What I Am Reading: "The Man From the Train" by Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James

True crime and serial killers are something I have sort of a secondary interest in, as part of an overlapping interest in horror, history, and the macabre. I usually consume my true crime as late-night Wikipedia binges or longform articles, and not as books. I tried it this time as a result of an opening in my library lending schedule, to mixed results.

This book was very frustrating. The topic and research were interesting, spooky, even dramatic; but the writing was undisciplined in both style and organization/presentation. Bill James is some kind of big-shot sportswriter and sports statistician, and Rachel McCarthy James is his daughter, who started out as his research assistant on this project but proceeded to write portions of the book. To get one thing out of the way: the writing style can be informal, with many conversational interjections, like: “Skeptical? Of course you're skeptical. You're either skeptical or you're stupid, and you don't look stupid." I can handle that in a blog post or article, even in nonfiction, if it is suitably applied; but I find it very annoying over the course of an entire nonfiction book. This goes double for notes applied to the story itself, like "...information about him can still be found on the Web," or how something will be covered "later in the book." There are much more elegant ways to convey this information, if it needs to be conveyed at all. For example: through end-notes or footnotes, which this book lacks entirely.

Anyway, the book is about a serial killer that the Jameses believe they have found, who committed murders across a 14-year period from 1898 to 1912. This serial killer rode the rails, working for a time as a woodcutter (i.e. logger/lumberjack) or miner in remote areas, then committing his murders before moving on to the next work/killing spot. He would enter a house in a remote rural or village area at midnight, and kill the family within by striking them with the blunt end of an axe. Beyond this basic structure, there are other hallmarks, such as the use of an axe found at the home or illumination from a kerosine lamp with its chimney removed. He would move the bodies, perform sexual acts with the bodies of the young women, then seal the house up behind him. After the killing, he would return to the nearby railroad track and hop a train out of town. James and James found roughly two dozen murders conforming in some way to this description. A core 14 of those are described in enough detail, and make enough chronological and geographic sense when viewed together, that they are positive on the involvement of the serial killer in question.

My biggest problem with this book is that a straightforward summary like the above is not presented as such until about two-thirds of the way through the book. It is badly in need of an introduction, or an abstract (you can make it as colloquial as you want! I promise!) that gives the reader a framework for what they are learning about, and what the theory is. Instead, the book simply launches into the murders, and is left to pick up the details of the serial-killing pattern as they occur. We are not even started off on the earliest murders; the book starts with the later murders in the Midwest, which at the time were in fact thought to be linked and to be the work of a rail-traveling killer. From there, we jump back in time to earlier murders that the Jameses believe to have been earlier work of the same killer (not connected by investigators or journalists because of the limited spread of newspaper stories earlier in the decade, before the AP and UPA had spread to many small-town papers). This achronological ordering isn't inherently bad or confusing, it is just disorienting to be along for a ride without knowing where we are going. Some of the murders are summarized, and then judged as not related to the serial killer in question, or the work of a copycat, or with too little surviving information to judge. It would have been a major help to the reader to be told beforehand what the book was about, what the authors’ theory was, what information would be presented, what order it would be presented in, and why. A timeline or map would not have been remiss either.

This would not have prevented them from saving the big reveal for the end: they have a hypothesized identity for the killer. The earliest killing is close to home for me, an axe murder of the Newton family in Brookfield, Massachusetts (listed for some reason as West Brookfield in some sources) by their farmhand, Paul Mueller. James and James believe that this murder shows the hallmarks that would evolve into the later murders, and that Mueller fits the right psychological and sociological profile to have been the killer. It's an interesting theory, but the entire book is built entirely on circumstantial evidence and statistical analysis (circumstances the murders have in common, the rarity of murder of entire families), and the truth of whether Mueller was the killer or even if these killings were related will probably never be known for certain. I had read of the Newton/Brookfield murder in the past, though I cannot pin down where and why I had first heard of it. I will say that the only other of these cases I have heard of before is the famous Hinterkaifeck case, a somewhat similar murder in Bavaria in 1922, which is tacked on somewhat offhandedly at the end as a possible extension. This seems a stretch to me, even though some sources say Mueller was a German. This quick analysis on my part makes me think that it is certainly possible that someone with more knowledge of any of the other killings could provide a thorough rebuttal to the book’s theory or analysis.

Beyond the obvious darkness of the subject matter, the story involves a cascade of tragedy and murder, as several white men were executed, and several black men were horrifically lynched, for murders that the Jameses believe were committed by their Mueller; these are contextualized as part of the tragedy as well. The book also has a lot to say about underfunded or nonexistent police departments in rural and small-town areas at this time, where investigatory work was farmed out to larger detective agencies. The book digresses for a while to talk about the ramifications of one of the more famous murders in the cycle, that in Villisca, Iowa, whereby a private detective operated as a con man and spent years ginning up outrage against a local political figure and "suspect," keeping himself well-funded in the process of pursuing "justice."

I think that the racial horror of the lynchings related to the alleged killer strikes more of an emotional chord than the murders themselves do, at least in my case. The lynchings are social atrocities, the serial murders are just dark occurrences, horror scenes. Many writers have written about American fascination with serial killers, and the cottage industry of media about them. Clearly, I am not immune to that, though I try to be critical of it when possible (and lurking in my future reading list is a book dedicated to that purpose). However, I usually eschew the modern and gravitate toward older crimes, often those unsolved; that's why I picked up this book. Serial killings are not political assassinations, concerning the lives of the powerful and well-documented. They affect the ordinary, or (even more commonly) those on the fringes of society, and both their victims and their perpetrators are prime candidates to disappear into the mists of lost or unrecorded history, to fall through the gaps in or be fossilized under the rubble of the historical record. The Man From the Train may be just a theory, and it may not have been presented in the way that I think it should have, but despite its manifest flaws I do sincerely appreciate the research that went into it.