06-05-2011, 07:45 PM
i'm going to have to order this to add to my pile of unread books! hahaha i'll get to them sometime!
this is a well-known case, and Ruth Snyder was electrocuted. there is a famous pic that was taken of her in the chair (secretly)...i'll go find it.
NYTIMES book review
Before it became one of the most familiar premises for hard-boiled fiction and film noir, the tale of the wife who coaxed her lover into getting rid of her annoying husband and cashing in on his life insurance was an actual news event. As he writes in an essay called “Whence Novels Come” (posted on the Web site of Santa Clara University, where he teaches) Ron Hansen found this out only accidentally. But he has made it the basis for “A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion,” a novel that separates the mawkish tabloid murder case from its later, tougher incarnations.
A WILD SURGE OF GUILTY PASSION
By Ron Hansen
256 pages. Scribner. $25.
While teaching a seminar on film noir and its literary roots, Mr. Hansen researched James M. Cain’s novels “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “Double Indemnity.” He found out that both were based on the case of a treacherous wife, Ruth Snyder, and a hapless corset salesman, Judd Gray. Ruth and Judd, as Mr. Hansen calls them, were both married when they began a torrid affair in 1925. “I knew you’d be a good kisser,” Mr. Hansen has Ruth say coyly. “You’re so gorgeous, Ruth,” Judd replies. “I hadn’t the daring to even dream — ” Then Ruth talks Judd into eliminating her husband, Albert Snyder, a k a “the Governor” and “the Old Crab,” from the equation.
When brought to trial for her husband’s murder, Ruth insisted that she had not instigated the crime, and that she had even tried to stop it. She claimed to have said, “Judd, you’ll do no such thing!” Upon being convicted and sentenced to death, she told the press: “This is just a formality. I have just as good a chance now of going free as I had before the trial started.” She was the rare liar who actually wound up with her hair on fire when she was electrocuted at Sing Sing in 1928.
Mr. Hansen, who has written about biographical characters like the James Gang (“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” in 1983) and Gerard Manley Hopkins (“Exiles” in 2008), had a lot of newspaper reporting and courtroom transcripts on which to base his book. He also made liberal use of “Doomed Ship,” Judd’s florid 1928 memoir, written in a style that’s a long way from James M. Cain’s. (Judd on his first encounter with Ruth: “I realized that a frank, sincere character lurked behind that radiant and healthy loveliness.”)
Still, there were many blanks for Mr. Hansen to fill in. One of the best things about “A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion” is its liberation from noir clichés; another is its seamless execution. The fiction works so well that the factual material is hard to find.
Mr. Hansen begins at the crime scene, with 9-year-old Lorraine Snyder finding her mother in the hallway outside her parents’ bedroom door. Ruth’s ankles and wrists have been tied with a clothesline. And she wants them to stay that way. “Don’t untie me yet,” she instructs. Instead, she tells Lorraine to go get witnesses from across the street.
Next, Ruth feigns surprise at the overkill inflicted on her husband. He was both bludgeoned and strangled with picture wire. Perhaps Mr. Hansen improvised when he had Ruth exclaim, “Oh no! Albert! Darling!” Whether it draws upon trial testimony or the author’s imagination, the book memorably points out that Lorraine had never heard her disagreeable father called “darling” before.
Mr. Hansen then backtracks to the story of Ruth and Judd’s romance, with enthusiastic emphasis on how the dapper Judd earned the nickname Loverboy. “He lifted Ruth to her feet so his clotheshorse hands could deftly undo and tease off a hushed waterfall of jeweled white evening gown,” Mr. Hansen writes, doing his most obvious embroidery when writing in torrid mode. He seems to hew closer to fact when he illustrates how Ruth, in her sympathy-mongering letters to Judd, could misspell neglect (“neglec”), cruelty (“cruellty”), unburden (“unburdun”), desperate (“desparate”) and destructive (“distructive”). She sweet-talked him into doing her bidding anyhow.
There are some cold, hard facts that this part of the book has to establish too: how Judd and Ruth had assignations at the Waldorf-Astoria (and at least once left Lorraine to wait in the lobby, which was the kind of thing witnesses would remember later); how they got to talking about Albert’s meager life insurance; how the double-indemnity insurance scheme was born. As soon as Albert became heavily insured, accidents started to happen. Mr. Hansen turns to black comedy as Albert gets trapped under a car and in a tree, and Ruth leaves the gas on in their house until she realizes this might kill the canary. She also experiments with poisoned prune whip, a toxic version of Albert’s favorite dessert.
The book then moves on to the actual crime. It was executed so clumsily that Damon Runyon, one of many writers who would cover the trial, nicknamed it the “Dumb-Bell Murder.” Here Mr. Hansen does some stumbling of his own: He provides not only a step-by-step account of the murder but also a second version as it played out in a courtroom. While those scenes have drama, the book loses momentum by rehashing details that have already been amply described.
When Mr. Hanson quotes a phrenologist who evaluated Judd, deeming him “a voluptuary, greedily drawing honey from the deep-throated calyx of illicit joy,” it’s easy to see how the language of the era was enticing to Mr. Hansen in its own right. The title “A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion” comes from an editorial in The New York Daily Mirror written by Cornelius Vanderbilt III, and it too is powerfully evocative of the overstatement that this murder case provoked. Mr. Hansen finds intriguing dissonance in the way such overwrought language is so far from lean, mean noir-speak yet can be used to tell a story that’s so noir at heart.
“There’s nothing worse than a full day of drinking, then waking up next to some guy and not being able to remember how you met,” Mr. Hansen’s Ruth complains, in a voice that would work in a steamy crime story of any era. “Or why he’s dead.”
this is a well-known case, and Ruth Snyder was electrocuted. there is a famous pic that was taken of her in the chair (secretly)...i'll go find it.
NYTIMES book review
Before it became one of the most familiar premises for hard-boiled fiction and film noir, the tale of the wife who coaxed her lover into getting rid of her annoying husband and cashing in on his life insurance was an actual news event. As he writes in an essay called “Whence Novels Come” (posted on the Web site of Santa Clara University, where he teaches) Ron Hansen found this out only accidentally. But he has made it the basis for “A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion,” a novel that separates the mawkish tabloid murder case from its later, tougher incarnations.
A WILD SURGE OF GUILTY PASSION
By Ron Hansen
256 pages. Scribner. $25.
While teaching a seminar on film noir and its literary roots, Mr. Hansen researched James M. Cain’s novels “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “Double Indemnity.” He found out that both were based on the case of a treacherous wife, Ruth Snyder, and a hapless corset salesman, Judd Gray. Ruth and Judd, as Mr. Hansen calls them, were both married when they began a torrid affair in 1925. “I knew you’d be a good kisser,” Mr. Hansen has Ruth say coyly. “You’re so gorgeous, Ruth,” Judd replies. “I hadn’t the daring to even dream — ” Then Ruth talks Judd into eliminating her husband, Albert Snyder, a k a “the Governor” and “the Old Crab,” from the equation.
When brought to trial for her husband’s murder, Ruth insisted that she had not instigated the crime, and that she had even tried to stop it. She claimed to have said, “Judd, you’ll do no such thing!” Upon being convicted and sentenced to death, she told the press: “This is just a formality. I have just as good a chance now of going free as I had before the trial started.” She was the rare liar who actually wound up with her hair on fire when she was electrocuted at Sing Sing in 1928.
Mr. Hansen, who has written about biographical characters like the James Gang (“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” in 1983) and Gerard Manley Hopkins (“Exiles” in 2008), had a lot of newspaper reporting and courtroom transcripts on which to base his book. He also made liberal use of “Doomed Ship,” Judd’s florid 1928 memoir, written in a style that’s a long way from James M. Cain’s. (Judd on his first encounter with Ruth: “I realized that a frank, sincere character lurked behind that radiant and healthy loveliness.”)
Still, there were many blanks for Mr. Hansen to fill in. One of the best things about “A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion” is its liberation from noir clichés; another is its seamless execution. The fiction works so well that the factual material is hard to find.
Mr. Hansen begins at the crime scene, with 9-year-old Lorraine Snyder finding her mother in the hallway outside her parents’ bedroom door. Ruth’s ankles and wrists have been tied with a clothesline. And she wants them to stay that way. “Don’t untie me yet,” she instructs. Instead, she tells Lorraine to go get witnesses from across the street.
Next, Ruth feigns surprise at the overkill inflicted on her husband. He was both bludgeoned and strangled with picture wire. Perhaps Mr. Hansen improvised when he had Ruth exclaim, “Oh no! Albert! Darling!” Whether it draws upon trial testimony or the author’s imagination, the book memorably points out that Lorraine had never heard her disagreeable father called “darling” before.
Mr. Hansen then backtracks to the story of Ruth and Judd’s romance, with enthusiastic emphasis on how the dapper Judd earned the nickname Loverboy. “He lifted Ruth to her feet so his clotheshorse hands could deftly undo and tease off a hushed waterfall of jeweled white evening gown,” Mr. Hansen writes, doing his most obvious embroidery when writing in torrid mode. He seems to hew closer to fact when he illustrates how Ruth, in her sympathy-mongering letters to Judd, could misspell neglect (“neglec”), cruelty (“cruellty”), unburden (“unburdun”), desperate (“desparate”) and destructive (“distructive”). She sweet-talked him into doing her bidding anyhow.
There are some cold, hard facts that this part of the book has to establish too: how Judd and Ruth had assignations at the Waldorf-Astoria (and at least once left Lorraine to wait in the lobby, which was the kind of thing witnesses would remember later); how they got to talking about Albert’s meager life insurance; how the double-indemnity insurance scheme was born. As soon as Albert became heavily insured, accidents started to happen. Mr. Hansen turns to black comedy as Albert gets trapped under a car and in a tree, and Ruth leaves the gas on in their house until she realizes this might kill the canary. She also experiments with poisoned prune whip, a toxic version of Albert’s favorite dessert.
The book then moves on to the actual crime. It was executed so clumsily that Damon Runyon, one of many writers who would cover the trial, nicknamed it the “Dumb-Bell Murder.” Here Mr. Hansen does some stumbling of his own: He provides not only a step-by-step account of the murder but also a second version as it played out in a courtroom. While those scenes have drama, the book loses momentum by rehashing details that have already been amply described.
When Mr. Hanson quotes a phrenologist who evaluated Judd, deeming him “a voluptuary, greedily drawing honey from the deep-throated calyx of illicit joy,” it’s easy to see how the language of the era was enticing to Mr. Hansen in its own right. The title “A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion” comes from an editorial in The New York Daily Mirror written by Cornelius Vanderbilt III, and it too is powerfully evocative of the overstatement that this murder case provoked. Mr. Hansen finds intriguing dissonance in the way such overwrought language is so far from lean, mean noir-speak yet can be used to tell a story that’s so noir at heart.
“There’s nothing worse than a full day of drinking, then waking up next to some guy and not being able to remember how you met,” Mr. Hansen’s Ruth complains, in a voice that would work in a steamy crime story of any era. “Or why he’s dead.”