REAL CRIME STUDIES
MORE STUDIES IN MURDER, by Edmund Pearson; Arco Publishers, English price 12/6. , Wit is much more frequent in imaginary than in real crime stories, but there is plenty of it, perhaps in some readers’ view too much, in the last book by Edmund Pearson, who died recently in New York. I had never heard of him, but from More Studies in Murder I should judge there is some justification for the publishers’ claim that he was "a very great criminologist." These real crimes in various countries, some of them widely known, are re-told with mastery of facts, acute, impartial and unsentimental analysis, a sense of human drama and character, and a very lively style. For example, the hen-pecking of Major Armstrong by his wife was a motive for her murder, but as described by Pearson, it is also social comedy. "Sob Sisters Emerge," a study in American popular reactions to a woman’s crime of passion, is what is colloquially called "a scream"; nevertheless, it is a highly enlightening picture of mass hysteria and perversion of justice. For one thing that makes this book notable is the skilful and often diverting way in which the criminal is related to his community. Criminals may be ‘worse than the people about them, but they are not necessarily
more strange.
A.
M.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 780, 2 July 1954, Page 13
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221REAL CRIME STUDIES New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 780, 2 July 1954, Page 13
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