POPULAR CRIME: REFLECTIONS ON THE CELEBRATION OF VIOLENCE - BILL JAMES

I finished this book the same day I finished the McKenna one and they both would have been better served as podcasts. This book rambles like crazy. It’s loosely structured around the largest crimes of the 20th century, in order. Each crime includes a short description and often short reviews of the different books on a given crime. James has read a lot of crime books so for each incident, he’s read maybe 3-5 books. He gives them short reviews (typically negative, for as many crime books as he’s read, he doesn’t seem to like the vast majority of them) and ranks them. My god does he love ranking and listing. This should be unsurprising given that James is famous for inventing Sabermetrics, a way to turn baseball into math. He attempts the same trick with crime, He comes up with an elaborate, 100-point system to ascertain the likelihood that a suspect is guilty. He outlines a way to place descriptions into different “levels” depending on their believability and specificity. He eventually outlines a grand system for categorizing popular crime that is built around 18 elements. For instance, the JonBent case is a IQBX 9 (innocent-victim, mystery, bizarre and sexual elements, 9 in terms of notoriety). While this all seems very wonky and “stats nerdy,” it was written by the ur stats-nerd, the objective or dispassionate patina that such numbers crunching is suppose to signify is totally undercut by how strangely personal all this is. He doesn’t decide which crimes to cover in any sort of systematic or consistent way beyond these are the 60 or so crimes he’s most interested in. He glosses over major 20th century crimes like Leopold and Leob or the Atlanta child killings. There’s also some very weird stuff, like a full throated defense of Mark Fuhrman (it comes as no surprise from a while male baby boomer, that this book about crime has little to say about race) or constant reference to the deserved failure of the 60s. There’s more interesting tangents like his JFK theory (a Secret Service agent killed him by mistake), or a long section about reforming prisons to a system where we have thousands of tiny 20-40 person prisons, all ranked and classified in a complicated system, of course (I like this idea.  But while all these weird tangents and sidetracks are scattershot and frustrating in the book (you want some to be longer and others shorter) they would be well served as podcasts where he could just take a crime a show and dive into it and share his theories and book reviews. That long formless ramble part that is before the “show” part of most podcasts could be where he tells us what a great guy Mark Fuhrman is or how claims that Micheal Jackson was not only not the World’s Most Famous Person but at no point in his life was he ever in the top 100  most  famous people(I swear to god James writes this. He posits this as part of trying to prove how out of touch the “Los Angeles Media” is with “real america” and ends up seeming like an alien). Either way, I was interested throughout. Get a crime podcast Bill. 6 bodies.