There are any number of novels based on true crimes. Dominick Dunne has written a number of these. A Season in Purgatory, based on the murder of Martha Moxley in Greenwich comes first to mind. Literary heavyweight Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song is about Gary Gilmore, who in 1977 became the first person executed in the United States since the reinstitution of the death penalty.
Josephine Tey’s detective Alan Grant re-examines the historical mystery surrounding Richard the III in the perennial 1951 favorite The Daughter of Time.
But perhaps the most revered classic of this genre is James M. Cain’s 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, based on the sensational 1927 case of Ruth Snyder. Snyder was a Queens, New York, housewife who conspired with her lover to murder her husband so they could collect the insurance money. A photo of Ruth Snyder’s electrocution in the New York Daily News in 1928 shocked the nation.
Edgar-winning author Megan Abbott has a new novel, Bury Me Deep, inspired by the Infamous "Trunk Murderess" Winnie Ruth Judd. In 1931 Judd was convicted —in a trial also marked by sensationalized newspaper coverage—of the murder of Agnes LeRoi, one of two friends she allegedly killed in mid-October 1931 in Phoenix, Arizona. All three women were interested in the same man. The bodies were shipped in trunks by train from Phoenix to Los Angeles.
Judd was sentenced to be hanged in February of 1933 and sent to Arizona State Prison. The death sentence was repealed and she was sent to Arizona State Mental Hospital. She escaped seven times, often at large for several years at a time, and was eventually released in 1971. She lived until the age of ninety-three.
Abbott’s protagonist Marion Seeley, a young woman abandoned in Phoenix by her doctor husband, finds a job at a medical clinic. She becomes fast friends with Louise, a vivacious nurse, and her roommate, Ginny. Marion is swept up in the exuberant life of the girls, who supplement their scant income by entertaining the town's most powerful men with wild parties. She becomes involved with a local rogue, Joe Lanigan, and when the other women confront Marion about her relationship with Joe, a heated argument leads to murder.
Publishers Weekly promises us a “shocking ending.”
An earlier novel by Abbott, The Song is You (2007), is based on the unsolved October 1949 disappearance of actress Jean Spangler.
