Karen Halttunen is Professor of History at the University of California at Davis.
Review
The invention of [true-crime] detective stories is often ascribed to Edgar Allan Poe, particularly in The Murders
in the Rue Morgue, published in 1841. In Murder Most Foul, Karen Halttunen demonstrates that a longer view is required.
Her book is a spirited and lively account, generously sprinkled with compelling anecdotes of grisly yet intriguing
murders, murder sites and executions, accompanied by explicit contemporary illustrations. Beginning in the seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries, she traces how accounts of murders changed from being seen as evidence of sin and
evil to a more imaginatively complex perception of the murderer as a monster of Gothic terror...[Her] argument
has a wide and expansive force.
--Markman Ellis, Times Literary Supplement [UK]
[Murder Most Foul] analyzes three centuries of American murder narratives, from execution sermons delivered in
colonial America to the recent movies Seven and Dead Man Walking. Halttunen makes a convincing argument that how
we view murder depends very much on how we view murderers--and ourselves...This is a thorough, scholarly, well-written
work, intelligently argued and full of juicy examples of over-the-top Victorian journalism, on which Halttunen
draws for her accounts of certain notorious murders and for contemporaneous reaction to the crimes. Halttunen amply
demonstrates that current American culture's avid interest in murder has important cultural and spiritual antecedents.
Weaving examples and analysis together into a very readable whole, Halttunen manages neither to condemn nor to
condone the various moralities she writes about, leaving readers free to make up their own minds about the usefulness
of a murder-saturated popular imagination--a valuable achievement indeed.
--Ellen McGarrahan, San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
This is a bold and imaginative study of what the jacket describes as a 'treasure trove of creepy popular crime
literature.' Halttunen's book is based on her close study of brochures, pamphlets, and narrative accounts of murders
and murder trials in the United States, from the colonial period roughly to the middle of the 19th century...As
you can imagine, this book is fun to read; and it is genuinely enlightening. It is, in many ways, cultural history
at its best. Halttunen is a brilliant reader of texts...[and her] imagination, her interpretive skills, are enormously
fruitful...[Murder Most Foul] is excellent and enlightening (like all of Halttunen's work); and my basic complaint
is that I wanted more. In any event, I recommend it highly to everyone interested in the history of law, crime,
and the American soul.
--Lawrence M. Friedman, Law and Politics Book Review
[This is an] absorbing piece of cultural history and analysis...By tracing changes in American literary representations
of the killer, Haltunnen chronicles a change in the way we, as a culture, come to terms with violent death. In
doing so, she maps the evolution of the moral and religious beliefs of our society. Meticulously researched and
compellingly argued, this book represents a solid addition to any American literature collection.
--Mike Benediktsson, Library Journal
An involving account of the shifting social constructions and understandings of murder in pre-20th century America.
Drawing on a wealth of sources, including confessions, trial accounts, and court documents, historian Halttunen
traces how the burgeoning romantic movement--and particularly its most extreme manifestation, the gothic--utterly
transformed the Puritan conception of crime and punishment. She holds that the Puritan belief in predestination
meant that 'the early American murderer was regarded as a moral representative of all sinful humanity, and was
granted an important spiritual role'...With the arrival of the gothic/romantic, Halttunen convincingly argues,
murder came to be seen as a monstrous aberration, something outside the pale of ordinary humanity...[Murder Most
Foul] is formidably researched and well argued.
--Kirkus Reviews
By focusing on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American crime literature, Halttunen explores how the popular
view of murder underwent a major transformation during the period, in particular the changing attitudes toward
the meaning of human evil in an increasingly secular society. The predominant response to radical evil was shaped
by Gothic conventions of horror and inhumanity, a legacy that, Halttunen persuasively argues, still informs out
response to killers and their crimes today.
--Nineteenth-Century Literature
Harvard University Press Web Site, February, 2002
Summary
Confronting murder in the newspaper, on screen, and in sensational trials, we often feel the killer is fundamentally
incomprehensible and morally alien. But this was not always the popular response to murder. In Murder Most Foul,
Karen Halttunen explores the changing view of murder from early New England sermons read at the public execution
of murderers, through the nineteenth century, when secular and sensational accounts replaced the sacred treatment
of the crime, to today's true crime literature and tabloid reports.
The early narratives were shaped by a strong belief in original sin and spiritual redemption, by the idea that
all murders were natural manifestations of the innate depravity of humankind. In a dramatic departure from that
view, the Gothic imagination--with its central conventions of the fundamental horror and mystery of the crime--seized
upon the murderer as a moral monster, separated from the normal majority by an impassable gulf. Halttunen shows
how this perception helped shape the modern response to criminal transgression, mandating criminal incarceration,
and informing a social-scientific model of criminal deviance.
The Gothic expression of horror and inhumanity is the predominant response to radical evil today; it has provided
a set of conventions surrounding tales of murder that appear to be natural and instinctive, when in fact they are
rooted in the nineteenth century. Halttunen's penetrating insight into her extraordinary treasure trove of creepy
popular crime literature reveals how our stories have failed to make sense of the killer and how that failure has
constrained our understanding and treatment of criminality today.
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Murderer as Common Sinner
The Birth of Horror
The Pornography of Violence
The Construction of Murder as Mystery
Murder in the Family Circle
Murdering Medusa
The Murderer as Mental Alien
Epilogue
Notes
Index