his book is non-fiction, but it reads like a novel, or perhaps a somewhat fictionalized true crime story. It's full title is a mouthful.

The biggest problem with the book is that it's poorly-edited, with one not-especially-interesting case taking up almost 2/3 of the book's length, another taking up 1/4, and the best parts, the random odd news items and quotes, filling just 10 pages here and 20 pages there.  If the longest case had been edited down by 50%, and the shorter bits had been given more space and added to, this could have been a fun look at what daily life was like 125 years ago.  I love the concept, but the execution is lacking, as my scores indicated.

You can see the categories explained here, if you need more details. I'm reviewing this as it were a novel, rather than non-fiction, since the vast majority of the book was taken up by two novella-length retellings of news events.

Forgotten News, by Jack Finney
Concept: 7
Writing Quality/Flow: 5/4
Characters: 4
Fun Factor: 3
Page Turner: 2
Re-readability: 3
Overall: 3

Despite the fact that I got this book for free, from a library giveaway, I felt a bit cheated. It's a bait and switch, basically.  The title and the back cover blurb make it sound like some sort of News of the Weird, circa 1880, with a variety of interesting stories that have long since been forgotten, and that will give us a unique look into life a century and a quarter ago. Here's a quote from the back cover:

[Jack Finney] magically transports readers back into the strange and fascinating 19th-century world of Forgotten News with this collection of mysterious and lurid stories that time forgot. Finney's research into magazines and newspapers of the period unveiled the true-life drama of a fashionable doctor killed by his exceedingly respectable mistress, of South Pacific cannibals who ate their way through 300 shipwrecked sailors, of a trapper's strange gift to the Preside of the United States, of the tragic wreck of a steamship off the coast of Florida...

None of this is a lie, and all of this is in the book. The problem is that the retelling of the doctor's murder case and the steamship wreck make up 98% of the book, and both of them get very, very boring before they finally wrap up. Finney did great research, but he was much too in love with both stories and every single last detail he unearthed about them, and while the steamship disaster isn't too bad, the doctor's murder, a case with less complexity and weirdness than any average episode of Law and Order, goes on and on and on, from page 4 up to page 186 of the 290 page book.  There are then 10 pages of interesting short bits of wackiness from the past, before the steamship story takes over on page 204 and runs through 276. After that there are 10 more pages of lively and bizarre news items from the turn of the century to close out the book.

The author admits as much in the introduction, but he's evidently a great antiquarian, and after he'd spent months and months reading every installment of the NY Times, the NY Tribune, and Frank Leslie's Illustrated (weekly) Newspaper, he simply couldn't help himself from summarizing the cases in mind-numbing detail. In theory, that's where an editor steps in and tells Mr. Finney that although his research is admirable, he simply can't regurgitate every single tidbit from every single news item he read about the case, and that some cutting must be done to keep readers from zoning out the twentieth time they hear about a piece of mishandled evidence or another anecdote about the insanely-overzealous medical examiner.

That didn't happen though, and as such the first 180 pages are by far the least interesting chunk of the book. Worse yet, after you slog through all of that damn background and murder and trial and investigation and more trial and so on... there's no conclusion. The prosecution presented an appallingly incompetent case that went against what obviously happened, the jury found the doctor's would-be wife innocent, and there was no retrial, no trial for the man who apparently did the actual murder, and the woman and the other principles in the story basically vanished from the face of the earth once the trial concluded. If you read this book and get through all the first 186 pages and don't wind up cursing out loud as you cry, "That's it? I read all that shit for that!" you're a stronger man (or possibly woman) than me.

The rest of the book is pretty good though, especially the short bits on how weird and wacky people were in the public arena back in the 1880s, and even the steamship disaster makes for a pretty compelling story, though there again Finney overdoes the info, especially the various survivor tales he compiled from numerous different sources, which tend to go on and on. If the whole book had been made up of the shorter items, and those had been expanded a bit, I'd have really enjoyed the read. Especially if the main murder case had stuck to the important details, and had been written up in around 100 pages, rather than 180.

As it is, don't buy this, but if you see it used or at a library, skim the short bits, enjoy the very weird slices of life from NYC 120 years ago, and put it back on the shelf. You'll be much happier than if you waste several hours of your vacation slogging through all the rest for so little pay off.

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