Here Schechter often manages to build the kind of suspense you usually only find in thriller novels. The short chapters pace the narrative in a tense, stalking way. They often end by leaving readers with a terrible surmise. Schechter tells how Albert Fish “gathered the necessary items,” wrapped them up, and went to his victim’s house.
The different sections of the book are also usually headed by amazingly apt quotes, often culled from well-known works of literature. For example, Schechter introduces the horror with a quote from William Blake’s poem, “The Sick Rose.” This quote so poignantly recalls the fate of Fish’s most notable victim, little Grace Budd, who was so often characterized as being as sweet, pretty, and innocent, as a rose. But it also summarizes the result of Fish’s depredations in general, and sets the tone of this account. It reads:
O rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm…
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
The later part of the book is devoted to Fish’s trial. A number of interesting legal points are raised, particularly centering on the question of what constitutes “insanity.” It was also interesting to note that, in the course of their learned arguments, the attorneys also raised the question of whether being in the grip of an “irresistible impulse” could constitute a legitimate defense. On this point, the court seems to have come to a different conclusion from the one a court came to in the partly fictionalized description of a Michigan trial in the movie “Anatomy of a Murder.”
So this book does provide a gripping chronology of, not only Fish’s ultimate killings, but also of his preliminary fetishes. So many of these, such as Fish’s coprophagia, urophilia, and engagement in consensual S&M – were regarded as uniquely bizarre back then. However, now such fetishes are acknowledged as being wide-spread and are even accommodated, to the extent they are often no longer regarded as “perversions.” It would have been interesting for Schechter to have explored this sea-change in societal attitude and some of the implications of such a reversal.
There are other areas I wish Schechter would have further explored. First, he doesn’t supply enough biographical detail about Fish to give us a sense of the “Why” of Fish’s obsessions. Although that is the perennial question about the evil acts people commit, our hopes of catching a glimpse of that all-important “Why” is a big part of the reason we read true crime accounts. Schechter does make early reference to the awful, Dickensian orphanage Fish was sent to as a boy. But we don’t learn until late in the book more about the unsavory propensities of many of Fish’s older relatives and about some of the additional malignancies he was exposed to as a child. This late, brief introduction of such information alerts readers to the fact that further details on this score are probably available. I wish more of that detail had been included.
Second, I would have liked to have read more about the New York settings in which these crimes took place. Except for some oblique references to tenements and trolleys, the crimes might almost have taken place this year, instead of back in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Schechter does mention some of the other news stories that monopolized the headlines of the day, including the Lindbergh kidnapping. I was surprised to learn that kidnapping (especially of children) was such a common crime back then, that some newspapers ran weekly columns listing who had been kidnapped and what ransom demands had been made. So much for our current conviction that we live in unique danger of predators. However, in general, I would have appreciated Schechter’s filling in more of the texture of the time and place in which Fish’s crimes took place.
Third, Schechter had a very distracting tendency to continuously characterize Grace Budd’s mother as “fat.” He hardly ever mentions her without attaching the opprobrium of “frumpy,” “lumpy,” and even “massive” to her. This singling out of a woman for such characterization smacks of misogyny – and what’s more seems very inaccurate and unfair. The main picture of Mrs. Budd reproduced in the book shows her to weigh possibly 145-150 pounds. If such a weight qualifies her as “massive,” I hate to think how most modern Americans might “weigh in” with Schechter.
Finally, there’s the problem of Schechter’s interchangeable titles. He started the pattern of giving one-word titles to his books, all synonyms of each other, so I suppose he has to carry on in that vein. Still, I would have preferred for Schechter to have taken the time to distinguish his titles and cover designs so that readers could quickly determine which of his books they had already read.
Nevertheless, I found “Deranged” to be an engrossing, albeit supremely, sadly grossing-out account.
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