Almost like a novel

To that list of creative historian/biographers that includes Erik Larson, Candice Millard and, way back when, Truman Capote, you can add the name Brad Ricca, whose recent Mrs. Sherlock Holmes proves that the earlier Super Boys was no fluke.

By the use of the word creative I mean to suggest that these writers write history and biography in the manner of novelists. In the second chapter of Ricca's newer book, for example, we read "Twenty-year-old Christina wiped away the steam and scraped at the spidery frost on the window." Well, 100 years later, how do we know Christina wiped away steam and scraped frost from the window. Perhaps because we know it was a frigid February day in New York City and that is what one would do in order to look out a window, and looking out a window is what one might do if one's sister is very late coming home.

Ricca gives pages and pages of notes and references to justify such sentences as this. A reader feels confident that if this isn't exactly what happened, it must be close to what happened.

The real problem with Ricca's book about a female lawyer who a century ago won brief fame for her detective skills is that while he may tell the story as if it were a novel, the story itself doesn't quite cooperate. Most people's lives don't have plots, as I mentioned in a blog post a few weeks ago ("Story vs. plot," June 8, 2018). Grace Humiston makes quite a splash, then fades into relative obscurity. The book ends with more whimper than bang, but the first couple hundred pages make excellent reading.

The case that occupies most of the book involves a young woman, Christina's sister Ruth Cruger, who never returns home from ice skating. Her father insists his daughter is a good girl who would never run away from home. The police think otherwise, but they do search a motorcycle shop owned by Alfredo Cocchi where Ruth is believed to have stopped. No evidence is found, yet later Cocchi himself disappears and turns up in Italy, leaving his wife behind in New York.

Henry Cruger, the girl's father, hires Grace Humiston to investigate. She becomes convinced that Ruth is dead and that Cocchi is involved. The body must be in the basement of his workshop, which Mrs. Cocchi guards zealously. Eventually Humiston’s team of investigators do find the body exactly where she knew it would be.

Cocchi makes two confessions, one that he killed Ruth to stop her screaming when he sexually assaulted her and a second that his wife killed her. Yet he is never returned to New York to stand trial. Various police officers are held accountable, however, both for failing to find the body when they searched the shop and for showing Cocchi favoritism because he often worked on their motorcycles and was a friend of theirs. This turned the police against Humiston.

Other reversals follow, and her reputation suffers. She remains a champion of missing girls, but with diminishing success. Ricca tells the story well, much like a novel, but because it is true, it cannot end like one.