Studies in Murder*

The combination of a discussion of crime with a literary style is rare in fiction and almost unknown outside of it; and it has remained for Mr. Pearson to discover that genuine murders, as distinguished from 'detective stories, are capable of a reflective and entertaining treatment. Here he has presented accounts of five historic American murders, beginning with the Borden case in Fall River, and including the engrossing story of the murders on the barkentine Herbert Fuller -an astonishing marine piece which outdoes Clark Russell and in some points is suggestive of a situation used by Conrad in Chance.

The Stories. The Borden case, in which an old gentleman and his wife were killed under circumstances so baffling that there seemed to be no possible solution, and which affected Fall River's sensibilities so profoundly as to lead the library officials to exclude a history of it from their shelves, supplies the longest and most absorbing of the studies. "There are in it," Mr. Pearson says, "all the elements which make such an event worth reading about," and he is entirely right. It is unquestionably a fascinating "problem in human character and in human relations," although in the bitter discussion which it aroused some people were obliged to fall back on the alarming theory that it must have been an act of Divine intervention.

The Herbert Fuller case presented the exceptional circumstance that both judge and jury knew positively that they had the criminal before them, but were unable to say who he was. There were twelve people aboard the barkentine, including an innocent bystander, when -it was about two in the morning and they were at sea -one of them came into the cabin and killed the captain, his wife and his second mate with an ax. One of the remaining nine must have been responsible, and all of them were brought into court. But the jury was so doubtful that the man it convicted is now selling peanuts in Atlanta.

The other cases discussed are interesting but less striking; though none of the sketches is in the least like a 'detective story. They lack, for one thing, the neat solution at the end; in only one of the cases was the mystery solved beyond any possibility of doubt and in the Borden case it was never solved at all. In that respect fact gains somewhat over fiction; it gains also in Mr. Pearson's method of presentation. Like Lizzie Borden, he does not "do things in a hurry." His entirely healthy interest in his subject has a gently philosophic turn, he builds up his backgrounds like an artistic social historian, and there is a wealth of literary allusion that can only be described as charming.

The Significance. All murders be sensational, but most of them are too obvious to be interesting. Mr. Pearson demonstrates that there are murders which are great in themselves, not because they involve the fact that someone has been killed, but because they involve great situations. Miss Lizzie Borden in her house at Fall River makes an unforgettable picture; and it was not the crime on the Fuller but the situation aboard of her next morning which is absorbing. The difficulty about ordinary newspaper crime is that it is so pitifully undramatic. Mr. Pearson shows that at long intervals murder can rise to the heights of Art.

The Author. Edmund Lester Pearson, graduated from Harvard in 1902 with what he terms "the fearsome degree of Bachelor of Library Science," has since been working in various libraries. In the copyright office of the Library of Congress he held what he designates as "the only library position that ever gave him any real exercise" -an exalted post in charge of all the circus posters deposited for copyright, which had to be spread out on the floor and measured with a yardstick. "To that," says he, "I owe my taste in Art."

He has since conducted a weekly department in the Boston Evening Transcript, called "The Librarian." Among his writings: The Old Librarian's Al manack, The Believing Years, Voyage of the Hoppergrass, Theodore Roosevelt, The Secret Book.

* STUDIES IN MURDER -Edmund Lester Pearson -Macmillan ($3.00).