Customer Reviews

A Cold Case

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Gourevitch's earlier book was such a fine piece of writing and journalism that I had high expectations for this one when I spotted it at a bookstore a couple of days ago. It should be noted, especially for those shopping on Amazon, that it is a very slim volume. That they were able to squeeze nearly 200 pages out of the original manuscript says more about the printers, triple spacing and wide fonts that it does about the author's legwork. I was able to finish it in slightly less than two hours, which makes it an expensive read for the time it takes up. It is perhaps no coincidence that the story itself seems better suited to a Reader's Digest than a full length book treatment (but then again this is hardly a full length book).

Gourevitch seems motivated to write a sort of hard boiled story about a kid on the wrong side of the law and the dedicated cop who brings him to justice. He keeps his sentences very short, and his descriptions are limited to characters who look like Bogart and bad guys with ruddy complexions and New York dialects. Perhaps he was aiming for a sort of genre story, but the format limits him considerably. The cop's story is hagiographic and the murderer's tale is told with a sympathy that Gourevitch feels compelled to deny. The capture is embarassingly easy (and points out rather awkwardly that police incompetence might be more responsible for the murderer's time on the lam than his genius) and the subsequent denouement couched in cliches rather than insight. (I cringed at the portrayal of the money grubbing Jewish lawyer who, apparently, performed most of his work in this case for free).

This is not to say that the book is racist, but hackneyed and while the story can hold your interest, it stays disappointingly close the surface. If you are a fan of the true crime genre, then this might make a quick and interesting read, but certainly Gourevitch is capable of something much deeper and challenging than this.

I expected much more from this book. OK, Frank Koehler shoots two people and then flees to California (escapes isn't really the word--he just kind of walks off). Andy Roesenweig decides to catch him and after only several pages of looking for him, half way through this book, they find him. Well, so what? There's no real drama, no spectacular moment. The only part of the book that I felt was really intriuging was Frank's perspective on himself. Unfortunately, this was only a few pages long and while his own perspective is certainly a good start in exploring a criminal mind, I felt readers might benefit more from different views--perhaps from psychologists or criminal profilers or other relatives who knew him. I mean, if there's no action to speak of, why else would you read this? I felt the book didn't really go into ANY aspect of the case in any detail. Very disappointing!

Very little new information is conveyed in this story beyond the original article in the New Yorker magazine. Could have been expanded to include additional information, perhaps more interviews with the deceased' families, pictures of the deceased when alive. It would be interesting to hear more about the detective Rosenzwieg's interest in these characters whom he seems fascinated with. Rosenzweig himself is an interesting character. Perhaps he could be tempted to write his own stories about crime and other unsolved cases.

When I read Gourevitch's original article in The New Yorker on which the book is based, I was intrigued. It was in interesting story, well told. But the book seems padded and is occasionally boring (I skipped bits which I almost never do on principle). Worse, it doesn't seem that difficult or profound a case, and you start to question the original story. Really, not a lot happens, though there is a little insight into detection methods and the hoodlum milieu. Gourevitch is a good writer and journalist, but this shouldn't have been a book.

This book does not have near the impact of Philip Gourevitch's first book, which concerned the Rwanda massacres. The story, about a righteous cop's attempt to bring closure to an old murder case, follows relatively predictable lines. But Gourevitch brings these real people to life, with simple language and telling anecdotes.

This is about a small time hood, Frank G. Koehler, who got mad at a couple of guys and shot them both to death in cold blood while wounding a third party. That was in 1970. He escaped and was never brought to justice. Eventually the case was closed because somebody (Gourevitch doesn't tell us who) was of the "opinion" that Koehler had to be dead since (according to others) it was "virtually inconceivable that a man with such a violent disposition and criminal history could have remained alive and out of trouble" for so long. (p. 26) Then in 1997, 27 years after the crime, Andy Rosenzweig, chief investigator for Manhattan's district attorney, reopened the case.

But this really isn't about Rosenzweig's pursuit of Koehler. There wasn't much of a pursuit. They found him living in Benicia, California and picked him up when he arrived at Penn Station in New York on July 30, 1997, "a pathetic old man" 67-years-old. A photo taken that day makes him look like a rummy with a bad dye job.

So what's this book about, and why is it considered so good that Scott Turow and Elmore Leonard, among others, have touted it? Quite simply this is a textbook example of how to write a modest crime story with an underlying emphasis on our criminal justice system, how it works, and how it fails. Besides the two chief characters in the book, Koehler and Rosenzweig, there is a revealing portrait of defense attorney, "Don't Worry Murray" Murray Richman, a man who's made a nice living defending some of New York City's sleazier crooks. The aptly named Richman believes that there's a difference between the authorities and gangsters: "the gangsters are more compassionate." (p. 128) He adds (p. 132): "If I defended only innocent people, I'd go hungry." He says he believes in the system (which is one of the reasons he defends the accused), but his bottom line philosophy is "The truth is there is no truth." (p. 132).

There's a certain nostalgic gangster color to the characters in this book. Koehler is a particularly good study, a guy who first killed when he was fifteen years old, but a guy who somehow while on the lam for twenty-seven years, managed to become so beloved that he was thought of by some of the people in Benicia, California as "their unofficial mayor" and they supported him with t-shirts reading "free New York Frankie." (p. 161)

Rosenzweig is the hero, a guy who never gives up, an honest cop who works methodically, dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's until he gets his man, a born bloodhound, and the kind of guy we ought to have more of in law enforcement.

Much of this true crime story first appeared in The New Yorker where Gourevitch's crisp, clean prose was much ballyhooed. This book expands on what I read there. It's a attractive book and a quick read.

This true crime story is a quick and breezy recounting of a New York murder case that took twenty-seven years to resolve. It weighs in at less than seven pages per year, though it does not pretend to be a thorough or chronological unraveling of this off-again-on-again investigation. There is no attempt to get inside the killer's brain. The killer, Frankie Koehler, was in fact known from the outset. And when all is said and done, this cold blooded killer from Hell's Kitchen comes across as the stable fulcrum between the plodding obsessiveness of the soon-to-retire detective Andy Rosenzweig and the killer's cynically manic defense attorney, "Don't Worry Murray" Richman. The disparity between these two men's personalities is surreal. If there was a story in how the detective and the lawyer interacted, Gourevitch doesn't tell it. The author gives his readers glimpses of the lives of many of the key players and victims, but does not provide us with any of the texture and depth of portraiture that a truly gifted storyteller might. If John Berendt (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) is Rubens, Gourevitch is a cartoonist or quick sketch artist. He expects each gesture to speak volumes; few do. Where his brevity and superficiality pay off is in the creation of a sense of how given to chance and circumstance anyone's life is. However, to call this book an existential look at a criminal act would be more than generous. Even so, it makes you wonder how many crimes go unresolved due to lethargy, human indifference, and careerism that favors closing a case over admitting the inability to resolve it. Worth a read if you like the true crime genre and have an hour to kill.

Philip Gourevitch captured my attention from the very beginning in this tightly wrapped true story on the nature of crime. It was nothing like I expected it to be and yet it was more than I had hoped for. Gourevitch should have a great future ahead of him as a novelist. He seems to have a knack for only sharing the necessary elements of a story--tight, terse, and brillant prose. Great research that makes me wish he would do a follow-up on what finally happens to Frankie Koehler and Rosenzweig. Try it, you won't be disappointed; only wishing it could have lasted longer.....

I don't like to leave things hanging and I thought it might make it a little less hard to retire if I got this thing settled. -Andy Rosenzweig, A Cold Case In this short but surprisingly affecting book, Philip Gourevitch examines just one "cold case", a twenty seven year old double murder that has bothered Andy Rosenzweig since it occurred. In 1970, after an argument in a bar, Frank Koehler met the two men he'd been in the earlier confrontation with and left them, Richie Glennon and Pete McGinn, dead on the floor of McGinn's apartment. Koehler then disappeared. Rosenzweig was just a patrolman then, but Glennon had attended his wedding, so the failure of police to ever capture Koehler was galling. In 1997, with his retirement just around the corner, Rosenzweig was on his way to the doctor's office and passed by the restaurant where the original argument had occurred, recalling, for the first time in a while, that Koehler had still never been brought in, Rosenzweig, by now the chief investigator for the Manhattan District Attorney, determined to finally close this case in his waning days on the job. This is an unusual kind of crime story. There's no mystery : we know who the culprit is in the first few pages. All the violence and most of the action takes place early on too. There's a little bit of courtroom drama, but it's mostly kept off stage. Instead, the book is mostly a profile of a few fascinating characters. Rosenzweig dominates the book's first half, a nearly perfect cop--honest, hardworking, and dedicated to the ideal of justice. It is his personal obsession with seeing that Koehler pays for the murder of Glennon that drives the story. He's kind of the positive version of Javert in Les Miserables. In the second half, with Koehler at last arrested and facing trial, it is the criminal who dominates. Frank Koehler, who had already done time for a murder he committed as a teenager, comes across as a cold-blooded killer, who, even now, in his 70s, contemplated shooting it out with the officers who came to arrest him in Penn Station or, before that, killing a cop a day until they agreed to stop pursuing him. In what Gourevitch says law enforcement officials consider a textbook depiction of the criminal mind, Koehler gives a videotaped confession in which he expresses no contrition about the original crime and seems to think he deserves credit for the killings he contemplated but didn't commit. But then, once he's imprisoned, Koehler shows a surprisingly spiritual side to his nature. Though Gourevitch, thankfully, never lets him off the hook for his violent past, he does show Koehler to be a more complex man than we might wish to believe. One particular facet of his personality that should give us all pause is that he appears to have modeled his behavior on that of characters in old gangster movies, like James Cagney. It makes you wonder what kids who learn their values from today's pop culture will be like. This latter part of the book introduces another interesting character, defense attorney Murray Richman. Amusingly free of any scruples about the work he does, representing admitted criminals, Richman provides some comic relief to the story and serves as kind of a moral bridge between the two main characters, straddling the line between the Law and the bad guys. Much of this first appeared in The New Yorker, for which Gourevitch is a staff writer, and it has the feel of a stretched out magazine piece, even if a superior one. I wouldn't have minded hearing more about all three of these men, but I suppose it's better to leave us wanting more than overstuffed. GRADE : A-

Given that Gourevitch uses but a few pages to detail the investigation and eventual arrest of Koehler, the reader would expect that the true substance of the novel resides in the remaining pages. Not the case. Rather, the rest of the book is a conglomeration of unanswered questions (Does Rosenzweig regret having reopened the case?) and random scenes (witness the unnecessary cast of characters parading through Richman's office). Unfortunately, Gourevitch appears merely to have stretched a predictable crime story into a novel sufficiently lengthy for publication.