Book Notes: Scoundrel by Sarah Weinman

Yes, this is the follow-up to the refined sensibilities post. And it’s about a true-crime book.

The problem with the true crime genre is that criminals are not interesting people. Authors have to concentrate on the investigation, the trial, or the impact on the victims because there isn’t much to write about otherwise.

Sarah Weinman didn’t have that problem, though, as she sat down to write a book about Edgar Smith.

Smith was a trailer park deadbeat in New Jersey who stupidly murdered a young girl for no discernible reason, immediately got arrested, and was promptly sent to Death Row. So far so boring.

But then it started to get interesting. On Death Row, Smith somehow learned to write like a person of refined sensibilities. Mind you, he didn’t learn to speak or to live like one, only to write. So he wrote.

As a result, he managed to attract the attention of William F. Buckley, a leading conservative intellectual. Think what you will of his political beliefs, it is undeniable that Buckley was an intellectual of the highest caliber. Being a conservative, he didn’t hold criminals in high regard, to put it mildly. Imagine the power of Smith’s writing to strike a close friendship that spanned well over a decade with somebody like that.

And it wasn’t only Buckley. From his jail cell, Smith wrote thousands of letters to some extremely sophisticated people, making them downright besotted with him and, what’s really shocking, seeing him as one of them. They didn’t feel sorry for him. They felt intellectual affinity. Smith began to write books and became a best-selling author while sitting on Death Row.

The intellectuals who befriended (and in one fascinating case, fell in love with) Smith couldn’t conceive that such a cultured, sensitive, deep man could have really been guilty of some sordid, senseless murder. Or even if he were, then surely, the 15 years after his conviction had clearly reformed him, right?

So every effort was made to help Smith go free. And he did. His sentence was commuted to time served and he was released.

Unfortunately, as I said before, he could write like a sophisticated person but not live like one. Soon enough, Smith stopped writing, dropped his intellectual friends, including Buckley, and reverted to his persona of an indigent, shady bum.

And then he tried to murder somebody else.

I’m not giving any spoilers here because all this is mentioned in the first two pages of the book. It’s how he made himself attractive to so many people and managed to be in writing what he couldn’t be in person that the book explores.

I have to warn you that if you decide to read Scoundrel, please be prepared for the obligatory woke pledge in the opening paragraphs. Weinman swears fealty to the cause of “Black and Brown boys” who make absolutely no appearance in the rest of the book but have to be invoked like jealous deities whenever one speaks on any subject whatsoever these days. Once you get past that, the book becomes really good. Every subchapter ends on a cool cliffhanger that makes you want to keep reading.

Smith’s literary gift abandoned him as suddenly as it had come. As I keep saying, we can’t know why the gift gets bestowed on people or taken away. Scoundrel gives us a glimpse into this mystery and is worth reading for that reason alone.