Readings

Texas Monthly on ... True Crime

From the editors of Texas Monthly
University of Texas Press, 235 pp., $19.95 (paper)

We Texans tend to believe that everything about us is special. When it comes to our criminals, we don't have to get too subjective to substantiate that belief: You can almost see the producers of 48 Hours Mystery drooling when they hear that a murder case involves anyone wearing a cowboy hat, especially if he happens to be an oil baron or something. As Texas Monthly Editor Evan Smith puts it in the introduction to this volume, "Our crime is not just big but bigger than anyone else's, so we may as well brag about it."

The Texas Monthly staff has long been aware of this element of our Lone Star heritage and maintains a strong pledge toward doing true crime right. They promise everything you'd find in a classic pulp like True Detective, along with a few of their own special touches (like fact-checking). In fact, an issue of Texas Monthly without a nice lurid crime epic seems physically lighter somehow; the restaurant guides and entertainment features just kinda lie there, waiting for a good old-fashioned serial killer to stalk the pages.

Texas Monthly on ... Texas True Crime is, then, just what you'd expect: all meat. Its dozen tales run the gamut from dead cheerleaders to cross-dressing bank robbers. A caveat: All-star players like Bonnie and Clyde, Charles Whitman, and Lee Harvey Oswald already were collected in a previous anthology. It's okay, because our lesser Lone Star lights of darkness are pretty darn entertaining in their own right. Joe Ball, the "Butcher of Elmendorf," was said to feed waitresses to his alligators back in the 1930s, and Treva Throneberry, while never actually feeding anybody to anything, brought new meaning to the term "mental case" in more recent years.

In point of fact, the real star of the book never killed anyone ... to the best of my knowledge, at least. Longtime Executive Editor Skip Hollandsworth penned half of the stories in the book (and apart from one tale by Michael Hall, he's the only male writer represented, in case you thought true-crime writing was still a member of the Old Boys Club), and besides treating the material with the same care as, say, politics, he manages to avoid the sort of repetition of format that makes it difficult to watch multiple episodes of some Court TV shows.

That's not to say you really need to read this entire volume in one sitting. As seriously as the writers take the subject (which is not to say they don't toss in a few healthy dollops of black humor), this all still boils down to entertainment, fueled by our fascination with guys and gals gone bad. So keep this one in the bathroom, at the ready for short bursts of seedy fun, but take a breather for a nice restaurant review once in a while. We don't need anyone going overboard, after all, unless the Texas Monthly team is running short on material for their next volume.