Fans of Bill James ? baseball fans, in other words ? will have many of their expectations confounded by his new book. For starters, unlike his previous two dozen or so volumes, Popular Crime has nothing to do with the statistical analysis of baseball. The title doesn't refer to certain general managers' criminal neglect of the many advanced statistics that James has popularized over the years, which are best known by terms like OPS, PSN, WAR and SecA. Popular Crime has nothing, in fact, to do with baseball. Its subject is our other national pastime: crime stories.
As a James fan myself, I was hoping for a new set of Jamesian terms, like STAB (Streetwalkers and Transients Assassinated per Borough), say, or OJs (Obstructions of Justice). And as it turns out, there are a few. By the final chapter, we are fluent enough in James' methodology that we don't flinch when he classifies the murder of JonBenet Ramsey as an ''IQBX 9.''
But the book is primarily a history of the murders that have obsessed American newspaper readers since Dec. 22, 1799, when the body of a young New York woman named Elma Sands was found floating in a well. Between vivid accounts of Lizzie Borden, the Boston Strangler and the Zodiac killer, James offers proposals for penal and judicial reform, theories about the cultural significance of crime stories and brief book reviews.
He is aware that he has no professional background in any of these matters; he even reminds the reader of this fact compulsively, describing himself as ''ignorant'' and ''an expert in nothing.'' ''I have no credentials to critique the work of homicide cops,'' he writes, shortly before embarking on a seething critique of the cops who botched the Ramsey case. Often, after developing some hypothesis, he falls back into a cranky defensiveness: ''That's just my opinion; could be right, could be wrong.''
James, who originally self-published his annual Baseball Abstract, the stat-head's holy grail, has always been proud of his outsider status; it is what allowed him to make observations that old-timers, drawing on decades of conventional wisdom, could not. His contributions to the field now known as sabermetrics were transformative.
It's clear early on in Popular Crime that James, despite his protestations ? ''I'm not expert in any of this'' ? is an expert. He's read the syllabus, as well as the supplementary texts: more than a thousand true-crime books in all, he estimates.
This may not make him a criminologist, but he understands the genre intimately. Popular crime stories, he writes, are Aristotelian tragedies, ''in which a person of substance is reduced to ruin by a flaw in his/her character revealed under the tensions of the stage.''
James is best when he applies his knife's-edge empiricism to the murkiest of crime puzzles. A stern logician, he lays out his opponents' arguments in list form, refuting each spurious claim and applying point totals to quantify a suspect's perceived guilt.
Readers of Popular Crime will be convinced that Lizzie Borden did not kill her parents, Albert DeSalvo was not the Boston Strangler, and John and Patricia Ramsey did not conspire to kill their daughter. Sam Sheppard, the Bay Village doctor whose story was the basis for The Fugitive, did not kill his wife, but he did hire the supposed killer, Richard Eberling, to do the job. And Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby, is certainly guilty. On a 100-point scale, where zero is innocent and 100 is guilty beyond any reasonable doubt, Hauptmann scores a 213.
This is where James faces his most challenging problem: Popular crimes, unlike baseball games, resist quantification. Crimes can be quantified in the aggregate, but popular crimes are exceptional. They often involve millionaires, celebrities and serial killers; they are also almost always unsolved.
And so James often finds himself succumbing to a streak of anti-empiricism that he would never tolerate among his fellow sabermetricians. His 100-point scale, while admirable in its effort to weigh contradictory evidence, seems relatively arbitrary. Why should the fact that Lizzie Borden tried to buy poison on the day before the murders count for 12 points, instead of 11 or 34? We are told elsewhere that 70 to 90 percent of murder confessions are false, a fact that seems both shocking and plausible but is unsupported here by any evidence.
James goes to great rhetorical lengths to support his central theme, which is that popular crime deserves serious attention. He's right, but the point is hardly as controversial as he seems to think. As James himself points out, popular crime has been the subject of serious public discourse since ancient Rome.
Yet while Popular Crime includes dozens of reviews of true-crime paperbacks and TV miniseries, it ignores the works of Damon Runyon, James Thurber, Gay Talese, Elizabeth Hardwick, Joan Didion, Jimmy Breslin or James Ellroy, to name a handful ? all of whom have written extensively about crimes discussed in this book. Nor does Norman Mailer's Executioner's Song rate a mention.
Lost in all of this, at times, is the profound human suffering that underpins these crimes. All I could think about when I put it down was the story of Christian Ross. In 1874, his 4-year-old son, Charlie, was kidnapped from his front yard. The abduction became a press sensation, and hundreds of waifs were shown to Christian with the hope that in one he might recognize his son. ''I suppose I shall continue going to see boys till I die,'' he said in an interview years later, ''but I don't expect to find Charlie in any of them.''
Source: http://www.ohio.com/lifestyle/123705579.html
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