A True Crime Story We Can't Stop Retelling

True Crime Fiction goes to London (Part 2)

Last month I visited London and of course made some time for true crime fiction content! You can read part 1 about Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes here.

On our last night in London, we saw a production of Machinal at the Old Vic.¹ This play, written by Sophie Treadwell,² is a fictionalization of the crime and trial of Ruth Snyder, who murdered her husband with the help of her lover in 1927, and was executed in 1928. Treadwell’s play premiered on Broadway (with Clark Gable!) eight months later.

Machinal’s stage directions and script³ call for an expressionistic production of a naturalist parable. I am not well versed in the history or precepts of theatrical Expressionsim,⁴ but this front matter in particular seems to describe the scenic “exaggeration and distortion” meant to evoke “strong feelings” in the audience that defines the movement:

The Hope is to create a stage production that will have ‘style’ and at the same time, by the story’s own innate drama, by the directness of its telling, by the variety and quick changingness of its scenes, and the excitement of its sounds, to create an interesting play.

And the production we saw was certainly interesting! The lighting and sound design were startling in their effectiveness as the stage transformed from the protagonist’s (identified only as the “Young Woman”) workplace, home, honeymoon hotel room, hospital room, and eventually into her execution chamber. Each space might as well have been the latter, as she feels constantly and hopelessly trapped by the machinations of the modern world and heteronormative expectations of women, which is a tenet of naturalism.⁵ As the Young Woman moves through the months leading to her crime and execution, she feels confined, not liberated, by a job, a wealthy marriage, and an affair that leads her to murder her husband. She never achieves the freedom she desires.⁶

The production seems to be getting mostly good reviews, though the group of teenage girls we sat behind, likely there on a school trip, would not concur. Waiting for the loo⁷ after the performance, I overheard one remark to her friend that the play was “the most hysterical thing” she had ever seen. I believe she was referring to the way the Young Woman’s physical performance enacted both pain and orgasmic pleasure. And honestly, I think she’s on to something.

Here’s where we move on from any sort of review of the production I saw, and more into thinking about how this true story of Ruth Snyder’s act of violence and desperation has been adapted and transformed in the years since her execution. The first piece of true crime content that was generated by her case is an infamous photograph of her body, mid-execution, that has been reproduced not only in papers all over the country,⁸ but also alluded to often in popular media.⁹ After Treadwell’s play, the Snyder case was the (at least partial) inspiration for two even more famous adaptations, Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice.

I’m left wondering if naturalism, and later noir, is the most suitable genre for adapting this story? In the production we saw, the Young Woman, though a talented actress, does seem hysterical as she attempts to gain a degree of agency within a (theatrical) world that is literally not designed to deliver her to any fate other than death. And noir, or hardboiled fiction, shares some of the same determinist strictures as naturalism, with a serving of misogynist femme fatale characterization on the side. We cannot know Ruth Snyder’s motivations or desires, and it seems she was undoubtedly responsible for her husband’s death, so if you want to tell her story in a way that imagines her as a woman forced into desperate acts of violence by an unjust world, perhaps it would be more effective for the audience you want to reach (which seems to absolutely include young women), to characterize that woman not as a hysterical animal, or a greedy manipulator, but as a sympathetic figure who deserves better options. And naturalism, at least, offers none.

I was also left wondering why Ruth Snyder’s story is one that we, culturally, keep retelling (Machinal in 1928; Double Indemnity novel in 1936, film in 1944; The Postman Always Rings Twice novel in 1934, film in 1946, remake in 1981). It reminds me of the film A Star Is Born (1937, 1954, 1976, 2018). Of course Snyder’s case is compelling because not that many women are executed for murder. And the photo evidence has a lot to do with it. But much like A Star Is Born, it’s also a story about a woman who wants something more for herself than the world will willingly give. And one way or another, she gets punished for it.

1. A more historically sophisticated writer could probably do a newsletter on the Old Vic alone, but unfortunately you’re stuck with me, whose only true crime association with the theatre is, shudder, Kevin Spacey.

2. Do take a moment to peruse her wikipedia page. She seems like quite a Jazz Age badass.

3. I found it here.

4. Let’s hope Wikipedia is!

5. No Wikipedia link necessary since I was trained in twentieth-century-American literature! But just in case you don’t trust me.

6. It must also be said that the production, and the original play, often uses characters of color (Mexican freedom fighters, a Black prisoner singing a spiritual) as proxies for and representations of the Young (white) Woman’s desired freedom. It wasn’t a good look then and it’s still not now.

7. Am I not obnoxious! Am I not intolerable!

8. The most famous is probably the Daily News with the accurate but salacious headline “Dead!” Apparently the photographer got around a ban on cameras by strapping a miniature one to his ankle and sneaking it into Sing Sing. I’m avoiding linking to the image since part 1 of this series took a true crime tour to task for displaying women’s dead bodies for content, but you can definitely find it with the most cursory of googles.

9. Any My Chemical Romance fans out there?