{"id":1663,"date":"2017-04-09T09:01:43","date_gmt":"2017-04-09T09:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hamiltonbookreviews.com\/reviews\/?p=1663"},"modified":"2017-04-30T09:07:06","modified_gmt":"2017-04-30T09:07:06","slug":"calvin-trillins-killings-returns-to-print-with-new-stories-of-murder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonbookreviews.com\/reviews\/calvin-trillins-killings-returns-to-print-with-new-stories-of-murder\/","title":{"rendered":"Calvin Trillin\u2019s \u2018Killings\u2019 returns to print \u2014 with new stories of murder"},"content":{"rendered":"

The author, a longtime writer for The New Yorker, spent years traveling the country and chronicling American life, sometimes uncovering riveting tales of murder and mayhem.


\n\u201cKillings\u201d

by Calvin Trillin

Random House, 293 pp., $26


\nMurder is as American as apple pie and motherhood. In 2015, according to the FBI, there were more than 15,000 murders in the United States. Calvin Trillin would not be surprised.

Trillin, a longtime writer for The New Yorker magazine, traveled the U.S. for 15 years, producing a series of articles called \u201cU.S. Journal.\u201d The 3,000-word articles were published every three weeks. As he dryly notes, \u201cMagazine writers asked, \u2018How do you keep up that pace?\u201d Newspaper reporters asked, \u201cWhat else do you do?\u201d

Some of those pieces are collected in \u201cKillings.\u201d It\u2019s not intended as a study of killings. Instead, it\u2019s \u201cmeant to be more about how Americans live than about how some of them die.\u201d

Trillin writes with ironic detachment: \u201cReporters love murders. In a pinch, what the lawyers call \u2018wrongful death\u2019 will do, particularly if it\u2019s sudden. Even a fatal accident for which no one is to blame has some appeal.\u201d

First published in 1984, the book was out of print for years, forcing true Trillin aficionados to scour used-book stores in search of the volume. The newly released edition contains half a dozen additional pieces written since the original publication.
The stories, each riveting in its own way, are like passing a particularly gruesome car wreck. You know you shouldn\u2019t slow down to look, but you just can\u2019t help it.

\u201cRight-of-Way\u201d (new to this edition) tells the story of a property dispute between two strong-willed but very different women who move to Rappahannock County in the bucolic Virginia countryside. Rather than peace, they find each other. And death soon follows.

\u201cI\u2019ve Got Problems\u201d (also new) tells the tragic story of a standoff in Cairo, Nebraska, between Arthur Kirk and the Nebraska State Patrol SWAT team. The heavily armed Kirk, holed up in his home and surrounded by SWAT team members bristling with firearms, hung up on negotiators, explaining with perhaps unintended understatement, \u201cI\u2019ve got problems!\u201d \u201cThe Mystery of Walter Bopp\u201d recounts the disappearance of a health-store proprietor in Tucson, Arizona, who, on close inspection, had a deeper backstory than anyone might have imagined.
But the best in this collection is the last essay, a classic by any measure. \u201cCovering the Cops,\u201d first published in 1986, is about Edna Buchanan, an iconic Miami Herald crime reporter and now a murder-mystery writer. As Trillin notes, there were police officers in Miami who said it wouldn\u2019t be a homicide without her.

Her leads, always pithy, are direct and to the point. Writing about a woman set to go to trial for a murder conspiracy, Buchanan wrote, \u201cBad things happen to the husbands of Widow Elkin.\u201d
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