Customer Reviews

The Poet and the Murderer

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Having read the book I highly recommend it to everyone, if I could give it 7 stars out of 5 I would. The way the two stories are interwoven is highly impressive and makes for fascinating reading. The research that has gone into the book is very substantial and ensures the book is gripping from start to finish.
As somebody who knew very little about the worlds of literature and forgery, I found it extremely enlightening and enjoyable to read about them. However I feel it transcends them and is quite simply a brilliant, well written book.
Due to the quality of the writing and the way in which the charcters were brought to life, I could empathise with the characters involved, (although it is an all too frequently used cliche), once I started the book I couldn't put it down.
This book shocks and surprises the reader as only a true story can, it almost seems like a creation from Hollywood, perhaps we will see it adapted to the big screen soon, I for one hope so.
Anyway, I will conclude by saying I recommend this book to everyone and anyone and look forward to more releases from this writer of undoubted quality.

Simon Worrall's The Poet and the Murderer has probably made a lot of people angry. In it the author dwells on the shaky foundations of the Mormon Church, whose founder, Joseph Smith, is revealed as a sex-crazed charlatan. He also writes about the near criminal practices of auction houses, particularly Sotheby's, which seems to have deliberately ignored evidence that the "new" poem by Emily Dickinson it was auctioning was in fact a forgery. But the rest of us, who are neither Mormons nor Sotheby's employees, can only delight in Worrall's fascinating book.

The Poet and the Murderer tells the true-life story of Mark Hofmann, a disaffected Mormon with a genius for deception. Hofmann's forgeries--of Emily Dickinson, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Joseph Smith, Daniel Boone, and over a hundred other historical figures--were expertly produced, a feat that requires far more than the superficial replication of a subject's pen strokes. Hofmann used paper ripped from period books, manufactured his own ink, and wrote under self-hypnosis so that his forgeries would not be betrayed by evidence of hesitancy. Many of Hofmann's forgeries were intended to undermine the religion he had grown up to despise, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, by inserting into the historical record documents that were embarrassing to the Church. One could almost admire this man, who was so scrupulous in his work and so evidently intelligent--except that his crimes did not stop at forging.

Worrall also devotes much of his book to a discussion of Emily Dickinson, the "poet" of the title, as one of Hofmann's more daring forgeries was a poem that he composed and passed off as one of her lost works. Her reclusiveness, sexuality, handwriting, potential incontinence, and bizarre family life are all discussed, as is the sale of the Dickinson poem by Sotheby's years after Hofmann's imprisonment for murder. But while Dickinson shares equal billing with Mark Hofmann in the title of Worrall's book, The Poet and the Murderer has more to do with the Mormon Church than it does with Amherst's famous recluse. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Nor is there very much wrong with this book. On a few occasions the author repeats himself. His narration in the Epilogue of a dream he'd had about Dickinson is perhaps a bit much. More importantly, when it comes, Hofmann's transformation from a brilliant and seemingly unassailable forger into a cash-strapped inventor of fraudulent investment schemes seems too abrupt. Why would Hofmann, who was otherwise so controlled, have adopted behavior almost certain to get him caught? Why, for example, did he accept nearly $200,000 as payment for documents he never intended to forge? Perhaps the answers to these questions were not forthcoming, and perhaps Hofmann's downfall was indeed thus abrupt.

One thing Worrall does succeed at particularly is transforming Hofmann in the reader's mind from a relatively harmless, almost admirable white-collar criminal into a reprehensible, sociopathic villain. Worrall's account of Hofmann's murders--to get creditors off his back he blew up two people with pipe bombs--and his description of the physical remains of Hofmann's two wholly innocent victims are chilling. And Worrall's book as a whole is gripping. Don't miss it.

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

I began reading THE POET AND THE MURDERER because I am a life-long admirer of Emily Dickinson. I finished the book because I couldn't put it down.
Mr. Worrall has recounted a gripping tale about an incredible forgery and the lives and institutions that were changed forever by the crime.
This is the story of the curator of Special Collections at the Jones Library in Amherst, MA,who, with some trepidation, paid $21,000 for an original manuscript of an Emily Dickinson poem.
It is the story of a man of incredible talent and will who set out to fool the experts and the public, and discredit the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints.
It is about a respected auction house, shrugging their collective shoulders over deceit.
It is about murder.
Worrall spent three years unraveling the threads of poetry and provenance. He takes us from Amherst to Salt Lake City, from the Dickinson Homestead to the wealthy showrooms of Sotheby's to Utah State Correctional Facility.
Along the way, he introduces Yale's Ralph Franklin, renowned expert on Emily Dickinson's handwriting; Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism; Mark Hoffman, dealer and forger; Daniel Lombardo, who refused to be conned; and even shy Emily, one of America's foremost poets.
Worrall is an enthralling storyteller.. He educates us on the complexities of handwriting, the intrigues of art auctions, and the machinations of the upper echelons of the Mormon Church, all while avoiding pedantic preaching.

Simon Worrall followed the story because he was intrigued by a person with the unquestionable ability to "clone" Emily Dickinson's unique style. After reading that the poem had been returned to Sotheby's by the Jones Library, Worrall was curious about the poem's real provenance.
He has done his research. His comments and allusions show a grasp of his subjects. And his own enthusiasm shines through-part of what makes the book so interesting and readable, yet never sensationalized or colloquial.

A forged poem attributed to Emily Dickinson turned up in 1997 at auction, years after the forger had been imprisoned for murder. Author Worrall takes this late development as a pretext for revisiting the Mark Hofmann case, from several years previously. Dickinson is really just a walk-on in this book, as the principals are Hofmann and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Only the first bit and a few sections later are really concerned with the forged Dickinson poem. Worrall's treatment of her life and poetry is brief and fair-enough. A in-depth reading isn't really called for in this book, so Dickinson fans oughtn't be too disappointed not to find more literary analysis. Though she is billed as a co-headliner in this story, she is actually more of a footnote.

An unprepared reader might be overwhelmed by the quickly multiplying number of characters in the first chapters, as the poem goes to auction and more and more experts and dealers get consulted. But these are soon moved offstage as the viewpoint switches to Hofmann's. We also get digressive chapters on the history of forging, which are interesting but are obviously makeweight.

The implied exposure of shady doings at the big auction houses never comes to pass, apart from some fuming quotes from people who had been burned by the forgeries.

The meat of the book is the telling of how Hofmann forged important Mormon documents, playing the top church leadership like a pawnshop Gibson in a Pete Townshend impersonation contest. The technical details of how Hofmann worked his dishonest magic are amazing enough, but more so is how brutally accurately he sized up the church's leaders. For one legendary document, he took a chance and left it vulnerable to carbon dating, knowing that the church wanted the document to be true and would not destroy a portion of it to date it. The Mormon church gets a very rough ride in this story, especially in the background material, and it's hard not to feel that they couldn't have tried to be more skeptical, lest the sky fall.

A bibliophile blanches to think how many forged Hofmann manuscripts and autographs are still out there, perhaps even shaping our view of history, as the Mormon documents did for awhile. I don't know what use a natural talent for forgery could be put to in a law-abiding life, but he certainly mis-used his to the hilt. Thanks to Mark Hofmann, "don't believe everything you read" has a whole new sinister tone.

A well researched, carefully written book that covered much more than I expected. What did I learn? Mark Hoffman is possibly the smartest psychopath in history. Emily Dickinson remains as always a mystery, (perhaps this helps to explain our fascination with her), the Mormon church includes in it's development corruption and many inconsistencies, which is not so different from other world religions. Trusted names in the auction business cannot be trusted, and frequently, renowned experts in historical documents can't tell a fake from the real thing. In Emily's own words, "A little madness in the spring, is wholesome even for the king...."

I knew very little about Hoffmann before reading this book, or about Emily Dickinson. I was drawn to it by an interest in the processes of forgery. I read the book in one sitting. Once this writer had pulled me in, I was on for the whole ride. And what a rollercoaster! Worrall takes you in to all kind of unexpected territory: the inside workings of the antiquarian trade, the history and psychology of the Mormon religious belief, the known material on Dickinson herself. But he does it with all the exactness of a watchmaker taking the insides out of an old spring-driven pocket watch. You feel like you understand a complicated situation because he's taken the trouble to lay it all out for you. There's human warmth here too when he's writing about the 'good guys' in this story full of cynical chicanery.
I thought the stuff about Hoffmann at his devilish work was wonderfully done....set up with great atmosphere, so you could really get a picture of how someone like that operates.
This should be a movie!
Really...it has all the earmarks of a good mystery-come-detective story, with the real life character Daniel Lombardo as our hero.
I will look out for this name in future. He's definitely on my list of must-reads.

Few books are more engaging than <The Poet and the Murderer.> Worrall knows how to use "telling details" to capture the reader's interest. (A trite example is the squirrel in the opening paragraph.) And he conceals key facts until just the right moment. A great read.

But I have to question the particular combination of elements that makes his story so compelling. For example, is it true that Hofmann built (and tested) a bomb on the same day he completed the Dickinson forgery? Or is it a literary device used to hook the reader? Worrall gives no sources, so the reader can't know for sure.

His description of Mormonism is for the most part accurate, however the tenor of his off-the-cuff characterizations will be offensive to many Latter-day Saints.

To my mind, Worrall's main contribution is his acknowledgment that Hofmann was successful in his forgery through self-hypnosis, an amazing feat.

It will make a great movie of the week.

Sadly, this book is little more than a magazine article puffed up to book length. The forgery of one Emily Dickinson poem is ostensibly the subject of this book, but the author quickly realizes that this can sustain but one chapter. To fill out the rest of the book, he rehashes the Mormon forgeries of Hofmann, despite the fact that there have been many other books on this subject, books which he appears to have cribbed from extensively. Furthermore, the writing is atrocious, making this reader cringe on several occasions. For example, while telling us about the sleepness night of the museum curator, Mr. Worrall feels compelled to mention that a raccoon was rumaging through the garbage. Does he know this? Obviously not, but he wanted to make the scene more dramatic. I would like to add as well that this book has clearly not been fact-checked by anyone with even a passing knowledge of Mormonism. As a former Mormon, I can attest to several out-and-out falsehoods that appear in the text, silly things that not even the Mormon Church's strongest critics would claim. Mr. Worrall has basically produced a magazine length story of the Dickinson forgery and cut and pasted the middle 100 pages from other sources. A real book about the non-Mormon forgeries of Hofmann still needs to be written.

This is a good book, and invites the reader in quickly.

The author's public appearances confirm his fluent style as proprietary.

Unfortunately, the book has a surprising number of typographical errors. Perhaps these are intended to catch the reader's attention, but I found them distracting.

Interestingly, the author asserts that Emily Dickinson had 10 poems published during her lifetime. The back cover jacket of the book asserts that "she had none published during her lifetime."

If the typos and periodic dissonances were intentional, they do not serve to make this a "smooth" reading experience. If they were unintentional, Dutton/Penguin have some editing issues to address.

...but would have benefitted from better editing/proofreading! There are a handful of misspelled words and entirely too many commas. In fact, the text reads like it was transcribed from audio with commas inserted at the breath pauses. Still, a book worth a try, especially by those intrigued by the Salt Lake City murder/forgery affair and its ever-widening circles of effects in the world of rare documents. I would also recommend it to buffs of the true crime genre. I would not recommend it to anyone devoutly LDS or anyone seeking a reasoned perspective on Mormon theology, but then this book does not pretend to cater to either type of reader. This book strengths are its pace and its character sketches, which are superb, though the murder victims are in my opinion too lightly and almost dismissively passed over.