Further adventures in true crime

July 20, 2014 at 2:14 am (books, Crime, Film and television, Mystery fiction, True crime, True crime narratives)

[The first post in this series is Adventures in True Crime, Part One.]

In the course of reading and doing research in the area of true crime, I’ve become fascinated by the way in which actual crimes have served as the basis for fictional narratives. There are quite a few examples of  this phenomenon in the literature of suspense and crime fiction – more than I had originally thought. So I decided to come up with some sort of schematic to help organize this information into a coherent form. Another part of my purpose here is to note instances where true crime narratives also exist.

I wanted to include two of my favorite films as well. And of course there’s plenty of relevant material on YouTube. Even an opera made it into the mix!

With the help of my computer whiz husband, I’ve created this grid. The tables were generated by Microsoft Word, and in the process of importing into the blog, I encountered a number of problems with spacing, some of which I was able to correct, but not all.

The project is not quite finished, but here’s what I’ve got so far:

Actual Crime:	True Crime Narrative:	Fictionalized Version:
The murder of Hannah Willix, New Hampshire, 1648	Drawn from a one-sentence entry in the journal of Massachusetts Bay Colony Gov. John Winthrop, dated June 4, 1648. Source: http://articles.latimes.com/1991-05-21/news/vw-2453_1_strange-death-of-mistress-coffinFrom a blog entitled My Maine Ancestry – http://mymaineancestry.blogspot.com/2012/03/unsolved-murder.html :My 10th Great Grandmother was murdered in New Hampshire in May or June of 1648. Her name was Hannah (or Annah) Willix. She was traveling from Dover to Exeter when she was attacked, robbed and her body “flung” into the river. I found a document online called “New Hampshire Homicides 1630-1774” that contains this information: Hannah “was founde in the [Piscataqua] River dead; her necke broken, her tounge black and swollen out of her mouth & the bloud settled in her face, the privy partes swolne &c as if she had been muche abused &c.”	The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin, by Robert J. Begiebing – 1991http://youtu.beRHjr7sjFvhA********************

 

 

 

Actual Crime:	True Crime Narrative:	Fictionalized Version:
Murder by James Yates of his wife and four children in 1781 in Tomhanick, NY	“An Account of a Murder Committed by Mr. J————– Y———– Upon His Family, in December, A.D. 1781” Anonymous article appearing in The New-York Weekly Magazine, July 20, 1796*	Wieland: or The Transformation: An American Tale, By Charles Brockden Brown – 1798   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wieland_%28novel%29

 

Actual Crime:	True Crime Narrative:	Fictionalized Version:
Murder of pregnant mill worker Sarah Maria Cornell, in Fall River, Mass., in 1832	Fall River Outrage: Life, Murder, and Justice in Early Industrial New England, by David Kasserman – 1986	The Tragedy at Tiverton, by Raymond Paul – 1984  Avery’s Knot, by Mary Cable

 

Actual Crime:	True Crime Narrative:	Fictionalized Version:
Murder of Anethe Christensen and Karen Christensen by Louis Wagner at Smutty Nose, in the Isles of Shoals, off the coast of New Hampshire, in 1873	“A Memorable Murder” by Celia Thaxter, for the Atlantic Monthly Magazine* http://seacoastnh.com/smuttynose/memo.html	The Weight of Water, by Anita Shreve – 1997 *********

 

 

Actual Crime:	True Crime Narrative:	Fictionalized Version:
Eight unsolved murders, primarily of African American servant girls, in Austin, Texas, in late 1884 and 1885	“Capital Murder” by Skip Hollandsworth, in Texas Monthly, July 2000: http://www.texasmonthly.com/content/capital-murder	A Twist at the End, by Steven Saylor – 2000 *******

 

Actual Crime:	True Crime Narrative:	Fictionalized Version:
The murder of New York City resident Mary Rogers in 1841	The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the invention of murder, by Daniel Stashower – 2006	“The Mystery of Marie Roget,” short story by Edgar Allan Poe – 1842 http://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/rogetb.htm

 

Actual Crime:	True Crime Narrative:	Fictionalized Version:
The murder of John Hossack in Iowa, in 1900	“The Hossack Murder,” by Susan Glaspell, in the Des Moines Daily News, 1901*Midnight Assassin: A Murder in America’s Heartland, by Patricia L. Bryan and Thomas Wolf – 2005	“A Jury of Her Peers,” short story by Susan Glaspell – 1917http://www.learner.org/interactives/literature/story/fulltext.html

Actual Crime:	True Crime Narrative:	Fictionalized Version:
The murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette, in Herkimer, New York (Adirondacks) -1906	Murder in the Adirondacks: An American Tragedy Revisited, by Craig Brandon – 1986	An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser – 1925  A Northern Light, by Jennifer Donnelly – 2003*********Film: A Place in the Sun – 1951 http://youtu.be/wEuFNnJSIw8 An American Tragedy: opera by Tobias Picker – 2005   http://youtu.be/2Um_jfEpjD0

 

Actual Crime:	True Crime Narrative:	Fictionalized Version:
The murder of Albert Snyder by Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, in New York City – 1927	“The Eternal Blonde,” by Damon Runyan, from Trials and Other Tribulations – 1927*Included in The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, by Deborah Blum – 2010	Double Indemnity by James M Cain – 1938****Film: Double Indemnity, from Cain’s novel, with Raymond Chandler writing the screenplay – 1944 http://youtu.be/yKrrAa2o9Eg ********************** http://youtu.be/vN9THMXxndw

*Included in True Crime: An American Anthology, edited by Harold Schechter and published by Library of America in 2008