CRIME—AND PUNISHMENT
CELL 2455, DEATH ROW, by Caryl Chess man; Longmans Green, English price 16/-. POLICE HEADQUARTERS, by Quentin Reynolds; Cassell, English price 18/-. ON the 25th of June, 1948, 27-year-old Caryl Chessman, a man with a particularly revolting criminal history,
was sentenced to death in California for kidnapping. On the 8th _of August, 1956, Chessman made his tenth legal move in eight years to avoid the gas chamber, after spending a longer period in the death cell than, I believe, any man in America before him, During these eight years, Chessman, who conducted his own defence and filed his own appeals, has mastered and navigated with superb~skill the intricacies of what must be the most involved criminal laws in the world. He has also written two books, the first of which has just been published. (continued on next page)
BOOKS (continued from previous page) Cell 2455, Death Row, falls naturally into two parts. The first is a unique self-portrait of a criminal psychopath and, as the book itself confirms, a vicious narcissist and pathological liar. It is tautly, almost professionally, written and, if it were presented as fiction, would make a better than average thriller of the American pulp variety. For the rest, this book is a highly emotional indictment of a society which spawns an ever-widening cesspool of juvenile delinquents and tolerates a vast underworld of criminals, under the comfortable but demonstrably false illusion that "crime does not pay." (Chessman
quotes Time magazine’s report of an F.B.I. statement that only 13 per cent of the nation’s criminals ever wind up in gaol.) Incidentally, proponents of capital punishment will find here nothing to report, and much to refute, the thesis that the death penalty is a deterrent to murder. Quentin Reynolds, the author of Police Headquarters, is the apotheosis, if the gods will forgive me for using the word in such a context, of the hack writer. As a life member of Mr. Reynolds’s fraternity, I respect his talent for potboiling reportage, but deplore his current panegyric on the New York Police Department as being well below his standard. If I were you, I should
forget it.
Henry
Walter
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 898, 19 October 1956, Page 13
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360CRIME—AND PUNISHMENT New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 898, 19 October 1956, Page 13
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