Book Review: "The Best New True Crime Stories: Partners in Crime" edited by Mitzi Szereto (2022)
Written by Stuart D. Monroe
Published by Mango Publishing
Edited by Mitzi Szereto
Stories by CL Raven, Jason Half, Paul Williams, Morgan Barbour, Anthony Ferguson, Paul Willets, Leona Marie Cross, Marcus Lind, Mitzi Szereto, Nadine Bachan, Cathy Pickens, Tom Larsen, Joan Renner, Mathilde Stansky, and Rachel Friedman
2022, 296 pages, Nonfiction
Published on January 18th, 2022
Review:
Coming back to Mitzi Szereto’s true crime series is a bit like buying damn good coffee- you may use a different creamer each time for a little different flavor, but the base quality is always choice because one of life’s great axioms is “you get what you pay for”. You’re paying for the good shit with Mitzi’s collections, and what you get in return is a diverse collection of true crime tales that are guaranteed to introduce you to often unbelievable crimes that you’ve never heard of before.
It’s my fifth go-round with the this series, and the Best New True Crime Stories: Partners in Crime flavored creamer, so to speak, delivers a decidedly more dark and twisted style of true crime that’s all about twisted relationships and dubious decisions. You never know what’s going to happen when the wrong two people get together, and this collection has some real doozies in it from another slew of repeat contributors (like heavy hitters CL Raven and Anthony Ferguson) and fresh, new voices as well. Virtually all of the accounts will have you saying two things to yourself repeatedly: Why hadn’t I heard about this? And what in the actual fuck is wrong with people?!
CL Raven opens up with a tale of a young Satan-worshipping couple who met in the personal pages of a black metal magazine (“Humans, Not Monsters”). As usual, Raven really did their homework on Satanism, the German black metal scene, and the connection between the two. It’s efficiently written and reads like a newscast; perfect for the subject matter. Jason Half delivers a well-constructed and smartly told account of a lesbian couple in the 1960’s who committed a downright unthinkable crime involving a very big bridge (“A Long Way Down: Jeannace Freeman & Gertrude Jackson”). If spies are your thing, Paul Williams gives you a meticulously researched gem about a Cold War-era couple sending secrets to the Russians that lets the facts do the talking (“Spies in Suburbia”).
In a highlight of the collection, Morgan Barbour gets deeply personal and takes you to her impoverished home in Virginia for a serial arsonist story that I frankly couldn’t believe wasn’t a massive news story. She has a hometown connection to the crime. Writing from a place of personal experience that doesn’t promise impartiality, it’s a gut punch…especially for those of us that grew up “Southern poor” (“Flames of Passion: Arson as Aphrodisiac”).
You can’t say partners in crime without thinking of Bonnie and Clyde, naturally, but this collection gives you multiple tales of couples who kind of made B&C look smalltime. Repeat contributor Anthony Ferguson asks you if you’ve ever heard of the Australian couple who inspired the terrifically unrelenting film Hounds of Love and shocked an entire nation (“The Birnies: Australia’s Bonnie and Clyde”). Paul Willets introduces you to an English couple who became the WWII Blackout era version of B&C on that side of the pond (“Whirlwind Romance”). For a couple that predates America’s famous outlaw couple AND has a higher body count and success rate, look no further than Joan Renner’s “The Wages of Sin: The Ballad of Margie and Dale”; it more than lives up to the billing of B&C on steroids with the volume all the way up. Finally, you can flavor your B&C with a little bit of Natural Born Killers and go for Marcus Lind’s excellent piece about nineteen year-old Charles Starkweather and his fourteen year-old (!) lover who brutally murder her entire family in a tableau that had to have inspired Oliver Stone’s epic film (“Anything for My Darling: Murder in the Name of Love”).
Editor Mitzi Szereto herself again contributes a stellar account, this time about the “underground” brothel in the wealthy Chelsea district of England run by an unscrupulous couple taking advantage of immigrants who just want a way out of their home country. It’s delivered with her trademark bluntness and well-timed witticisms (“Ten Floors of Whores”). Keeping in the vein of ongoing cases, both Leona Marie Cross (“Ship Ahoy”) and Nadine Bachan (“The Crimes and Punishments of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka”) lay out stories of couples ripping people off and ruining lives in expose pieces that are as well-researched as they are told with an entertaining flourish.
Poison is always popular when crime and couples mix, and Cathy Pickens delivers a motive-driven piece that’s more why than who, artfully painting a very concise picture of couples who used the silent killer to various degrees of success (“Love and Strychnine in New Zealand”). Repeat contributor Tom Larsen goes for the tawdry and shocking chronicle of a teen couple who kill the girl’s younger sister after a love triangle develops (“If You Love Me, You’ll Kill Her”). Mathilde Stansky gets poetic with a murder for profit yarn where a brilliant and manipulative poet ensnares a timid young man and weaponizes him (“Poems About Murder & Love”). And in closing, Rachel Friedman brings surprising humor and takes it all the way back to the eighteenth century to tell the story of a man poorly poisoned by his bumbling wife and landlady in a tale that comes complete with a history lesson about sexist old laws concerning disobedience to the husband as actual treason (“A Whale of a Murder”)!
Informative, educational, and viciously entertaining, The Best New True Crime Stories: Partners in Crime is another homerun for Szereto and crew. It’s the liveliest bunch of stories to date in the series, and one gets the impression that a second volume in the same theme wouldn’t be hard to pull off. True crime junkies should be eating this one up, too.
