Author: Eugenia Parry

Publisher/Date: Scalo, 2000

Format/Condition: NEW hardcover book is in fine condition. 7” X 9”, 319 pages Illustrated with photos.

Description: This is a unique and remarkable book that combines Parry’s historical fiction and photographs from a photo album owned by a police official documenting 30 murders committed in Paris from 1887-1902. Please note: the photos are from true crimes, the stories are “historical fiction – based on fact but not entirely what one would call non-fiction” A mix of fact and imagination using the true crime photos.

From the Library Journal:
Art historian and critic Parry (The Short Story and Photography 1880s-1980s: A Critical Anthology, Univ. of New Mexico, 1998) became obsessed with an album of graphic photographs depicting actual crimes scenes and victims in Paris at the turn of the last century.

Taken mostly by Alphonse Bertillon, who largely created the modern practice of crime documentation and suspect identification, the photos are of historical importance. But Parry rejected a straightforward presentation of the material, writing several stories based on groupings of crime photos. Her style blends enough of the objective documentarian and the horrified observer to work perfectly. Her fictions elucidate the crucial moments in the lives of the victims and murderers, like the photos themselves, in gruesome detail, raising questions about the ability of photos to capture truth and our own capacity to understand a crime fully. The photographs themselves are so compelling and disturbing that it would be difficult to imagine a prose that could complement them, but here word and image serve each other well.