Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective’s ScrapbookEdited by Sean Tejaratchi
Introduction by Katherine Dunn
Feral House, paperback, 168 pages
Review by Steven Blake (1996)
Death Scenes is 167 pages of suffering and death caught in the raw glare of a police flashbulb. The scrapbook of little documented detective Jack Huddleston, it bloodily catalogues the pitiless Los Angeles of the 1930s and 1940s.
There’s suicide by hanging, by asphyxiation, by gun blast, by leaping from a tall building. There are tragic automobile accidents with bashed-in heads, brutal hit and runs, an extraordinary, surreal decapitation. And of course there’s murder. Murder for passion, money, kicks. People are shot, beaten, strangled, stabbed, mutilated, drowned in the bathtub. There are eviscerations; faces ripped apart by bullets; a teenage couple shredded by explosives; a baby beheaded by its mother; a head blown off by a shotgun. There are brutalised, violated children.
Page after horrendous page. At least those dying in robberies or accidents cling to a vestige of dignity, the epitaphs of so many murdered women are written in harsh photographs of naked, battered bodies. They die silently, robbed of self-respect. The frailty of the human condition is laid bare. Just be grateful for black and white photography.
So where’s the point? There’s undoubtedly a fascination. The eye is drawn to the background detail: we want to know who these people were. We humanize the all too easy word, ‛victim’. The results are heartbreaking. In the morgue shots, however, we are users; stripped of context they are nothing but pornography.
Katherine Dunn’s introduction veers between compassion and (I don’t say this lightly) prurience. Huddleston’s own scant captions exhibit an understandable gallows humour, but Dunn and Feral House have no such alibi. One senses a bloodlust on their part; whatever pathos emerges from these portraits is entirely serendipitous.
Certainly the book puts a lie to that pernicious nonsense about desensitization. Only a very few could look upon these images and remain unmoved. In that, Death Scenes – like this same publisher’s volume of Joe Coleman’s meticulously depraved paintings, Cosmic Retribution – is an affecting, heartrending book that should be seen as much as it cannot be recommended.