Depraved: The shocking true story of America's first serial killer, by Harold Schechter
Concept: 7
Presentation: 4
Writing Quality: 5
Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 5
Entertainment Value: 4
Rereadability: 3
Overall: 3.5

This one was a disappointment. I ordered it from the library after enjoying Savage Pastimes, another book by the same author, and hoped Depraved would be an informative and gruesome book about an infamous serial killer. It was, in places, but the presentation was lacking, and the book had no focus on the interesting stuff, and far too much coverage of irrelevant courtroom drama.

It opens up properly, with a thumbnail sketch of the times, a brief description of H. H. Howard's infamous crimes, and more background info. It then lists some formative experiences from his childhood, and gives a short bio of his life up to the point he turned to murder. After that it loses its way, with endless discussion of Holmes' travels around the country as he tries to perpetrate a minor insurance scam, and then far too many pages on his anticlimactic murder trial. (Note to the author: just because you constantly say how shocking a development was in the trial doesn't mean the readers are going to agree.) Surprisingly, Holmes' trial is for the murder of a henchmen in the poorly-designed insurance scam, and Holmes was never charged or prosecuted for the dozens of other far more interesting murders he committed. Unfortunately those are hardly mentioned in the book at all, and are not discussed in any detail.

Going by the middle 80% of the book, you'd think it was a biography about a small-time hustler, scam artist, and serial bigamist who eventually got carried away and murdered a partner, tried to collect on his life insurance policy, and was subsequently tried and executed for it. The fact that Holmes tortured and murdered maybe 50 other people, built an incredible murder mansion, and was the world's first documented serial killer is almost an afterthought.

Let's be honest; the hook of the book, the reason anyone reads it, is that it's about H. H. Holmes, who killed a lot of people in various horrible ways, at a time in history when that sort of thing was almost completely unknown. That's what the reader wants to know about, in as much detail as possible, with lots more about the, "mazelike corridors, soundproof rooms, sealed vaults, oversized furnaces, and chutes leading down to the cellar" that the book jacket talks about. Unfortunately, the sentence on the book jacket is about all the reader learns, when its repeated in the book. There are no detailed descriptions of the castle or the torture chambers below, no charts or diagrams or photographs, no eyewitness accounts, and not even any speculation about how the crimes went down.

What we do get are maybe 200 pages (out of the 360 total) covering Holmes' seemingly endless and aimless cross-country travels while dodging the cops and tediously plotting to murder his assistant in a life insurance scam, hoodwink his widow, and dispose of the guy's children. Ten or fifteen pages would have been sufficient for that section, but instead it covers at least 100, most of it of the, "traveled from Chicago to Baltimore, checked into two different hotels under different names, didn't buy the poor girls new shoes, etc..." variety. It's as boring as it sounds. Worse yet, we then revisit that entire story when it all gets relived during Holmes' trial, which ends in his conviction for the murder of his henchmen, as part of a life insurance scam.

The author covered that section in so much detail for an obvious reason; he could just pluck it all from newspaper articles at the time, since there was extensive coverage of Holmes in the media of the day. Far, far less coverage is given to the castle itself, or Holmes' serial killing, and there's virtually nothing about why Holmes became what he was. We get one short childhood incident, lots of unsourced comments about his practicing torture on animals as a child, and then bang, he's being hung for one minor murder with almost no details about the bulk of his crimes. We know everything about a crime we don't much care about, and almost nothing about all of the crimes we wanted to learn about, and that's a definite flaw. I was skimming paragraphs and whole chapters in seconds by page 250 or so; bored with the irrelevant courtroom drama and wanting to get past his conviction for one life insurance scam murder, and on to more about his real crimes.

Basically this is a decent first draft of a book about H. H. Holmes, but it needs substantial editing to add detail about his castle and murders, needs to have at least 50 pages of redundant and boring reportage about his travels removed, and needs much more psychological analysis and discussion about Holmes and the society in which he lived.

Originally reviewed September 14, 2005.