Word: larson
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...appearance of two new books to document Ted Bundy's gruesome career reminds us again that murderers are celebrities to be merchandised to satisfy our rapacious demand for the bizarre. One, Seattle Times reporter Richard Larson's The Deliberate Stranger, smacks of naked opportunism, while the other, The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rules, is mesmerized by how a man variously described as "compassionate," "charismatic," "Kennedyesque," and a "wonderful human being" could do the things Ted Bundy...
Richard W. Larson's Bundy: The Deliberate Stranger simply rehearses all that coverage again. It is less a book than a 303 page True Detective article--with none of the cheap thrills. Larson seems a dogged but uninspired or talentless young reporter responding to a hard-boiled chief detective's "Gimme all you've got"; he has lots of facts and is obviously a tireless reporter, but it all just sits there. The Deliberate Stranger isn't a book; it's the murder file on Bundy, a shapeless compilation of everything Larson knows about Bundy, which isn't that much...
...Larson's inability to summon any emotion for Bundy's victimes is especially outrageous. The bodies just pile up. The first is no more tragic than the 20th because Larson gives no thought to the women--he just cranks out a banal notation of these girls' eye color, hair length, and extra-curricular activities. The reader can only conclude that Larson really didn't care that much. Women slain in Seattle blur with women bludgeoned, stripped, and abandoned in Salt Lake City, Aspen, and Tallahassee. As the stock descriptions accumulate we get only a sense of the growth...
...Larson has nothing to say beyond his clumsy rerecording of the facts, which, by now, are the least important thing in our concern or nonconcern about Ted Bundy. Larson's fearfulness to speculate at all about what constructed Bundy's grim mechanism, his complete unwillingness to risk saying anything amounts not just to mediocrity but immorality--a failure of nerve typical of the quiet neutrality of American society's herd spectatorship...
Though Rule is no great stylist--her good intentions and horror at the story cause severe purpling of the writing at crucial times--her book is at least a sensitive, steady account of the facts, given a moving dimension through her relationship with the murderer. Though Rule, like Larson, is unable to get past a snapshot description of the victims to make them stand out as individual sacrifices to the sociopath, one feels it is not because of a deadness of her moral sense. Unlike Larson's rote transcription of the case, The Stranger Beside Me grapples with Ted Bundy...