Bloody Murder: The Homicide Tradition in Children’s Literature by Michelle Ann Abate (review)

If Americans are obsessed with violence, we are also fixated on puzzling out the roots, the cultural representations, and the effects of our nation’s bloody obsession. In her most recent book, Michelle Ann Abate examines how homicide, one of the most horrific acts of violence, “has formed a beguiling subject and recurring theme in narratives popular with American youth for centuries” (10). Employing an interdisciplinary framework, Abate positions children’s books involving murders within the legal and sociocultural history of the United States and within a media culture in which killings and other depictions of violence can be readily found in books, films, television shows, video games, news programs, and even “murderabilia.” Arguing that literary works for children previously have been excluded from cultural analyses of homicide in the United States, Abate aptly corrects this oversight, offering detailed readings of seven well-known stories for children and young adults in order to link the lethal violence in children’s literature to historical events and figures, as well as to different understandings and attitudes about murder.

Abate observes, “Far from existing outside of or even separate from the history of homicide, popular American children’s literature is both influenced by it and exerts an influence on it” (25). Several of the featured children’s books address issues related directly to homicide and relevant investigatory policies and trial procedures. For example, Abate’s analysis of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) relates the British antigallows movement that emerged during Lewis Carroll’s lifetime to his satirical portrayal of the two capital trials of the Mouse and the Knave of Hearts in the novel. Similarly, Abate draws connections between the conclusions of early criminal anthropologists, most notably Cesare Lombroso, and the physical descriptions that Edgar Rice Burroughs provides of murderers in Tarzan of the Apes (1914). Discussing Tarzan’s homicidal characters, Abate argues that “their similarities to the Italian researcher’s portrait of the ‘born criminal’ are too numerous to be merely coincidental” (105). Burroughs’s description of Tarzan’s “finely formed features, well-proportioned face, and good-looking appearance” (113) absolves him of being Lombroso’s “criminal type,” despite the numerous murders that he commits throughout the book. Just as Abate situates Tarzan within the developing field of criminal anthropology, she also locates Nancy Drew and her “famous hunches, her powerful sense of intuition, and her unfailingly accurate gut feelings” (120) within the arena of parapsychology, comparing Nancy and Eugenie Dennis, a real-life psychic from the 1920s and 1930s, and showing ways in which Nancy uses her psychic ability to prevent murders and to solve other crimes.

Yet children’s books about homicide and attempted homicide deal not only with crimes and related legal policies and applied theories. They also reflect changing cultural beliefs about murder and evolving representations of murderers in different genres. According to Abate, S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967) preserves the legacy of the paperback pulp novels of the 1930s through the 1960s, particularly the accounts of juvenile delinquency, for an intended readership of young adults. Likewise, Abate demonstrates how Walter Dean Myers’s Monster (1999) combines the motivations and intentions of colonial-era execution sermons and more contemporary, sensationalized murder literature to introduce a sympathetic protagonist who may have been involved in a horribly violent, graphically narrated murder. In her chapter on Monster, Abate reveals a changing cultural perception of murderers as individuals who are repellant rather than pitiable, whereas in her chapter on “Snow White,” the most psychoanalytic chapter of the book, she examines a longstanding need for parents to submerge their homicidal feelings for their offspring rather than expressing them openly. Finally, through a discussion of the killings of zombies in Stacey Jay’s My So-Called Death (2010), Abate speculates about the possible future of murder and the relevant social and legal ramifications if the United States indeed moves into a posthuman and perhaps “posthomicide” era.

Though Abate references homicides...