Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris

Photo: Book's cover, from its Wikipedia page.  Great cover!

Very specifically-written account of the murders committed by Dr. Marcel Petoit, of which there may have been 27, or 150, or anything in between, by David King.  In Nazi-occupied Paris, he would advertize his services as a Resistance-fighter, as a man who could get Jews and others out of the country, to Argentina and to freedom.  His orders were to not tell anyone.  To carry as much money as possible, sewn into their clothes.  To remove all identifying tags.  To pack all of their most valuable belongings into two suitcases and to bring them on the day they were to get away.  He'd have them meet him at an address, at an apartment condo affixed with a gas chamber, a scope that allowed him to see the suffering from the gas, or from the poison he might've injected them with.  He became very rich.

The book shows a lot of the Paris of the time, from existentialists Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir (it was cool to hear about them; I studied them while getting my philosophy degree, but I didn't get to learn a lot about their daily lives), to the daily struggles of everyone else at the time, to the way the police department worked in its tug of war with the Nazis in power, to many other things.  Petoit's crimes over so long proved the maxim of the best way to get away with something huge and terrible: To do so in the wide open, because nobody will believe it, and those who do will willfully ignore it.

It covers the trial, which was a farce of the highest order.  In a French trial, the judge, the accused, the prosecution, and any lawyer of any of the other civil defendants can all ask a question, interrupt, and say anything at any time.  So can the judge, and any of the assistant judges he has next to him.  So can any member of the jury.  This, as you may imagine, would create a chaos that I still have trouble understanding.  How anything is proven, or disproven, and judged upon is a mystery.  But Petoit was found guilty, and guillotined.  His last moments exhibit a perhaps-psychotic calm that is also beyond belief.

The subject matter saves the book, in a way, because the author displays a very dry, matter-of-fact writing style that could bore had the subject been more pedestrian.  I had no trouble putting it down, though I did want to continue.  A better job could perhaps be done with all this, though I do understand, perhaps, that the author may have felt such an approach was necessary in order to make sense and order out of all the chaos.  I have not read any of his other work, so I can't say if this is just his style, or not.

Worth a read, though Petoit's manic behavior, and his apparent ability to impress so many very well-educated and otherwise hard to impress people, may turn the reader off a little.  A Jekyll-and-Hyde person, Petoit was both a celebrated and altruistic doctor, and a mass-murderer, serial-killer-for-profit, and perhaps fifty other types of person, all at the same time, and was in and out of institutions frequently.  It was also clear that he worked for the Gestapo, and that he may have started this killing spree getting rid of other Gestapo workers--and then started killing everyone, including Jews desperate to get out of France.

Sickening, yet compulsively readable.

Seward's Successful Defense of an Insane Black Man

Photo: William Seward, from his own Wikipedia page

After watching Spielberg's Lincoln, I bought the book much of the movie is based on, Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin.  Because I'm nerdy like that.  On page 85 is a true account of William Seward's defense of William Freeman, a former slave (last name ironically notwithstanding) who, after years of extreme mistreatment in jail, was released and almost immediately broke into the home of a rich white man--a friend of Seward's, in fact--and killed him, his pregnant wife, their little child, and his wife's mother.  This was undisputed during the whole trial.

The amazing thing about the trial is that, after Freeman was found guilty of the murders, Seward chose to defend him, for free, during the penalty phase.  Long a supporter of prison reform and reform for the mentally ill--and long an abolitionist--Seward realized that Freeman, who was deaf, dumb, and, according to Seward himself, an "imbecile" and a "maniac"--committed those crimes because of his maltreatment in jail for a crime that, it turned out, he never actually did to begin with.  (This case reminds me a bit of Murder in the First, an 80s movie with Christian Slater and Kevin Bacon, and Gary Oldman as a sadistic warden).

And so Seward, who had already served twice as Governor of New York, and who would soon run for president and lose the nomination to Lincoln (partly because of this case), defended him, this black man, who in March of 1846 wiped out a family of Seward's friends.  I found, free on Google Books, Seward's entire closing argument for the case--all thirty-one pages of it.  (!!!)  Full title: Argument of William H. Seward, in defense of William Freeman, on his trial.  In it is some fantastic stuff, including--

--Seward's insistence that Freeman belonged in an asylum, not "on the scaffold," because he was insane.  This was practically a brand new defense at the time.  In fact, though relatively new, Seward reminded the jury a few times to not consider the overuse of the insanity defense against his own insane client.

--A very strong argument against capital punishment itself.

--A very strong argument against the treatment of the insane.

--A rebuke about the bias accorded to the "negro" and to the insane.

--An impassioned stance against the slavery Freeman had lived under, and the mistreatment in jail he had incurred.

--A reminder that had Freeman been white, and the murdered family black, there would have been no trial.

--A warning to the jury to put aside their bias against "the negro" and "the infirm."

--A reminder that, although the murdered family's family and friends were all over the courtroom, the defendant's family was not, because they were slaves, and nobody could track them down.

--The oft-repeated quote: "The color of the prisoner’s skin, and the form of his features, are not impressed upon the spiritual immortal mind which works beneath. In spite of human pride, he is still your brother, and mine, in form and color accepted and approved by his Father, and yours, and mine, and bears equally with us the proudest inheritance of our race—the image of our Maker. Hold him then to be a Man."

And many more things.  And he won!  After a successful appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court (apparently the well-written argument given to the case's jury had no effect), he was spared from the scaffold and died of consumption in a cell somewhere.  An amazing thing, for one person to defend a person of a race oppressed by his own society, who killed a family of his friends.  Seward had everything politically to lose (and he feared for his safety and that of his family, too, from an enraged local populace during the lengthy trial), and he had the bias against the race and the insane to overcome.  All to save a man who never had the sense to know what was going on, to thank him or to pay him, who was never going to see the light of day, even if victorious.

I wonder if any politician today, with the public the ravenous and rabid dog that it is, would have the courage of his own beliefs to defend a man who had done this, who was as hated by his society as he was, who had killed a family of friends, solely because of Seward's beliefs against capital punishment, against slavery, and against bias against blacks and the insane.

I wonder if many of us would, even those of us outside the public eye.  Would many of us even take such a stance against someone at a social gathering?

Doubtful.

The Best American Stories: 1998--Last Few Stories

 photo: front cover, from its Amazon page

All right, everyone, it's been a long while since I posted my review of the stories in this anthology.  I've been sidetracked by various and sundry issues, but here's the concluding blog entry about these stories.  Overall I found this book extremely worthwhile, so track it down and read it.  Follow my critiques as a guide once you have the book, if you wish.  If you have any thoughts about these, or any other works of these authors, please feel free to comment.


The Two Ladies of Rose Cottage by Peter Robinson

Interesting and well-written, sort of a cross between Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" and Tolkien's Hobbit's land.   And Rose Cottage will always remind me of the hut in Eyam, England, within which so many members of one family died of the Plague.  (I've written an entry about that here.)  There's a little bit of Fried Green Tomatoes, too.  There's a wonderful little mystery involving the two ladies of the title, and some bones found buried in the garden of the former home of one of them, and an abusive husband, and small-town secrets.  And a nice little subtext about death itself, too.  And getting old.  A good read, and pleasantly bittersweet, if you like that kind of thing.  But we do grow old, and things do die away, much as we do.

Twelve Days out of Traction by Dave Shaw

Written in a purposely terse style, too aware of itself for my taste, but anyone who throws in a jab at Newt Gingrich can't be that bad.  The narrator runs injury scams, the kind of guy who slips on a wet floor of a store and sues the owner.  Just okay, not much of a story, really, and written like yeah, okay, whatever.  Not really sure why this one made the cut into this anthology.  Shaw must have pictures.

The Power of Suggestion by Helen Tucker

In this one, a man's normally-boring Holly Homemaker Housewife starts having ESP and devours such books about it.  She "sees" him cheating on her in a hotel, though she's gullible, so believes his lies about it.  Or does she?  A very Ellery Queen kind of story, which is where it was published, like in the old Alfred Hitchcock magazine days.  You know, there's a cheating husband who works too much during the day and even more at night, but not with his wife.  She's supposedly the innocent homemaker, but you know she knows she's being wronged.  Since you know the guy's going to get it, you start thinking how, and this one was then easy to figure out.  Reading it was like watching yourself mentally connect the dots, and then watching yourself being right.  You can see it as a half-hour episode of the Hitchcock TV show as you're reading it.

Take It Away by Donald E. Westlake

Disappointing story from a well-known writer of the genre, who's been writing for over forty years, it seems.  (I have some old paperbacks of his from the fifties.)  Anyway, this one is a forehead-slapper, as it is not conceivable that a member of the FBI would be this dumb.  He and his team on a stakeout use an unsafe walkie-talkie channel; he's in line at a fake Burger King, talking to a guy who's very obviously playing him in the conversation, referring to stakeouts, and his job, and a million other things, and the narrator gets a bad feeling but doesn't do anything about it.  And before you can say The Usual Suspects, the guy in line is of course the guy they were staking out, and the attractive woman in front of him was of course the person the guy in line (a smuggler of paintings) needed to exchange info. with.  And she's holding papers she won't let the FBI guy look at over her shoulder!  Simply not believable, and one of those stories where you want to strangle the narrator, and then the author who shoved him upon us.  A very heavy disappointment, where clearly Westlake's name alone opened the door to this Best of...anthology for him.

The Rest of Her Life by Steve Yarborough

Very effective story about a murder of a young girl's mother, but in fact the murder is the last thing this story is about.  Love, and falling out of love.  Men and women, and relationships.  How and why relationships fail and end.  Lying, and the acceptance of those lies.  Getting old; losing life's fire.  Some quick-changing POV is never a distraction, but is often a revelation.  A juror twenty years later talks again to the girl, it's a flash-forward that takes one sentence.  There are flashbacks, as well, and some back and forth, but if you're paying attention, they're not a problem and can be, as I said, a revelation in the way of this world, of how time works, and of how life and justice often look the other way.  The ending might be a little more subtle than it needs to be, but by then the despair of the writing has forecasted the ending a bit, and it really doesn't matter anyway.  You'll need a shot of whiskey, or something, after the end of this one.  But read it anyway.