Internal Combustion: The Story of a Marriage and a Murder in the Motor City [Hardcover]

Joyce Maynard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 22, 2006

On Mother's Day night, 2004, award-winning fourth grade teacher Nancy Seaman left the Tudor home she shared with her husband of thirty two years in the gated community of Farmington Hills, near Detroit, Michigan, and drove in a driving rain storm to Home Depot, to purchase a hatchet.

Three days later, police discovered the mutilated body of Bob Seaman - a successful auto industry engineer, softball coach and passionate collector of vintage Mustangs - in the back of the family's Ford Explorer. As the shackles were placed on her wrists, Nancy Seaman asserted that her husband had been beating her, and she'd killed him in self-defense.

At her trial, two radically different stories emerged. One of the couple's sons, Greg, testified that his father had been abusing his mother for years. The other, Jeff, testified for the prosecution, charging his mother as a cold blooded killer.

Joyce Maynard's chilling work delves beyond the events of the crime itself, to explore the lives of an American family who seemed to have everything. Her exploration of the story led to a year's research in suburban Detroit - but the story she found there will take the reader to the Depression-era farm country of Illinois, the working class neighborhoods of the auto industry in its heyday and even, surprisingly, to a Baptist church in burned-out downtown Detroit. Along the way we meet a Transylvanian forensic pathologist, a beautiful young prosecutor, an old-school police chief, a television news crew hungry for ratings, the softball scorekeeper mom accused of carrying on an affair with the murdered man, and her two shell shocked teenagers, still reeling from the death of their beloved coach, and a mother who has to tell her daughter why her favorite teacher won't be in school any more.

As in Joyce Maynard's previous books - including To Die For, based on a true crime, and her best selling memoir, At Home in the World - Joyce Maynard's themes here involve family secrets, the deep fissures that lie below the surface of the glittering exteriors, and the deep, potentially fatal, fissures in the American Dream.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Maynard serves up an examination of murder among the middle class. The setting is a gated community in a suburb outside Detroit. On Mother's Day in 2004, Nancy Seaman, the wife of a successful auto-industry engineer, herself an award-winning fourth-grade teacher, bought a hatchet at Home Depot. Three days later, her husband's mutilated body was found in the back of the family's Ford. There is no mystery as to who committed the crime. The mystery revolves around Nancy's defense, which was based on battered-woman syndrome. Although the basic plot is gripping, Maynard spends far too much time tracing the backgrounds of both families. It is also problematic that, although Maynard was unable to attend the trial, her account centers on the proceedings and the testimony delivered there; the result is not as compelling as it might have been. Still, Maynard's portrayal of battered-woman syndrome is thought-provoking, reinforcing her theme that we never know what is behind the walls of even seemingly respectable homes. Expect some media attention, but, finally, this material might have been better suited as a magazine article. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

Novelist Maynard (The Cloud Chamber, 2005, etc.) examines a real-life murder for the nasty truths it reveals about a family of four torn apart by its pursuit of the American dream.
In 2004, respected fourth-grade teacher Nancy Seaman picked up a hatchet and killed her hus-band, semi-retired automobile engineer and executive Bob. Was it self-defense or premeditation? Only Nancy knows; she's serving a life sentence in a Michigan jail. Maynard, no stranger to stories of corruption born of ambition (To Die For, 1992), takes on a tale that offers few conclusions but a host of intriguing questions. The central one: Where does happiness lie? Bob was a man who liked his Detroit Tigers season tickets and working on his vintage Mustangs; Nancy was a polished, proud woman who carefully tended her ideal life in Farmington Hills, a tony suburb of Detroit. They and their two sons, one favoring their mother and the other their father, made up an unhappy clan caught between keeping up appearances and having loving relationships. Maynard devotes the first half of her book to tracking down the Seamans' extended family, locating the roots of their marital problems and detailing the opinions and reactions of friends, coworkers and neighbors. Noting that her work falls under the ethical shadow cast by not just Truman Capote's In Cold Blood but the 2005 film Capote, she drops her detachment and becomes a presence in the story. She resists choosing sides about who was the real victim, Bob or Nancy. At times, she openly admits struggling with her feelings about her own family's dysfunction and divorce. In the end, Maynard finds enough common ground with the Seamans to portray a family broken, but one more familiar than strange.
Painful, intimate and blood-spattered: a gripping true-crime tale. (Kirkus, August 1, 2006)

INTERNAL COMBUSTION is an engrossing tale of a troubled marriage, a dysfunctional family and a horrible act of violence. It is thoroughly readable and just scary enough for a good winter's fireside read. - Bookreporter.com

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass; 1 edition (September 22, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0787982261
• ISBN-13: 978-0787982263
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,691,943 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I've been a writer all my life. Over those years, I've worked as a newspaper reporter, columnist, radio commentator (I was Liberal-of-the-Day on CBS radio at the age of 19, on a show called Spectrum) . For eight years, I published a syndicated column about my life called "Domestic Affairs", but when my life got increasingly complicated (I got divorced) and my children grew to the age where it was no longer a good idea to write about them, I ended the column and turned to writing fiction. One of my novels, To Die For, was made into a terrific movie, directed by Gus van Sant , in which I can be seen in the role of Nicole Kidman's lawyer.

My memoir, At Home in the World, published in 1998, engendered a fair amount of controversy at the time of its publication --still does, in some quarters.

In recent years, I've published a true crime story--Internal Combustion, and two more novels--The Usual Rules and a young adult novel, The Cloud Chamber, as well as a number of essays that can be found in various collections. (Read over the titles--aging, divorce, anorexia, miscarriage, disastrous midlife dating--and you may get a picture of my life, I suppose, though a number of the more cheerful aspects --more enjoyable to live through, but less good as material--would be missing.

My latest book is the novel, Labor Day--just published in July 2009. I'll be on the road for a while, sharing that one with readers. You can learn more about the novel, and my tour schedule (also my writing workshops on Lake Atitlan, in Guatemala) on my website, www.joycemaynard.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Written from a unique perspective, September 24, 2006

By 

K. Corn "reviewer" (midwest, United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Internal Combustion: The Story of a Marriage and a Murder in the Motor City (Hardcover)

Author Joyce Maynard has written a combination of true crime novel and personal confession, focusing on Nancy Seaman, a schoolteacher accused of a particularly brutal slaying of her husband, Bob, leaving two brothers adrift and alienated from each other in wake of that crime. That is the basis of this book, the pivotal event that everything else revolves around.

But ths isn't just a recounting of a terrible event but also a way for Maynard to explore marriage in general, including her own marriage, one that eventually led to divorce. She can't help but wonder what separates the pain and rage one feels when a marriage ends from the type of anger that leads to murder? While reading this book, I got the impression that investigating the crime served as a sort of catharsis for Mayhard. Think of it as "true crime marriage therapy".

Maynard also reveals some parallels between her own life and that of the Seaman family- an unhappy marriage, anger, pain, acting irrationally at times....even going so far as to admit that she may have pushed her children to try and make some painful choices. There is a lot of personal revelation and confession here.

I have mixed emotions about the usefulness of this kind of revelation in a true crime novel. Perhaps there is something universal about rage and anger, some connection between "ordinary" rage and that which goes over the edge. On the other hand, I wonder if this book wouldn't have been stronger without the personal viewpoint and comparision.

Even so, there was so much that was moving and engrossing about this book that I read it in one fell swoop, cover to cover. I just wish I knew whether it was meant to be an exploration of the crime itself or an attempt at therapy over the author's long-ended marriage. This left me feeling a bit baffled and ambivalent.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Should Have Been Better, July 24, 2008

By 

Bill Barbour (Sterling Heights, MI United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Internal Combustion: The Story of a Marriage and a Murder in the Motor City (Paperback)

I purchased this book after hearing the author on Fresh Air. It appealed to me because I used to live in Farmington, Michigan, which is next to the city where Nancy and Bob Seaman lived. I also wondered not only why Nancy Seaman murdered her husband but why she did it so violently.

The book is a page turner. I'm usually a slow reader but I finished it quickly. The short chapters help to maintain momentum. Maynard's style also keeps the tempo going. Some of her interviews and observations do give a flavor of the people and places of the story and the Detroit area.

However, the book has fatal flaws (pardon the pun). The worst of these is Maynard's decision to insinuate herself into the story. The book becomes almost as much of an exercise in therapeutic self-exploration as a true crime story.

Maynard clearly takes sides in this story. She writes of the people she likes, such as Lisa Ortleib (now Gorcyca) and Detective Al Patterson, with near reverence. Those she doesn't like seem like cartoon characters. The same facile approach that makes the book easy to read also gives it a television-like tendency to oversimplify.

Maynard also makes abundant mistakes of fact (saying that Telegraph Road runs through Grosse Pointe, calling Dodge Magnums Plymouths, misspelling Tigers shortstop Alan Trammell's name, etc.). This made me wonder whether her sloppiness extended to pertinent parts of the story, too.

In the end, I was disappointed. This was a story that deserved to be told in all its complexity. Maynard captured some of it. However, she could have told it better if she had kept herself off of the pages and abstained from quick and easy generalization.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Padded, But Still Well Written, January 10, 2008

By 

Bradley F. Smith (Miami Beach, FL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Internal Combustion: The Story of a Marriage and a Murder in the Motor City (Hardcover)

What do you do when you set out to write a true crime book, but the perp won't talk, even though you've invested a lot of time and money in the faith that she will? Well, this book shows how to get around that major problem. You pad it. Pad it with observations about everything you did while waiting around for the key interview that won't ever happen. You attend the funeral of a Four Tops singer. What's that got to do with Nancy Seaman? Nada. You hang out at the lake house of the local courthouse reporter and pad a few chapters about that. You decide you'll draw parallels with your own failed marriage and divorce. That's good for maybe 25 percent of the required pages to make your book contract. Hmm. Let's see, now? What else can you pad with? Oh, I know. Make some big socioeconomic generalizations about the haves and have nots who populate both sides of the tracks in your setting, in this case, Detroit's 8 Mile Road. Even so, this book is still pretty interesting and Maynard is a world-class writer. So you should read it, even though it's deeply flawed. The case in question is a real beaut.