The Many Enticements of True Crime Biography

‘Wilde Nights & Robber Barons: The Story of Maurice Schwabe, The Man Behind Oscar Wilde’s Downfall, who with a Band of Aristocrats Swindled the World’By Laura LeeElsewhere Press, 408 pages‘Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks’By Patrick Radden KeefeDoubleday, 348 pagesRogue biography, or criminal biography, or true crime books constitute a genre with a history dating back to the 18th century. Their appeal is not simply to the public’s craving for tales of the illicit, full of mayhem, murder, and sex, but to a keen fascination with what Patrick Radden Keefe calls the “permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds.”Which side of the law you find yourself on can be a fungible phenomenon, as I learned by the age of 11, accompanying my father on trips to the New Casino Bar on Davison Avenue near the police station out of which he worked a decade earlier as a Detroit plainclothes detective investigating the numbers racket. I would sit on a tall stool and observe a few of the numbers racket suspects my father had befriended after he left the police force. I wonder, dear reader, if your family may have a shady member who is spoken of with a curious affection. Think of Uncle Charlie in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt.”If you set aside Tacitus writing about Roman emperors, this lust for reading about criminals perhaps begins with Jonathan Wild (circa 1682-1725), who perfected the double role of crimefighter-criminal. Eighteen-year-old Henry Fielding watched Wild hang, and later wrote about him in a satire, “The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild, the Great” (1743), which likened Wild’s duplicity to the machinations of a Whig party leader, Robert Walpole.Samuel Johnson attempted to elevate the true crime narrative in his “Life of Richard Savage” (1744), about a murderous minor poet who was Johnson’s friend, a beautifully executed work of measured exculpation: “it must be confessed that Mr. Savage’s esteem was no very certain possession, and that he would lampoon at one time those whom he had praised at another.” Savage’s life becomes a precarious seesaw in the balanced antitheses of Johnson’s sentences. Laura Lee capitalizes on another enticement of true crime biography: the Ripley-Highsmith rogue who gets away with it. Ms. Lee has discovered a spectacular subject, a boon to her as a biographer-sleuth: an obscure figure implicated in Oscar Wilde’s downfall, who is now exposed, in Conan Doyle fashion, as just possibly a mastermind of crime. Maurice Schwabe, mentioned in the Wilde trials, helped another confrère, Alfred Taylor, to introduce Wilde to the rough trade with whom they all consorted. Because only Taylor appeared in the dock, Schwabe escaped significant notice, protected in his seeming insignificance by Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas.Much about Schwabe remains occluded, but, as Ms. Lee observes: “There was no question, Schwabe was a member of an organized crime syndicate” that bilked “young aristocrats out of fortunes” through “card-sharping, blackmail, seducing wealthy heiresses, selling shares in shady businesses and espionage.” Schwabe may well have set up Wilde.Why was Schwabe never caught? Ms. Lee posits that exposing him would have also revealed that permeable membrane between the licit and illicit members of society that the Wilde trials only adumbrated. Schwabe knew too much about too many people of privilege or in power to be outed.Mr. Keefe misses an opportunity in his preface to say more about how his lives of crime and criminals are woven into the fabric of society, and instead describes his magazine work as a “write-around man” — the term used for profiles in which the subject refuses to be interviewed. Even so, who can resist chapters with these titles? “Crime Family: How a notorious Dutch gangster was exposed by his own sister.”“The Empire of Edge: How a doctor, a trader, and the billionaire Steven A. Cohen got entangled in a vast financial scandal.”“The Hunt for El Chapo: Inside the capture of the world’s most notorious drug lord.”“Winning: How Mark Burnett resurrected Donald Trump as an icon of American success.”Mr. Keefe’s stories are entertaining and edifying, but for a sustained account of a criminal career, and wonderful insights into how biographers keep turning up new angles on old stories, I’d recommend Ms. Lee’s intriguing narrative. Mr. Rollyson is the author of “A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography.”

The Many Enticements of True Crime Biography

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