20. H is for Hawk

By Helen MacDonald

Was a bit difficult to find the exact cover on the web.  But this was the hardcover I found secondhand at Kestrel Books (fitting name!) a few years ago for $11. Finally got around to reading it and it was quite marvellous.  Three memoirs this year - a record!

15. A Killer By Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind

By Ann Wolbert Burgess and Steven Matthew Constantine

I loved Mindhunter, the 2017 Netflix series based on the 1995 book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit by retired FBI agent John Douglas. I also really loved the character Dr Wendy Carr, the psychologist who collaborated with Holden Ford and Bill Tench. 

 

The trio had fictional names but their characters were based on actual people and/or composites of members of the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.  It wasn't until I came across a Facebook post (one of those 'A Day in History' sites), about Dr Ann Burgess when I realized she was the real-life inspiration for Dr Wendy Carr.  It was likely written by AI, but still, it got me wanting to know more. I saved this as one of my birthday requests!

1975. Quantico, Virginia.  FBI agents Robert Ressler and John Douglas had been driving across America for months, sitting in prison cells, recording interviews with the most violent criminals in the country. They had hours of tape. Detailed confessions. Direct access to the minds of serial killers. And absolutely no idea what to do with it.

Ann Burgess listened to the first recording and delivered the verdict that would reshape criminal investigation forever: "This isn't research. This is just... stories."

The agents stared at her.

She continued: "You're asking them to talk about themselves. But you're not collecting data. You're not following methodology. You can't compare one interview to another because every conversation is different."

Silence.

"You're sitting on something extraordinary," Burgess said. "But the way you're doing this? It's scientifically worthless."

It seemed like the FB post totally dramatized the entire exchange because this dialogue wasn't even mentioned in Burgess' book at all!  But it hooked me nonetheless.

Ann Burgess hadn't planned to revolutionize criminal justice. She was a psychiatric nursing professor at Boston College. A researcher studying trauma. She was also a wife and mother of three. The FBI found her because of a groundbreaking paper she'd published in 1974 about rape trauma—proving that sexual assault caused lasting psychological damage at a time when courts barely recognized it. An agent read it and thought: We need this woman.

 

She was invited to give one lecture at Quantico about rape victimology. She ended up redesigning how the FBI investigates violent crime. The problem was obvious once she pointed it out:  The Behavioral Science Unit was brilliant but chaotic. They believed you could profile unknown offenders by studying crime patterns—revolutionary for the 1970s, when most law enforcement considered it pseudoscience.

This part was at least true, according to Ann Burgess' 2021 book, A Killer By Design.  It gave a fairly comprehensive overview of how the BSU evolved as well as the most famous cases they helped solve. It also wasn't quite what I expected.  First of all, Burgess was very proud of her pioneering work with rape survivors.  Over several years, Burgess had interviewed victims and documented how trauma worked—the phases, the coping mechanisms, the fear responses that made victims comply with their attackers. She'd proven that sexual violence wasn't about desire, it was about power and control.

 

When Burgess joined the BSU, she applied that framework to murderers and serial killers and helped redesign the entire interview protocol.  She created structured questionnaires so that every interview collected comparable data. She introduced victimology as the key to understanding the perpetrator—learnng details about the victims revealed offender selection patterns. She distinguished between "MO" (method that evolves with practice) and "signature" (psychological needs that stay consistent). She mapped escalation patterns to identify offenders earlier. In short, she established a scientific methodology for the early stages of criminal profiling.

 

So I was surprised how Burgess seemed to downplay her early contributions at the FBI.  The FB post also made it seem like Burgess had been overlooked.  In nearly every article, the credit went to FBI agents Ressler and Douglas. Ann Burgess's name appeared once, maybe twice, buried deep in the text. This became the pattern. But from what Burgess wrote, she wasn't interested in being featured in newspaper articles, she was more effective behind the scenes.  Even though Burgess was the only woman at the BSU, the agents seemed to really value and respect her.

But Mindhunter, despite being an excellent show, was probably to blame for misportraying Ann Burgess. Most viewers never knew Dr. Wendy Carr was based on a real person. Those who did assumed the show was accurate.

For years afterward, people approached Burgess at conferences asking if it was hard being closeted in the FBI in the 1970s.

She'd smile and correct them: "I'm not gay. I didn't move to Quantico. I'm not a psychologist. I'm a psychiatric nurse. And I have three children."

As if her actual story—mother of three, psychiatric nurse, revolutionized criminal profiling while commuting from Boston—wasn't interesting enough.

I wonder if this was one of the reasons why, at 85 years old, Burgess finally published her own account: A Killer by Design. Apparently she is still consulting and teaching at Boston College (she's 90 now!).

 

One aspect that was missing from her book was that it revealed nothing about her personal life.  Burgess kept her work separate from her family, though her husband seemed to be very supportive of her work. I believe he was an engineer and pilot, and would often fly her to Quantico!  I know if Burgess was a man, no one would be curious about his family life, but for me, it's precisely because she was a woman in an unusual field that it would've been so fascinating to learn how she juggled and struggled.  Perhaps that would be another book.  It was probably for the best that A Killer By Design focused solely on her work with the FBI.

 

With the Netflix show, I could see why they portrayed Wendy Carr the way they did, to keep things simple.  But in 2024, Hulu released "Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer"—a docu-series based on Burgess' 2021 book.  The docu-series interviewed her adult children, so we got a tiny glimpse of her family life.  For example, as a child, she had an uncle who had nurtured her love of music, but he was killed by his driver, who was secretly a drug addict. Ann's daughter mentioned how family members still found spots of blood behind lamps after he had died. His death changed the landscape for Ann, as it was her first experience with losing someone she loved in a violent way. 

 

I do have one criticism about the book regarding the photos in the middle. One was of a victim killed by John Joseph Joubert.  At first glance, the photo looked like a bloodied female mannequin lying half-buried in the snow.  Once I read about Joubert, I realized it was the naked body of a 13yo boy. The 1970's colour-processing made the blood look particularly garish against the pale, orangey skin, like a still from a B-grade horror movie.  The deep slashes left by the knife as it tore through the torso was clearly visible. I thought it was oddly exploitative to include such a disturbing photo because Burgess always wrote about respecting the victims, and it seemed wrong to depict a photo of a murdered adolescent.

 

14. The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street

By Helene Hanff

Just squeezed in The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street on the last day of April, with a total of six books read in a month - a new record, I think! One of them was a comic and Raising Girls was a parenting book that I'd been reading piecemeal since my daughter was in preschool.

The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street is the follow-up to 84, Charing Cross Road, which had some modest success upon its publication and was shortly bought by a London publisher to distribute in the UK.  This allowed author Helene Hanff to finally visit England after all these years and the sequel is comprised mostly of her journal entries with some correspondence and notes from her various friends, colleagues and contacts.  Like its predecessor, The Duchess of Bloomsbury was utterly charming and a very quick read. The only thing the sequel lacked was the connection between Frank, who died some years ago, and Helene, which anchored the first book.  In comparison, The Duchess of Bloomsbury felt much breezier, but that's not a bad thing.  This one is very much all about Helene!

Sometimes, it's better to read an introduction afterwards as they often reveal too much.  The intro by Plum Sykes is no exception but it does summarize The Duchess of Bloomsbury (and 84 Charing Cross Rd) perfectly:

I couldn’t put this book down for two reasons. One: It is the charming story of a midlife dream realized. Two: Helen Hanff was a completely and utterly neurotic New Yorker—my favorite kind of heroine. Although she eloquently writes that she would go to England “looking for the England of English literature,” the day before she leaves for London she also admits that she is “terrified of going abroad by myself (I am terrified of going to Queens or Brooklyn by myself; I get lost).” That evening, she confesses, “I got out of bed, had hysterics, a martini and two cigarettes, got back in bed, whiled away the rest of the night composing cables saying I wasn’t coming.”
     Helene does make it onto the plane, on June 17, 1971. The American publication of her book had brought with it avalanches of letters from adoring English fans, as well as offers from various correspondents to take care of her if she ever came to London. A former colonel, who had gone to work at Heathrow Airport after retiring from the army, volunteers to escort her through Customs and Immigration; Nora Doel, Frank’s widow, and his daughter, Sheila, insist on meeting her after Customs. A glamorous-sounding Old Etonian called Pat Buckley even offers to show her literary London. (It’s a very sweet idea, isn’t it, that you publish a book and various strangers offer to take you on jaunts in a foreign country. Nowadays, such offers would be met with a jail term for stalking.)

     Helene soon installs herself in the “shabby-genteel” Kenilworth Hotel, located on the corner of Great Russell and Bloomsbury Streets… Her trip starts in a blaze of glory—interviews with the London Evening Standard, the venerable BBC, and photographic sessions at Marks & Co., although it is no longer in business. There are dinners and lunches with her publishers and important journalists. But all that is just background noise for Helene. What she really craves is time to visit with Nora and Sheila, tour literary landmarks, and eat strawberries and cream with Pat Buckley in his Knightsbridge flat.
     Because she finds herself constantly being picked up at her hotel by someone who is intent on taking her off, in a Rolls-Royce or a Jaguar, on yet another thrilling English expedition, Helene soon christens herself the Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. Life is one long stream of excitement for Helene while in London—very different from her spartan existence in New York City.

There's more, but it's best to just read it yourself!

 

Note: This copy was a birthday gift from Olman.  I had requested a few books, including Ann Burgess' A Killer By Design, which is my next read.  Quite a change going from a charming wish-fulfillment travel memoir to one about notorious serial killers and FBI investigations!

3. 84, Charing Cross Road

By Helene Hanff

I do love second-hand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to “I hate to read new books,” and I hollered “Comrade!” to whoever owned it before me. 

I wanted to start off with this lovely review that perfectly captured my feelings of 84, Charing Cross Road (though I dispute the "aging" bit as Hanff was only 33 when she began her correspondence with Frank Doel in 1949!):

Epistolary fiction had always captured my fancies, but I never knew non-fiction of a similar kind could possess far more power to entwine the reader in its vast web of human intricacies ranging from the art of letter-writing, to the art of conversation and how human compassion can traverse miles and miles of oceans to make a mark on people one has never met, seen, or even heard about. The potency of words is such that seemingly polarized people are woven together in a relationship that transcends the barriers of friendship and love and all other abstract notions mankind has come to acknowledge and define.

 

Such is the relationship between an aging scriptwriter hailing from New York, the vivacious Helene Hanff and a certain Frank Doel of Marks & Co., booksellers located in London at the eponymous 84, Charing Cross Road. Ms. Hanff has an unquenchable thirst for English literature and in search for now obscure classics does she begin her acerbic albeit sidesplitting correspondence with the booksellers situated miles away from her shabby apartment. Ms. Hanff stumbles upon the book dealers through an ad placement made in the Saturday Review of Literature. From here onwards starts a warm and compassionate relationship between her and Mr. Doel on whom the responsibility of delivering her books falls on. This relationship is penned down in form of letters spanning almost twenty years.

 

I loved loved LOVED this book!  It was SUCH A DELIGHT.  Charming, witty, cozy and yet brimming with intelligence and affection.  And this unlikely friendship between a brazen NYC writer and reserved English bookseller, which spanned decades and the vast expanse of the Atlantic ocean, was real. I think I read it within 24 hours as the breezy, epistolary format made it very easy. And I didn't want it to end. It had to though, as Frank Doel unexpectedly passed away from illness in 1968.  This was not a surprise for me as I had already the watched the film adaptation back in May 2024. 

Apparently, 84, Charing Cross Road was one of Anne Bancroft's faves and her husband Mel Brooks bought the rights to the book for her birthday, which was how we ended up with the wonderful film starring Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins (with a young Dame Judi Dench as Mrs Noel). I was so fond of the adaptation that I put the book on my list. When I'm not in a rush to read something, I prefer ordering secondhand books from the USA as there is much more range and choice. Sure enough, I found this paperback Penguin edition for only $4.75 USD ($5.23 total with tax!) in great condition.

 

I had ordered the book to be delivered to my MIL's address when we were there during Xmas but I left it somewhat late and the book arrived shortly AFTER we had already returned home. It languished at my mother in law's for several months. I never told anyone to look for it until my SIL found it, still in its unopened envelope, during a summer visit after the Patch-Addario family had left. Hubs was finally able to bring it back in September!  By then I had lost my momentum. Some more months passed before I finally remembered I wanted to read 84 Charing Cross Road, and here we are.

 

I learned later that Hanff was an Anglophile and autodidact. Unable to afford a college education during the Great Depression, she undertook a comprehensive, self-taught English literature course that lasted over a decade. She was then in her early thirties, scraping a living as a freelance scriptwriter and magazine journalist. Her unconventional education was structured around the writings of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch ("Q"), specifically his lectures at Cambridge University. Hanff discovered On the Art of Writing by "Q" in a library and used his recommendations as her syllabus, covering authors and texts he admired.  Under ‘Q’s gentle, ghostly tutelage’, the self-study process took approximately 11 years because she would stop her study to investigate unfamiliar references and texts, as the scholar had assumed the reader would be already familiar with these books.  

So I started reading Q. Who assumes I’ve read The Fairie Queene and Paradise Lost. So I read Paradise Lost and find I need to have read the New Testament. So I read the New Testament and find I need to read the Latin Vulgate. And my Latin reader says the rules governing the ablative are the same as in English. A-ha. Thanks a LOT!

Hanff didn't want to bother with the library because she wanted to have her reference books within easy grasp.  When she inquired at local booksellers, she discovered that the American editions of the English books she wanted were of lesser quality and/or over-priced. When Hanff spotted the Marks & Co ad, she wrote to them and the rest was history.  

Gentlemen: Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature says that you specialize in out-of-print books. The phrase ‘antiquarian book-sellers’ scares me somewhat, as I equate ‘antique’ with expensive. I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books . . .

It's a niche genre, I guess, but I love reading about under the radar autodidacts, like The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

Another fact I learned was that Gene, Hanff's editor, was mentioned in her letters as being Chinese.  It was well-known that editor Genevieve Young was instrumental in getting 84, Charing Cross Road published. Young also had a fascinating legacy and bio of her own, entering the publishing business in the early 1950s, when there were few female editors and even fewer Asians.

It was bittersweet how Hanff finally made the journey to London well after Frank Doel had passed on and Marks & Co had long been shuttered. Even though Hanff made enough money to support herself relatively comfortably and was setting aside money for her trip, minor emergencies kept eating away at her savings. I think air travel was still prohibitively expensive for the average person during the 50s and 60s and ocean travel took longer.  Ironically, it wasn't until after 84, Charing Cross Road was published in 1970 that Hanff would afford to finally travel to London!  She wrote about her experience in her 1973 book The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, which is now on my list.

 

There are so many wonderful online reviews of 84, Charing Cross Road.

From A Literary Love Affair:

By the time she wrote to Marks & Co., Hanff ’s pursuits had become, frankly, arcane. Her first few letters include requests for a very particular edition of Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, the Sir Roger de Coverley Papers, de Tocqueville’s Journey to America and Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Four Socratic Dialogues.

But Helene Hanff is no dry old blue-stocking. She reads with the seasons, ordering ‘Dear goofy JH’s’ (John Henry Newman’s) The Idea of a University for Lent, and Pepys’s Diary for long winter evenings. On 25 March 1950, she writes to say that, with spring coming, she requires a book of love poems:

 No Keats or Shelley, send me poets who can make love without slobbering . . . Just a nice book preferably small enough to stick in a slacks pocket and take to Central Park.

Had she ever been in love? Rumours after her death suggested that her heart had been broken by some high-ranking American whose identity she kept under wraps for the sake of his wife and family. Was she lonely? We cannot tell. All that is clear from her letters is that for this single woman in her ‘moth-eaten sweaters and slacks’ books are friends and companions, and antiquarian books especially so. She loves ‘inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins’; she rejoices in the way that the books sent by Marks & Co. ‘open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to “hate to read new books”, and I hollered “Comrade!”’

In response to these wild, wise-cracking, passionate outpourings, ‘FPD’ of 84, Charing Cross Road is, at first, stiff: ‘Dear Madam’, his letters begin, and they are cautious almost to the point of curtness. Undaunted, Helene Hanff works at puncturing his reserve. ‘I hope “madam” doesn’t mean over there what it does here’, she writes, and on the rare occasions that she does not like the books he sends her, she makes no bones about it...

And that is how providence seems to operate, blocking the paths we think we want to take and then introducing unexpected openings in the form of opportunities and delights more wonderful than anything we could have dreamed up for ourselves. This was Helene Hanff ’s experience and, since meeting her through the pages of this book, it has been mine too. Nowadays if I find myself on Charing Cross Road it is with a sense of gratitude and wonder; and the knowledge that the best things come unbidden.

From A Life in Books:
 

The funny thing about Helene as an author is that she could not write fiction. She never made it as a playwright, though Lord knows she tried, and studied her art. She wrote scripts for TV shows, and reviewed books for film companies to advise on how well they might be adapted as films. The Lord of the Rings was one of her great ordeals, because she absolutely hated it, and charged her employers ten times her usual fee as recompense for the mental torture of trying to summarise the plot. (This explains clearly to me why she was not able to write fiction.)

I realized that there were many, many authors, and books, in the long history of English as a literature, that she just had to read. But the New York libraries couldn’t supply what she needed (she had a passion for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century essayists), and she began to order books from Marks & Co, who had advertised their services as an antiquarian book-finding service in the New York Times Saturday Review of Books.

If you like the sound of 84 Charing Cross Road, but want to find out more about her, try Underfoot in Show Business, and Q’s Legacy. There is also a what-I-did-in-London book, called The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, about when Helene finally gets to visit London, to see the BBC filming her book, and there’s also a book of New York reminiscences, Apple of My Eye. I’ve also found, to my great delight, that there’s a biography of Helene’s life, by Stephen Pastore, which I now have to read after a lifetime of vague guesses. 

Update (April): Olman got me this lovely Plain Foxed Edition for my birthday!

6. House of Psychotic Women

 By Kier-La Janisse   

I first knew of Kier-la Janisse when her Cinemuerte festival launched a few years after I finished film school. I remember attending screenings at the Blinding Light Cinema in Gastown, though not exactly what I saw. I do remember going to a rare screening of Zulawski’s Possession as well as a screening of Female Convict 701: Scorpion, both organized and introduced by Janisse before the audience. I can’t find online info about them (back then events weren’t really posted online!), but I believe Possession screened in Gastown and Female Convict screened at the Vogue theatre on Granville.

Obvs back then I didn’t realize how special and unique those screenings were. Until I read her 2012 memoir, House of Psychotic Women, I didn’t realize how much horror movies had shaped Janisse’s life into the singular individual she is today. Perhaps more accurately, it was more how the trajectory of Janisse’s early life had shaped her appreciation and fascination for horror and exploitation films.

And of course, Zulawki’s Possession was the film that first sparked Janisse’s obsession with horror and female psychology.

“In that first half Janisse circles back again and again to Andrezj Zulawski’s 1981 Possession, obsessed and enraptured by its “hypnotic cinematography” and “deep blue hues.” The film becomes an anchor for much of the analysis, the film that sparked a lifelong passion — her interest is hardly academic, no mere formal fascination. In an early passage that displays her insightful, potent prose, she writes,

‘There was something terrible in that film, a desperation I recognized in myself, in my ability to communicate effectively, and the frustration that would lead to despair, anger and hysteria.’ — House of Psychotic Women

Because of who she is, it’s no surprise that Janisse couldn’t write an ordinary memoir either. The full title is House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films, and it truly is a unique hybrid of autobiographical and scholarly film analysis seen through a very distinct personal lens. In the decade since its publication, there hasn’t been anything else quite like this book either.

Janisse’s early life was, unsurprisingly, marked by family dysfunction, instability, trauma and much unhappiness. You can check all the tumultuous factors off the list: being adopted, abandoned by an older stepsister who ran away, her parents separating when she was young. One time, she even witnessed her single mom being assaulted at home. There’s more, but I’m not going to list out all the awful things that happened because those things don’t entirely define a person. However, Janisse was honest enough to admit that for the longest time, she did let those bad things define her and almost ruin her life. At some point, she managed to pull herself together and make something of herself. Her love of cinema helped her find a job at Black Dog Video and that support system allowed her to eventually finish her education and go from there.

This review sums up HOPW well: 

“Horror films reflect some core truths about the way we live, the trials and tribulations that we endure, and our individual relationships with a world that seems, at best, indifferent to our well-being and, at worst, actively hostile. Not everyone feels this way, but a lot of us do. And there’s a deep satisfaction in seeing your experiences and perceptions honestly reflected back at you, even if said experiences and perceptions aren’t totally pleasant. It’s a reminder that although the world can be a hard place, you’re not alone in it.”

Olman and I actually saw Janisse at the 2012 Fantasia film festival when she was there to launch House of Psychotic Women. She was sitting quietly in the main lobby of the Concordia Hall building with modest stacks of HOPW laid out on the table before her. At the time, she looked like how I remembered her from my days in Vancouver.  Yet it didn’t even occur to me to purchase her book!  Fortunately, Olman keyed into the unique opportunity by purchasing the book from Janisse herself.  Like me, Olman has the tsundoku-esque habit of buying nice books and forgetting to read them, so House of Psychotic Women sat unread in a shelf for years.

At some point, I remembered the book and started reading it around 2019, though very intermittently. During the 2020 pandemic, my reading pace picked up again, and my film consumption sky rocketed. Thanks to Shudder, Criterion and other creative ways of acquiring digital meda, I was able to watch obscure horror films that have been on my list for years and years, ie. Marnie, Secret Ceremony, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, The Witch Who Came from the Sea, L’intérieur. I wanted to read about the films I watched and it made sense that I’d seek out HOPW again. Olman was happy to see me reading HOPW as he didn’t think he'd ever get around to reading it. So I now claim HOPW as mine!

Although I finished the memoir over a week ago, there's a film compendium that takes up about 40% of the book’s content. Janisse provides a short review for each film and there are, at minimum, 150 films! It’ll take me a while to read through them all, which I want to do and savour.

Here’s one I found amusing for Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972, Italy):

“It has often been said that the stringent Catholicism of Italy and Spain contributed greatly to the luridness of their horror films, the sleaziness of their comedies, the predatory nature of their thrillers. It’s no surprise: the Catholic religion is a staunch advocate of repression and self-denial, which usually just results in exactly the kind of sexually transgressive behaviour they are trying to warn against.”

Reading HOPW has definitely influenced the films I’ve been watching during the pandemic. And it’s been interesting to read Janisse’s take on films that I’ve already watched, not to mention a slew of new films to put on my to watch list as I make my way through the compendium.

As I’m writing this, I realized Janisse also made her first documentary, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, which I missed at 2021 Fantasia.

It’s just as well, because when I saw that it was (thankfully) also available on Shudder, it’s well over 3 hours long! I've started to watching it piecemeal and it’s packed with a LOT of films, most of which are quite obscure and/or forgotten, most of which I’ve never heard of and will probably never set eyes on.

Then not long after, I got sidetracked with Eli Roth’s History of Horror episodes, which are geared towards more mainstream horror afficianados. It didn’t take me long to finish all three seasons, while I’m not even hallway through Janisse’s Folk Horror doc. Shame! But to my pleasant surprise, Janisse was featured as a talking head expert on Roth’s series! So it was fantastic to see her there with the likes of Roth, Tarantino, and Stephen King.

P.S.

Fantasia Film Festival announced their 2022 lineup. Kier-La will be back to launch and promote an expanded edition of HOPW to celebrate its 10th anniversary of publication! It features a new cover (which Janisse prefers), reviews for 100 new films, and more glossy colour photos of cinematic female psychoses. If you pre-order, you’ll receive the limited edition with a CD of Janisse reading The Yellow Wallpaper set to originally composed music.