Newsletters

Dear friends,

I’ve been busy. It seems there’s a lot going on in these days leading up to the August 6 publication of my memoir, That Beast Was Not Me: One Forensic Psychologist, Five Decades of Conversations with Killers.

I mentioned in June that I was counting on word of mouth to help spread the news. I still am. If, unlike me, you are tech-savvy and know of ways to use the internet to make my organic, DIY-type marketing effort more robust than I know how to make it, I’ll be grateful for your assistance.

One way you can help is by directing your friends to my website:  www.jeffreysmalldon.com.

Currently, the book is available for pre-order from Black Lyon Publishing:

Soon, it will also be available for pre-order on Amazon.

On my website, I’ve posted a number of new reviews. I’ve also posted information about upcoming author appearances—and some other promotional activities as well.

Two of the new reviews are from John Douglas, the legendary FBI profiler whose book, Mindhunter, inspired the popular Netflix series of the same name; and renowned serial murder historian, Peter Vronsky, the author of books like Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters and American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years, 1950-2000.  

After reading an advance copy of Beast, Douglas wrote, in part, “Smalldon has produced a sprawling, page-turner of a book that’s at once entertaining, instructive, and utterly unique. Take it from someone who knows: Smalldon’s a mindhunter—and a crack shot at that. If you’re a fan of true crime, you’ll love That Beast Was Not Me.”

Vronsky wrote, “That Beast Was Not Me is unique among true crime-related memoirs. If you like true crime, I recommend that you buy a ticket and take the ride on this dark magic bus of a book.”

• Recently, New York Times bestselling true crime author M. William Phelps interviewed me for an upcoming episode of his popular podcast, Crossing the Line with M. William Phelps. The episode is slated to air sometime in either late-July or early-August. (I should perhaps note that due to some technical difficulties on this end—surprise!—the interview ended up having to be cut short. So it goes. In any case, Phelps said he’ll have me on again.)

• An article focusing on Beast and my career as a forensic psychologist is slated to appear in the August issue of Columbus Monthly magazine.

• During the last week of July, I’ll be interviewed by a reporter for Matter News, Columbus’s most prominent alternative news source. 

• On August 5, Tim Fox will be interviewing me for an episode of Bridge Street, a television program that airs in Syracuse, New York.

• On August 13, Gramercy Books in Bexley, Ohio is hosting an author event to mark the publication of That Beast Was Not Me. I’ll be in conversation with mystery/suspense novelist Andrew Welsh-Huggins, whose book No Winners Here Tonight is considered the definitive history of the death penalty in Ohio.

• On August 15, Ted Baker will interview me for his FLX Morning radio show in Geneva, New York.

• On August 19, I’ll discuss Beast at the North Tonawanda Public Library in North Tonawanda, New York. 

• On August 20, I’ll appear on the television program Good Morning Rochester, which airs in Rochester, New York.

• On August 21, I’ll be interviewed for the television program Daytime Buffalo—which airs in Buffalo, New York.

• On August 22, the North Tonawanda History Museum is hosting me for an author event and book signing.

Stay tuned. A lot of other stuff is currently in the works…

Here’s what I’ve been reading lately:  

Once Upon a Time
by Elizabeth Beller (Gallery Books)

If, during the 1990s, you were paying attention to the media’s way of portraying Carolyn Bessette, the former Calvin Klein executive who married “America’s prince,” John F. Kennedy, Jr., in September of 1996, you probably remember how regularly you encountered words and phrases like “icy,” “gold digger,” “difficult,” “vapid,” “entitled,” and “unapproachable.”

In this warm and sympathetic biography of Bessette, journalist Beller bends over backward in an attempt to correct the record. As part of her research, she interviewed many of her subject’s friends, family members, and work associates. Her portrayal of Bessette bears only a passing resemblance to the tabloid caricatures that helped—along with the paparazzi’s non-stop harassment—to turn  Bessette into a near-recluse in the months leading up to the tragic July 1999 plane crash that ended her life, along with the lives of her husband and her sister Lauren. 

According to Beller, Bessette was intelligent, kind, funny, compassionate, independent, fiercely loyal to those she considered her friends, strong-willed, assertive, and deeply curious about other people’s lives. It’s hardly surprising that she struggled with some degree of depression, not to mention a growing sense of insecurity and even paranoia that stemmed from her sense that many Americans would never regard her as good enough for the Kennedy heir they’d loved and revered ever since the day they observed him saluting his father’s coffin in November 1963—on the day he turned three. 

At a memorial service for Bessette, her friend Carole Radziwell, the wife of John Jr.’s closest friend, his cousin Anthony, said this about her: “She was wild and vivid in a cautious and pale world. Always burning a little more brightly than any of us around her. And John was so beguiled and admiring of the alchemy she worked on her friends, transforming them into happier and bolder versions of themselves.”

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma
by Claire Dederer (Alfred A. Knopf)

This is an odd book—or so it seemed to me. It grew out of a 2017 essay that its author, Claire Dederer, published in the Paris Review. 

The question at the heart of Dederer’s inquiry: How are we supposed to deal with the confusion and ambivalence we feel whenever we’re forced to admit that artists whose work we admire are—or were—deeply flawed human beings? Even, in some cases, monsters?

The question is an interesting one. It’s what drew me to Dederer’s book in the first place. Among the artists she discusses:  Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, J.K. Rowling, Michael Jackson, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Doris Lessing, and Sylvia Plath.

The problem, or at least one of them, is that Dederer’s analysis is unfocused and undisciplined, more like an extended meditation on an unsolvable conundrum than anything else. She can’t seem to figure out exactly what it is she wants to say about the extreme dissonance that sometimes results when an artist’s troubling biography collides with a reader’s biography, and with that reader’s necessarily subjective point of view.

Ultimately, she doesn’t offer a solution; she simply acknowledges the complexity of the problem. Perhaps that’s all anyone could have hoped for. Each fan of each badly flawed artist will, in the end, have to decide whether the aesthetic merits of the artist’s creations outweigh the evidence of the “monstrous” aspects of his/her character and life choices. 

Lou Reed: The King of New York
by Will Hermes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

At the 50th birthday party David Bowie threw for himself at Madison Square Garden, he pronounced Lou Reed, who was his honored guest, “the King of New York.” Who could argue?

Reed, who died in 2013, was, more than anything else, a disrupter: a fearless, restless, troubled, prickly, enormously influential provocateur whose songs about the New York demimonde often dealt with subjects like drug addiction, mental illness, electroshock therapy, violence, and forms of sexuality that were seen as shocking and transgressive by members of polite society.

Hermes’ biography is thorough, engrossing, and informative about nearly every aspect of Reed’s life, including his artistic collaborations with figures such as Nico, John Cale, and Andy Warhol; his time as a non-conforming undergraduate at Syracuse University, where he fell under the influence of the brilliant but unstable poet Delmore Schwartz; his groundbreaking work with the Velvet Underground; and his uneven but often brilliant career as a solo artist. Hermes also writes of Reed’s relationships with a dizzying succession of male and female partners in the years leading up to the start of his relationship with multi-media artist Laurie Anderson, with whom he spent the final two decades of his life. 

An anecdote from Reed’s Syracuse years speaks volumes about the iconoclast’s irascible personality and disruptive ways. A friend had convinced Lou to attend some sort of fraternity rush function. One of the fraternity members took it upon himself to mock Reed’s clothes and disheveled appearance. Reed’s response? “I wouldn’t join this fucking fraternity if you paid me. And you are the biggest asshole that I’ve ever met. As far as I’m concerned, I hope that you die soon.” Ouch.

On a personal note: Not long before the shocking and totally unexpected November 2017 death of guitar-pop legend Tommy Keene, I attended a show of Keene’s at Schubas Tavern in Chicago. For his encore, Keene performed a ferocious mash-up of Reed’s “Kill Your Sons” (about Reed’s experience of undergoing electroshock therapy when he was only 17) and the Stones’ “Street Fighting Man.” Incendiary in the best possible way. RIP Lou Reed. RIP Tommy Keene.

Mothers of the Mind
by Rachel Trethewey (The History Press)

In this intriguing and illuminating book, Rachel Trethewey shines a bright light on three formidable mothers who helped shape the lives and art of three of the twentieth century’s most famous female writers: Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, and Sylvia Plath. 

All three sections of the book are informative and well worth reading. I discovered a great deal I hadn’t known previously about the relationship between Julia Stephen and her daughter, Virginia Woolf; and about the relationship between Clara Boehmer and her daughter, Agatha Christie. 

For me, however, the book’s most fascinating section also happens to be its longest. It’s the section pertaining to the complicated, sometimes highly fraught relationship between Sylvia Plath and her mother, Aurelia. 

On one hand, there are the pages upon pages of loving, almost adoring letters that Sylvia wrote home from Smith College and, later, from England, where she attended Cambridge as a Fulbright Scholar and met the poet Ted Hughes, who became her husband. On the other hand, there is Plath’s late admission that she experienced a profound sense of liberation when her psychiatrist gave her permission to “hate” the maternal figure she’d felt emotionally tethered to throughout her life. 

And who can forget the famous last two lines of Plath’s poem, “Medusa”? “Off, off, eely tentacle!/ There is nothing between us.”

A lot of the information contained in the Sylvia/Aurelia part of Trethewey’s book was familiar to me; however, there was much that was revelatory. Perhaps the single most interesting part of the chapter was the part pertaining to the young Aurelia’s relationship with a much older male professor who she fell in love with before ever meeting Sylvia’s father, Otto. If Trethewey is correct, the emotional repercussions of that first lover’s rejection colored many aspects of Aurelia’s outlook toward men and played a significant role in determining not just the trajectory of her daughter’s life but the themes of her art.

I was never quite sure what to expect of a first meeting with a new capital case defendant. I have to admit that a lot of the time, my knowledge of what the defendant was alleged to have done established a kind of baseline for my expectations.

In the case I’m thinking about right now, what I knew going in was that the defendant was alleged to have killed a young woman, then cut off her fingers before severing her head, which the police later discovered in the oven at the crime scene. Those “facts of the case” were enough to make me wonder if I was about to encounter a wild-eyed maniac of one kind or another. Perhaps a viable candidate for a defense of not guilty by reason of insanity? 

When I arrived at the county jail and passed through security, I could see through a glass partition that the defendant was already seated in the room where our meeting was to take place. He didn’t look like a maniac. In fact, he was sitting quietly, looking less like an out-of-control killer than a slightly disheveled college student. Of course he was wearing rubber sandals and the same jail scrubs that all the inmates wore. 

As I entered the room, I asked the deputy who had acted as my escort if he would please remove the defendant’s handcuffs. The defendant looked up at me and smiled, I assumed because he was grateful for this early indication of my interest in having him be as comfortable as possible during the time we spent together. Then I noticed that he’d turned his gaze toward the lower half of my body. 

“Awww man, I dig those cords,” he said.

“Cords? Are you talking about these corduroy pants I’m wearing?”

“Yeah, man” he said. “I really dig the forest green. And I’ve always liked, how do you say it, thin wale, narrow wale, a lot better than wide wale. So yeah, I think those are cool.”

“Well, thanks.”

So that’s how our session got underway. It certainly wasn’t what I’d been expecting, but it helped to create a relaxed, positive vibe that continued all throughout the meeting. The guy never gave me even the slightest bit of trouble—and as it turned out, he had a perfectly rational (if hideous) explanation for why he did what he did at the time of the offenses that made him a candidate for Ohio’s death penalty.

-Jeff

P.S. Again, this is the “only if you’re interested” part of my newsletter. Since music plays such a huge role in my own life, I like to end each issue with a couple of song recommendations.

Last year, I saw Mary Fahl, formerly of the October Project, at an intimate venue here in Columbus. She’s a wonderful singer. Her last record consisted of cover versions of a number of songs that she loved when she was a young woman. Her take on ELO’s “Can’t Get It Out of My Head” is mesmerizing. Check out the video on You Tube.

Eliza Gilkyson is another female vocalist I can’t seem to get enough of these days. What a voice! I could recommend many, many of her songs—but for now, you can improve your day by checking out her fabulous cover of Jackson Browne’s “Before the Deluge.”