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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Gruesome and gory...., April 18, 2009
This review is from: Mop Men: Inside the World of Crime Scene Cleaners (Hardcover)
This is truly a "dirty job" that no one thinks about, and for good reason... Mop Men: Inside the World of Crime Scene Cleaners by Alan Emmins. Emmins leaves his home in Denmark and travels to San Francisco to follow Neal Smither on his rounds. Smither is the president of "Crime Scene Cleaners", a company that comes in when someone has died and cleans up afterwards. While you often read about grisly deaths in the paper or see them on TV, you really don't think about what happens after the crime tape comes down and the room needs to be returned to a usable state. That's the world that Emmins writes about in graphic detail.
Smither is an interesting character, someone who sees death as his path to financial independence. He's crude, aggressive, and doesn't flinch at much of anything. He has no problems walking into a room where someone has committed suicide via rifle to the head, making a rather crass comment about the mess, negotiating a price to clean it all up, and then digging in. But as gruesome and revolting as it may be, he's fanatical about making sure *no* remaining traces of body fluids or parts are left behind to be discovered weeks later by others. Emmins undergoes a transformation during his month-long stint as a crime scene cleaner. He starts with the reactions that you'd expect... nausea, dry heaves, bizarre dreams. By the end of his trip, he's diving into cleanup operations like a pro, more irritated at the mess than grossed out by what happened. He also has to come to grips with the feelings of wishing someone would die so he'd have more material for his book, realizing that he's become somewhat jaded by the experience.
In terms of being exposed to a hidden world, Mop Men was OK. But it's less of a technical read than an exploration into what drives people who deal with death on a daily basis, as well as a large side trip into one particular murder crime scene involving a person living in an apartment with a dead body that was decomposing for about a month in the bathtub. He goes into the cleanup a bit, but he also tracks the investigation and trial of the person accused of the crime. I felt that part of the book strayed somewhat from the main subject, and as such had me skimming a bit to get back to the main story.
Mop Men is a very different read, and not one to start if you are at all squeamish. You probably won't look at news stories involving dead bodies quite the same way again, either...
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mop Men -, January 21, 2009
This review is from: Mop Men: Inside the World of Crime Scene Cleaners (Hardcover)
Picking up `Mop Men' I was as out of my comfort zone as the author, Alan Emmins, was when he donned a white protective suit and picked up the industrial cleaner. Not a fan of blood and gore (I hide behind a cushion during CSI), I didn't know what to expect and wasn't sure if I wanted to `go there'. But Emmins took me along for the ride. And after the opening lines, I went willingly. He faces each new day and every new scene to clean with a fresh eye and a fast pulse. The reading experience mirrors Emmins' own fears as he, and by extension, the reader, face their own bloody mortality. This is prose on speed. Emmins scrubs away at blood stained walls and his own tainted thoughts, as he attempts to make sense of his changing responses to death and life. At once horrified and intrigued by Smither's own attitudes, Emmins gradually understands that to see death, you have to get up-close and personal. And it ain't pretty.
The rooms Emmins and Smither clean up are littered with somber reminders of the living, and the tragic aftermath of their dying. And Emmins takes a long hard look at what it means to be here and what we leave behind. Moving, keenly observed, darkly comic, Emmins can make you laugh, cry and gag in the space of page. Describing Neil Smither, the owner of Crime Scene Cleaners Inc. as `indelible' - Emmins continues, "Neil is so harsh that once he has entered your head you will remember him for the rest of your life. He himself is like a bad stain that you can't scrub away." The impact of Emmins' powerful prose is equally indelible. This is the best way to be ink stained. And you won't forget it.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Murder - Messes - Millions, January 20, 2009
This review is from: Mop Men: Inside the World of Crime Scene Cleaners (Hardcover)
Alan Emmins' prose style is direct, blunt, and absolutely perfect for his theme, the story of Neal Smither and his company, California-based 'Crime Scene Cleaners'. "Although the body appears free of decay immediately after death," he informs the reader, "there are bacteria inside the body that feed off the contents of the intestine. When the body dies, the bacteria start eating the intestine itself." Curious and at points unashamedly unable to hold down his lunch, Emmins' guides the reader through suicide scenes, garbage houses, filth and gore in his acutely observed and highly disturbing odyssey.
Mop Men would be a prime contender for the sort of prurient pseudo-reportage that often winds up in weekly magazines aimed at pubescent boys. It's got all the hooks; month-old corpses decaying in bath tubs, chubby maggots doing their grim business, there's even an anecdote about a teenager whose liver explodes messily after a prolonged alcohol binge.
However, Emmins' portrait of the work done by Smither's 'trauma scene' cleaning company goes a long way beyond the mere recounting of grisly stories. Focusing on the banal profusion of Hollywood violence and the growing dislocation felt by many individuals in the modern world, Emmins' book attempts a deeper understanding of a culture in which Smither's motto, 'Gore sells, my friend,' holds such currency.
Interestingly, it is when Emmins' material unexpectedly dries up, an unprecedented spate of joy and life in California threatening the completion of his book, that his thesis comes into its own. Having initially chastised Smither's blasé attitude to the misery and death that he deals with on a daily basis, Emmins is quick to realise that he, like Smither, is also 'praying for death, baby,' and thereby equally implicated in the death industry.
A masterful, compelling portrait of a man just doing his job.
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