When I bought the eBook edition of this book while I was traveling on business a few years ago, I thought there was something defective with the e-edition. I assumed that there must be some crazy formatting that just didn’t translate to the digital medium. So I dropped by a nearby B&N, found a copy of the book, and flipped through it. Nope, just words on the page. No crazy formatting.
So I went back to reading it and came across a passage where the author talks about what he was like as a kid. And then penny dropped:
He was that Bill James.
Once upon a time, when I was a young bookseller, every spring when the baseball books came in (it was early March-ish if you can call that “spring”), we’d set up a table for baseball fans. And right in the middle, in the biggest stacks of them all, were the Bill James Baseball Abstracts.* These were compendiums of statistics about players, etc. The kind of statistics that you find easily online now, that get quoted on ESPN, the kind that Kornacki quotes about politics. That level of detail. They came out annually. Bill James was the guy who put them together.
That tells you how his brain works.
James must have needed something else for his brain to do, once the role of compiling baseball statistics was replaced by computers. You can’t just turn a brain like that off.
And so he turned to crime.
Once I realized who had put the book together, I enjoyed it a lot more. Because, although he clearly got the best of his editor, he is thorough and detailed** in how he approaches his subject matter, has researched it extensively, and has opinions on everything from Miranda to Prison Reform, and isn’t afraid to use them.***
Popular Crime is a historical retrospective on crimes that captured the popular (mostly American) imagination – crimes like Jon Benet Ramsey and the OJ murder (though he refuses to cover OJ because it was so ridiculously over-covered).
He starts in Ancient Rome, then jumps forward to Elizabeth Canning, Elma Sands (18th century NY), and then creeps menacingly forward from there, ending finally with the death of Michael Jackson. Some stories he covers in great depth, pages and pages of detail; others he mentions in passing. Often he lists books and movies that have covered cases in detail, and compares them on artistic and accuracy merits. (I often pull reading lists from his book lists and it was James who finally got me to read The Stanger Beside Me, which was totally worth reading if you’ve been putting it off. I can’t vouch for her other books but, because this one has a personal connection, it’s something special.)
Sometimes he goes off on a complete tangent. The book is 555 e-pages long (24 chapters, that’s big even in paper pages). In chapter 6, he introduces a mathematical way to score murder allegations. In chapter 10, he introduces a method of categorizing crime stories based on the type (Celebrity/Tabloid vs. Innocent-Victim, etc.) and the scale of national attention they receive. In chapter 13, he places the descriptions that witnesses give police into 6 levels that he then uses to rate false arrests later.
Along the way, he goes down side paths about the eyes of serial killers, profiling, true crime writing, the cause of the ’70s/’80s surge in serial killers and a statistical system for identifying and apprehending them, a subway analysis of the Boston Strangler, his own theory on who killed Jon Benet – I can’t go into them all. You’ve got to read it for yourself.
I’ve read this book at least once a year since I’ve bought it and sometimes multiple times in a year. If I’m on a plane or in a hotel and have exhausted or become exhausted by the other books I have on my phone, I pull this one up. I can relax with this book. It’s like a reassuring friend.
A reassuring friend who whispers to you about murders and kidnappings.
Sometimes I wonder how many crimes we would know about if some true crime author hadn’t needed something to write about, and dug up a string of murders in a remote area of South Texas or backwater Washington that no one cares about except the people who live there and they’re too busy just surviving to spend any time on it. And then some writer for hire blows in and writes a mass market and suddenly a bunch of true crime readers are wondering who could be that killer…
I’m not going to lie: the first time you read this book, you’ve got to go into it with an open mind. James has a voice that most people don’t use in books – although you find it more on the internet – and you have to click into reading the way he writes. In Unwillingly to Earth, which is set in the future, a girl struggles to make it through all the required reading in school: they used a machine that forced osmosis (the idea that you put a book under your pillow and absorb the content while you sleep) and it turns out she was using the machine wrong. The first time she used it right, she thought she had gone crazy because ideas just flew into her head. That was how I felt reading Bill James: I couldn’t make my brain process it until I realized who I was reading, and then something clicked and it became crazy-easy to read.
His next book, The Man on the Train, was written with his daughter and, while it’s still clearly his voice, I can almost hearing her say, “Oh Dad!” as she tames his writing style and makes it easier for newbies to read.****
Oh shoot. Now I just want to spend the day reading this book again. I’m never gonna get anything accomplished if I keep this up. Last week, I downloaded samples of 15 books to my Nook app. And I’m re-reading a bunch of things I reviewed earlier this year. I’m running out of time to watch TV and doomscroll. Dang.
By the way, I just noticed James dedicated Popular Crime to his mother-in-law. This guy is one in a million.*****
*Going to continue this in the footnote because otherwise, we’ll never get to talking about this book. These “abstracts” were giant mass markets – the trim size and thickness of a hefty cookbook – printed on throwaway grey paper because next year, a new addition would come out with updated statistics. I say they were mass market but we never actually had to strip any because, no matter how many they sent us, they sold out and we never had any left over to strip. This was an era where boys did math without realizing it – sports guys learned sports statistics, music guys could quote chart placement and album sales, and D&D guys could crunch the stats from a handful of dice with way too many sides in a split second. I don’t know, do these boys exist anymore? There’s so much written about the plight of boys these days and their failure to thrive, and their drop out and unemployment rate, and what’s causing it and maybe it’s Title 9 or the struggles of single mothers or the lack of male elementary school teachers, or the failure to maintain a good Christian home, or wokeness or whatever ad nauseum (literally, some of these theories make me nauseous). But I say, maybe it’s the proliferation of online data that prevents boys from memorizing stats and geeking out over math with their friends without realizing it. Someone should do a study on that, David Brooks.
**Just not organized. I would not categorize his writing as organized. Thorough, yes. Entertaining, yes, very much. Thought-provoking, completely. But not organized the way most of us would define organized, although I suspect it is organized according to how James’ mind works.
***And some of them even make sense.
****My post from February 9, 2018 discusses this book.
*****Now there’s a statistic for you.
Change+Management 