A Parasite's Progress

Episode 280 is a reading of "The Black Negligee Murder" By Frederic Holmes

Adapted from True Detective, v.43 no.1

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There’s a lot going on in this story. The seams show in the author’s reporting as he occasionally allows glimpses into his process, but at the same time, he makes it seem like he’s telling story from the point of view of the bad guy for most of the first two thirds of the narrative. The really cool nerdy part for me as a writer and a fan of pulp, is that you can hear the author’s disdain and sympathy both for the character as well as his determination to be fair and to let the story unfold no matter how disagreeable he may find it. So this tells me that he might have had a frank, lengthy, detailed interview with Dahlbender, was maybe even charmed by him a little, just as Rose Whitmore was, but also repulsed by his plotting and despicable actions. Still, the author seems to get in Dahlbender’s head and lets him have his say, but his self-pity doesn’t make his actions any less reprehensible.

I checked with some of the newspaper articles of the day, and this story seems to be sticking to the gist of what reporting I found. Dahlbender was quite contrite when he was caught and his confession seemingly heart-felt. True crime magazines have a terrible reputation for not being totally committed to the “true” in the interest of sensationalizing the stories. The do typically veer from newspaper journalism in a lot of ways, such as inventing dialogue and giving people intentions they can’t possibly know, but I have found them to be relatively reliable, at least as reliable as daily newspaper reporting, as far as the general facts of the case go. Before I share a story from the old pulps, I always do at least a cursory check against newspaper reporting to make sure there really was such a case and that the basic facts are accurate if not the details. There’s a big difference between a true story and a story based on a true story, and I try to lean toward the former in my curation. I’ve got some really well-told stories in my back pocket that I can’t yet prove their veracity, mainly because they’re about really old cases and I don’t have access to the right archives to give adequate confirmation. At least not yet. I’ll keep them in my pocket for now.

I’ve known some guys who did this kind of magazine work, and they were always meticulous in their reporting and had an advantage of time that daily newspaper reporters don’t have. This story was written three years after the trial and covers the case not only from the reporter’s and the perpetrator’s points of view, but the last third switches over to the police investigation, which is usually the sole perspective in most pulp stories. So I believe the author did his homework for us and presents us with an interesting, somewhat sympathetic portrait of a sleazy opportunist.



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