally ran into my eyes, and finished it sometime in the early afternoon, with the sort of book hangover where you're still immersed in the story and too dazed to interact with other people around you who haven't just been reading it. It has been a while since I've been that level of absorbed in a novel.

Witchmark is about magic, and, therefore, about power; in this case, it's largely about class warfare and elite impunity. In the world of Witchmark, a handful of very powerful families have magical powers; they call themselves mages, and they control the weather, the country, and sometimes each other--the members of these families with strong weather magic are Storm Singers, and the family members with any other kind of magical talent are all lumped together as "Secondaries," their individual talents dismissed as mere "tricks," and they are basically used as backup power centers for the Storm Singers. People who exhibit magical talents who aren't members of these families aren't mages, they're "witches," which is obviously different and means they are clearly insane and must be locked up in asylums.

It is in this context that Miles, our protagonist, is in hiding, living under an assumed name as a doctor at a veteran's hospital. He is a Secondary, but ran away because he wanted to use his healing magic to actually heal people and not just be used as a human battery for his younger sister. He joined the Army as a combat medic shortly before the country invaded another country and became engaged in a World War One-esque war of protracted brutality. After having done a tour himself, Miles' time is now mostly spent trying to figure out what the hell is going on with a bunch of vets whose battle fatigue/shell-shock/PTSD seems to be manifesting in a sort of split personality, with a separate "killer" personality inside them, struggling to break out and murder everybody. A couple of veterans around the country have already done so.

Miles lives in fear of having either is family find him or his powers detected. Some people with magical abilities can spot them in other people just on sight, like an aura; Miles himself can't do this--he has to be touching people to see anything--so he doesn't know who could possibly see him. If he's caught, he either has to out himself as belonging to his terrible family, or he'll be tried and incarcerated as a witch. Miles' family is so terrible that these are about equally bad outcomes.

Unsurprisingly, early in our plot, Miles runs into his little sister at a benefit luncheon and some rando comes right into the hospital and identifies him as magical. The rando promptly dies, having lived only long enough to scare the shit out of Miles and to insist that he's not sick, he's been poisoned, and he needs Miles to investigate his murder. The extremely handsome stranger who accompanied the poisoned rando to the hospital hears all of this; he is, fortunately, the only person who witnesses the whole scene.

From this point we are on a rollicking adventure of a murder mystery, in which someone is mysteriously sabotaging Miles and Mr. Hunter's (Mr. Hunter is the handsome stranger, whomst does not stay a stranger very long, obviously) attempts to investigate whether the murder is actually a murder, both by destroying evidence and apparently by trying to get Miles murdered on the street during his commute by bicycle--twice. The timing here was perfect because I have been watching a lot of Good Omens lately and listening to a lot of Queen in my car, so I was able to mentally set these scenes to Queen's "Bicycle Race." It works wonderfully.

The action never really stops. The subject matter does get very dark, especially near the end when we realize the full extent of what's really happening with the war and the rich people's exploitation of everybody else (there's some good metaphors about the human cost of "progress"/industrialization you could probably get into if you wanted to have a political discussion about it), but a lot of it is fun, accessible murder mystery goodness. The worldbuilding is basically "Edwardian England with the serial numbers filed off and the magic system integrated into it", which is just as delightful and vaguely steampunky as it sounds. The obligatory romantic subplot is quite well done--sweet, with well-paced sexual tension, and neither salacious nor tragic, which is sadly still not a given where m/m romances are concerned. (It seems to be to also still be rather rare to find stories where the protagonist's ORS is a same-sex romance, but it's still definitely a subplot and the story is still primarily in a genre other than romance.) There are some fun murder mystery tropes, like sassy journalists, illicit housebreaking for investigative purposes, lying to cops, a jerkface coworker who is On To You, authority figures blowing you off when you have figured out Something Very Important, a possibly poisoned teapot, and the like. There are some classic wish-fulfillmenty aspects, especially in the romantic subplot, the one of which struck me the most was MR. HUNTER'S HOUSE. I WANT TO LIVE THERE. I have already mentioned some of the fantasy/steampunk tropes that form the core of the book's genre classification--i.e., using magic to explore real-world questions about power, status, consciousness/mental health, industrialization, etc.--but there are also heaps of genre classics like a relentlessly controlling father, a nice but dead mother, stuff we thought was just a legend turning out to be real, adorably old-timey electrical gadgets (including a "coffee burper," which is dead on), a last-minute intervention by the queen, and some channeling of Big Magic through the power of friendship (or at least teamwork). All this comes together into something that hits a lot of familiar beats and is very easy to read, but mixed up into a refreshing new summer cocktail.

Possibly my favorite detail in the whole book is that when characters pick up the phone they say "Ahoy" instead of "Hello," which is actually the thing Alexander Graham Bell wanted to have be the standard phone greeting before Thomas Edison's "Hello" won out.

It turns out that I was also incorrect that this book was a standalone; it will, as the laws of fantasy publishing proclaim, be a trilogy, and the next book comes out in 2020. I'm looking forward to it.

Considering how much I loved, loved, loved Libba Bray's The Diviners, I'm kind of appalled with myself that I apparently missed the publication of the sequel, Lair of Dreams. But something brought it to my attention again recently, so I made sure I'd snagged a copy as an ebook to read on the plane up to Nova Scotia last weekend. (BTW, I went to Nova Scotia last week!)

The book did not disappoint. Clocking it at around 600 pages, it's a big fat Gothic doorstopper of a YA fantasy, full of 1920s New York goodness, and also a fair amount of 1920s New York badness. The cast of characters is pretty big, with all our old favorites still around--Evie, Theta, Mabel, Henry, Memphis, Jericho, Sam Lloyd--and a couple of interesting new folks who pop up, the most prominent of which is Ling Chan, a mixed-race teen girl from Chinatown, who can walk in dreams. Ling Chan is cranky and brusque and loves science and can summon and talk to the dead in her dreams, and she has infantile paralysis in her legs, which she suspects might be some kind of divine punishment for her pride in her dreamwalking ability. She becomes friends with Henry, who it turns out is also a dreamwalker, and they meet and become friends in dreams before meeting in real life when things start to get weird.

The main plotline in the book involves a sleeping sickness that is spreading mysteriously across the city, first striking a bunch of subway laborers who had discovered and opened an abandoned subway station with a single train car in it, which nobody had known was there. If you guessed that this train car was haunted and the laborers let the ghost out by disturbing it, you are also familiar with the basics of how Gothics work, congrats! But that doesn't make it any less exciting, because all kinds of terrifying stuff has to happen for all the disparate characters to come together to figure out who the ghost is and how they are spreading the sleeping sickness and how to stop it, and meanwhile people are also disappearing and turning into ghastly toothy monsters in the subway (don't read this book if you're going to have to take a subway at night in the next year or two), and the authorities and a whole bunch of the populace are blaming the sleeping sickness on the Chinese immigrant community. Unsurprisingly, things get pretty racist, up to and including a Klan march, because the 1920s were terrible and oh god it's the 1920s all over again, isn't it.

So the fun mostly comic relief-y plotline going on through all of this is that Evie is now famous on the radio for doing object reading, and so she now lives in fancy hotels and throws parties until she gets kicked out and has to move into the next fancy hotel, and at some point during all this she ends up fake engaged to Sam for PR purposes, on condition that she help him learn more about the old government project that his mother used to be involved in--the one Evie's uncle Will, who runs the museum, was also part of. The bits with Sam and Evie and their ludicrous fake romance are freaking hilarious, involving creating loud diversions in post offices and all sorts of other nonsense. The stuff they find out about the government project is pretty dark, possibly even darker than the dream-eating ghosts in the subways, because it gets all mixed up with the eugenics movement.

One of the things I like best about the book is the amount of American history that Libba Bray works into it--and she doesn't try to make it flattering. Between the two books, the series so far discusses eugenics, the Klan, the Sacco and Venzetti trial, spiritualism, the Second Great Awakening, polio, Chinese exclusion, sex trafficking, segregation, domestic abuse, and the Civil War. There's also a stealth mention of radium tonic, my new favorite terrifying historical detail, and a brief but highly plot-relevant cameo by Dr. Carl Jung. And there's Jake Marlowe, Charming Scientist Businessman Inventor Dude, a vehicle by which Libba Bray provides Pointed Commentary on the links between American exceptionalism, capitalism, the modernist approach to science, and the aforementioned eugenics movement.

One minor disappointment I had was that I wanted to see more of Mabel's new anarchist buddy that she met at the end of the first book, but he is gone for most of this one, but then he shows up right at the end, and at the end there's also a mention of Sacco and Venzetti's impending execution that has me hopeful that the third book will involve many more anarchists. Also solve the mystery of whatever creepy swelling of magic is being brought forth by the man in the stovepipe hat, who I haven't mentioned yet in this review but he keeps popping up in the background, in paintings and in people's memories and dreams and things. Another mysterious motif that keeps popping up throughout the book is a logo of an eye with a lighting bolt under it. And a third ongoing motif is a bunch of dudes named after Founding Fathers who are apparently just driving around the country murdering young Diviners or people suspected of being Diviners. Look, it's really hard to fit all the cool stuff into a review because it's a really long book and it is just jam-packed with STUFF. Like, it could probably have been cut down at least 100 pages if you wanted to ruin Bray's descriptive style, but then it wouldn't be very Gothic, and it'd still be 500 pages long, and that's a lot of subplots and historical tidbits.

Anyway, it is almost October, and this is a good October book, so if you liked the first one I recommend the sequel highly, and if you haven't read the first one, that is a good October book too!

For BSpec's book club I finally got around to reading the first book in Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence, which I have been meaning to do for at least two years now. I have the last two books in the sequence signed, but the first one only in paperback, and am missing the second and third. To make it even more complicated, the books take place in a different order than they are published -- they are ordered by the number referenced in the title.

The first book, therefore, is Three Parts Dead, which follows the adventures of young Craftswoman Tara Abernathy as she is hired on probation at the necromantic law firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao under the mentorship of terrifyingly efficient senior Craftwoman Elayne Kevarian. Tara graduated from Craft school under dubious circumstances that involved her trying to kill one of her professors and getting thrown out of the school, literally, which is pretty dangerous because the school floats up in the sky, as all the best magic schools do.

Tara's first assignment is in the city of Alt Coulomb, which runs off the power of its god, Kos Everburning. Unfortunately, Kos has died under mysterious circumstances. Tara, with the help of a hilarious sheltered young priest (or Novice Technician, as he is called) named Abelard and his junkie policewoman friend Cat, has to help Elayne figure out who killed Kos and why and how and who benefits and all that stuff and generally unravel the massive conspiracy hidden in the heart of the Church.

While the story is plenty funny, it's not as much of a comedy as one might think from some of its elements -- demon lawyers! a vampire pirate captain! divine contract law! -- and the world of magical techno-corporatocracy that Gladstone builds is convincing, at once both weird and distressingly familiar.

Tara is a great protagonist, driven and talented and badass and definitely in a bit over her head, and Abelard is a great dual lead, being an earnest bumbling weirdo in an arcane religious order who chain-smokes to show religious devotion and doesn't know what a newspaper is. They're a fantastic, fantastic team, especially since the book very sensibly eschews the unnecessary romantic subplot that I think a lot of authors would have found obligatory. Instead of romance we get, like, shape-shifting gargoyles and blood magic libraries and a nine-story demonic BDSM nightclub and stuff like that.

The philosophical underpinnings of the main conflict ends up having a lot to do with free will and consent and the dangers of clever, talented technolibertarian douchebags being allowed to exploit other people without adult supervision, so suffice it to say that the book is not all fluff and explosions, although like any good urban fantasy it certainly has quite a lot in the way of fluff and explosions, and even an instance of leather pants.

I think we're going to get a really good discussion out of it. I've already started reading the next book in the Sequence, so we'll see how many we get through by the time book club rolls around.

I read a book way back in November, then interviewed its author three weeks ago over at the day job: http://www.casinocitytimes.com/article/visit-the-bizarre-side-of-vegas-with-getting-off-on-frank-sinatra-65718

So not a lot of great stuff has been happening since the election, but a brief moment of relief arrived yesterday in the form of a brand-new shiny Shadowshaper novella from Daniel José Older, which only cost $0.99 on Kindle. I promptly cancelled my evening plans to bug out about stuff on Twitter and bought Ghost Girl in the Corner. I then had a lovely evening with Tee and Iz and three glasses of boxed wine and it was the best I’ve felt in three weeks.

Anyway, as for the novella itself: Most of the most-beloved characters from Shadowshaper are here, but the main action surrounds Tee and Izzy, with a big helping of Uncle Neville. The mischief all starts when Tee sees the ghost of a teenage girl in the basement where she’s taken over Manny’s local newspaper after he died in the last book. Tee has acquired some sort of community journalism grant and has a small crew of intrepid teenage reporters, including a white girl from Staten Island whose grandma is the creepy old lady with the creepy dolls from one of the short stories in Salsa Nocturna. There is also a dude who writes about sports, but when he’s first introduced he says “I write about esports” and I thought he meant eSports like competitive video gaming and then got all confused when he was covering local baseball games and not, like, CS:GO tournaments, but no, it’s just that Older writes out people’s accents and I am a huge fucking nerd.

Anyway, the local baseball games are important because, while Tee is trying to figure out who the ghost in the corner is and simultaneously screwing up her relationship with Izzy, one of the local teams’ star players mysteriously disappears. The cops are, predictably, zero help. The ghost girl in the corner, on the other hand, is, as are the giant printing press and Uncle Neville. How do all these things fit together? You can find out for $0.99.

While the plot is very heavy, the characters are delightful. The dialogue is witty and vivid, which will be surprising to no one who has read anything else by Older or heard him speak at a convention or reading. The social commentary is sharp and incisive—mean, yes, but insightful and hilarious with an eye for detail, like Jane Austen except about modern urban Latinx communities instead of 18th century English countryside gentry nonsense. (If you’re thinking “So not like Jane Austen at all, then,” let me know and I will gladly subject you to three hours of rambling about social satire and economics.) It's also full of fun little references to things, from Older's other work (I mentioned the creepy dolls lady above) to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There is also a brief but very timely and satisfying instance of straight-up Nazi fighting.

Overall, it is a wonderful and much-needed morsel of awesomeness to tide people over until Shadowhouse Fall comes out.

The most recent Harvard Bookstore Warehouse sale had a good selection of books for those such as myself who have, since Lin-Manuel Miranda's play took Broadway by storm this fall, devolved into complete Hamiltrash. When I saw the title of Paul Collins' Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take On America's First Sensational Murder Mystery, I knew I had to buy it. Well, first I thought it must be fiction that had been misshelved, but then I reread the subtitle and picked it up and read the flap copy just to be sure, and when I got back home I immediately went online to see if I was remembering the lyrics properly:

[HAMILTON]
Gentlemen of the jury, I’m curious, bear with me
Are you aware that we’re making hist’ry?
This is the first murder trial of our brand-new nation
The liberty behind
Deliberation—

[ENSEMBLE]
Non-stop!

[HAMILTON]
I intend to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt
With my assistant counsel—

[BURR]
Co-counsel
Hamilton, sit down
Our client Levi Weeks is innocent. Call your first witness
That’s all you had to say!

[HAMILTON]
Okay!

Confirmed: This book is about the Levi Weeks case, a real case in which Burr and Hamilton really did serve as co-counsel for the defense.

The musical fudges the facts a bit for dramatic license. First of all, it barely touches on the case at all, subsuming it under the larger narrative of Hamilton's nonstoppitude, whereas this case was actually a really, really big deal. Second of all, it wasn't a big deal because it was the first murder trial since independence, since it really wasn't: It was the first murder trial that became a big public sensation along the lines of the popular murders that characterized the Victorian era across the pond (see; Judith Flanders' The Invention of Murder), which had sort of just barely started--because, thirdly, the Levi Weeks trial took place in 1800, when both Hamilton and Burr were well-established lawyers in Manhattan, and in their mid-forties.

Neither A. Ham nor A. Burr pop up too much in the earlier parts of the book, except in distant, tantalizing bits and pieces, like marching in Washington's funeral procession, and some little-regarded letters to the editors of various newspapers. Instead, the earlier sections of the book are dedicated to setting the scenes of life in three-turns-of-the-century-ago New York City in general, and in Elias Ring's boardinghouse in particular, where the major players in the crime all lived.

The short version: Elias Ring and his wife ran a nice, respectable Quaker boardinghouse, which at the time had four boarders: Mrs. Ring's sister Hope Sands; Hope's cousin Elma Sands; a cloth merchant named Richard Croucher; and a young carpenter named Levi Weeks. One day shortly before Christmas, Elma Sands got dressed up to go out, borrowed a muff from a neighbor, left the boardinghouse and didn't return. Around New Year's, her body was found in the Manhattan Well at Lispenard's Meadow, a well that had been recently built as part of Senator Aaron Burr's plan to improve the municipal water supply, but which had been abandoned because it kept filling up with quicksand.

Suspicion immediately fell upon Levi Weeks, who was rumored to have been engaged to Elma, and he was promptly arrested. His brother, Ezra Weeks, called upon some top-notch lawyers who owed him money to serve as Levi's defense team in exchange for canceling their debts. The lawyers in question were Senator Burr, Major General Alexander Hamilton, and future Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Henry Brockholst Livingston.

The trial ran for two full days, which was super long by the standards of the time, and had only one recess for a few hours overnight, during which the jurors had to sleep on the floor in a portrait gallery because it hadn't really been planned that the trial would run on for that long. Part of the length of the trial was due to Hamilton, Burr, and Livingston's brilliantly tricksy cross-examinations--mostly Hamilton was in charge of the cross-examining; he seemed to be having fun with it--and part of it was due to the approach of Assistant Attorney General Cadwallader Colden, which was to bring in basically everybody in Manhattan as a witness. Unfortunately for Colden, his prosecution was a complete mess. In addition to such blunders as citing cases that actually argued the opposite of what he claimed they argued, Hamilton and friends kept tripping up his witnesses with questions like "What day was that?" when they claimed they saw or heard suspicious things. (Things you learn from reading history: Old-timey people are not NEARLY as smart as people assume they were when complaining about Kids These Days. Like, sure, General Hamilton was certainly much smarter than your average asshole is today, but your average asshole in 1799 had alcohol for breakfast and didn't know how old his own children were.)

A nice gift for the nerds of the future was that this trial, all nearly forty-eight hours of it, was taken down in shorthand by the clerk of the court and later published in full as a book for mass purchase. As a result, we know every one of Colden's blunders, the defense team's snarky questions, and the witnesses' testimonies. The middle third of Duel with the Devil therefore gives us a very lively and detailed account of exactly who said what and how it was received. It makes a delightful courtroom drama.

The final third of the book discusses how the various publications about the trial were produced and received, as well as what happened to all the major players--including a pretty convincing theory on who it was that actually murdered Elma Sands. My favorite bits were learning more about the sad and wacky trajectory of Aaron Burr's life after he shot Hamilton, of which I had known nearly nothing: It turns out that he was indicted for murder in both New Jersey and New York, although the charges were eventually dropped; he fled out West where he was then charged with treason for fomenting a rebellion in Mexico; eventually he ended up wandering about completely penniless in Europe for several years before he dared return to New York and become a specialist in family law, which happened pretty much just because the only people desperate enough to be willing to use his services as a lawyer were women seeking divorce cases. (Burr represented Maria Reynolds, of the Reynolds Affair/Pamphlet notoriety, in her divorce. Isn't history fun?)

Overall, the book is a really fascinating look into a very particular slice of history, and is nearly a novel in its readability: It's got a fantastic cast, vivid worldbuilding, a thrilling mystery, and even some dryly funny dialogue:

"There were many discolorations on the teguments of the skin," Dr. Snedeker announced to the prosecutor. "There was a dislocation of the clavicle from the sternum."
There was a confused silence.
"Be so good, sir, as to speak in less technical language, so that the jury may understand you."
"The left collar bone was broke," the doctor sighed.

Well, I laughed.

Anyway. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED FOR: American history nerds, true crime nerds, my fellow Hamiltrash, combinations of the above.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Location: lower allston
Current Music: "Non-Stop," Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton: An American Musical