Neglected Murderesses  

Peripatetic Path of the Murderesses’ Art

 The dire dozen first appeared in Murderess Ink (1980), a follow-up to Murder Ink, Workman Press, (1979), by Dilys Winn, in a chapter titled “Neglected Murderesses Series.” In the same year, they were repackaged with a selection of whimsical cat drawings by Gorey from Cat Catalog, also from Workman, in a small 1980 trade paperback titled Dancing Cats and Neglected Murderesses.  However, Gorey was so disappointed with the look of the paperback, that he published a limited edition of 300 signed/numbered and 26 signed/lettered books featuring his elegantly-designed front and back cover, and limitation page, but retaining the poorly printed Workman interior pages.[i]

In 1989 Gorey gave the murderesses a fresh printing and larger format through his Fantod Press as a set of Dogear Wryde postcards. The sets were limited to 250 copies, each of which was signed, numbered, and packaged in an illustrated envelope.

Never brought to justice for their crimes, these scoundrels carried on in Betrayed Confidence, an album of seven different dogear Wryde postcard series from 1992. They reappear in Amphigorey Again in 2006, so well reproduced that Gorey’s glorious penwork is, at last, realized. Ten years later, they emerge for the first time in full color in a boxed set of note cards — five each of four designs Gorey’s limited edition — from Pomegranate.

My favorite of the original twelve designs portrays Natasha Batti-Loupstein who pulverized a paste necklace and sprinkled it over a tray of canapes, at Villa Libellule, Nice, 1923. Her iniquity was as elegant and eerie as is Natasha herself and the modern art under which she posed.

Theses lethal ladies may come to the small screen if news from Variety becomes fact. Television producer Norman Reedus is developing a live-action, AMC broadcast series of Gorey’s Neglected Murderesses. No release date is set as of this writing.

The evil twelve may come to the small screen if news from Variety becomes fact. Television producer Norman Reedus is developing a live-action AMC broadcast series of Gorey’s Neglected Murderesses. No release date is set as of this writing.

 

Murder on Mind

Was Gorey possessed by murder and death?  Some of his favorite readings were Agatha Christie mystery novels, which, by definition, are about murder. Death takes no holiday in The Deranged Cousins —Rosemary Marsh, Mary Rosemarsh, and Marsh Maryrose, by name. In a quarrel while beach-combing one September afternoon, Mary struck Rose with a brown china door knob she had already found and killed her.       

There are twenty– six deaths in Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies!  Most of them are caused by animals, accident, or the child’s poor judgement, but two are heinous murders:

H is for Hector done in by a thug

K is for Kate who was struck with an axe

Even more ghastly than the Tinies, The Loathsome Couple unveils some dreadful true murders. Based on the killing spree by Ian Brady and Myra Handley committed between 1963-1965, Gorey sticks closely to the facts covered by the British press under “The Moors Murders” banner. In his curiously canny way, he tells of the couple’s grievous beginnings, their torture-murders of several children, and their final incarceration. Gorey spares no effort in his illustrations for the book, either. They are heavily crosshatched in a way that reinforces the gloom in the telling of the tale.

As the flyleaf of the book’s first edition states (in Gorey’s hand), “This book may well prove to be the author’s most unpleasant ever.” [i]

Thus, when we come to these unsung murderesses, they are nowhere as vicious as the Moors Murders couple, or others Gorey may have encountered through his voracious reading, like Gesche Gottfried, an early 19th century, German serial killer who poisoned fifteen people — including her parents, her twin brother, her children, and her husbands, or Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova, an 18th-century Russian noblewoman, who hired young women, then brutally beat and tortured them so badly that more than one hundred of them died at her hands. Nor where the eponymous murderesses as famous as Lizzie Borden— sadly, they were completely neglected until Gorey brought them up.

Lighten Up

Gorey was no more obsessed with death than anyone who follows the daily news, reads detective books, or likes scary movie. Like its obverse side, life, it’s an exciting, dramatic event that makes a good story. Fatalities, indeed, abound in his writings, but are not the only elements. He has many, many other tools on his bench to work with. There is rhythm, rhyme, and wordplay. He uses misdirection, hints at buried ideas, and makes us gasp in surprise at his non sequiturs. His art is enriched with action, mood, and place. He is adept at character. We know who and what they are in his works.

The one pervasive component in most of his ingenious art is humor— sly and dry. It doesn’t make fun of death; it eases the fear of it, and one of his often-used modes of humor is parody of literary forms.as typified by The Gashlycrumb Tinies and Neglected Murderesses.

An image of a death’s-headed leader tending a troop of little children on the front cover of The Gashlycrumb Tinies, doesn’t tell the reader that it is an abecedarium. The first page, however, makes it evident it that this is no kid’s ABC book. Instead of the usually bland “A is for apple, C is for cat,” we get:

“A is for Amy who fell down the stairs” followed by twenty-five more children’s fatalities, that are as uncommon as are the names of the doomed: Basil is assaulted by bears; Desmond thrown out of a sleigh, Ernest choked on a peach; fanny sucked dry by a leech, Winnie embedded in ice, Xerxes devoured by mice and —for the most poignant because the cause touches us all now and then —Neville who died of ennui.    

Gorey’s calamitous content contrasts so powerfully with his catchy two-line rhyming and solemn, etching-like illustrations, that it’s hard to hold back a chuckle of recognition at the audacity of this twist on the classic children’s genre.

Similar to The Gashlycrumb Tinies, Neglected Murderesses’ morbid subject matter is tamed by quirky names for people and places, like:

Nurse Rosebeetle tilted her employer out of a Bath chair and over a cliff at Sludgemouth in 1898.

and

Miss Q.P. Urkheimer brained her fiancé after failing to pickup an easy spare at Glover’s Lanes, Poxville, Kansas 1936.

or

Mrs. Daisy Sallow eviscerated her daughter-in-law with a No. 7 hook, afterward crocheting, over the course of three evenings, her shroud in a snowflake pattern (1922).

An aura of levity is coxed through Gorey’s straight-faced invention of these depravities which are reported in an unsentimental, “just the facts, Jack.” style — a parody of spare notes made on a local police precinct blotter. The dates of the murders add a jolly garnish of authenticity to complete the satire.    

Just not to get too comfortable with his humor and forget that he’s dealing with death here, Gorey delivers his most chilling case of five- or six- year-old Angelina Transome. In a delightfully homey illustration, Angelina poses in front of a stone well-head on which her little brother is comfortably seated; beneath it we read:

Angelina Transome.
So disposed of her infant
brother that he was not
found until many years later (Nether Postlude, 1889)