Lee has discovered a spectacular subject, a boon to her as a biographer-sleuth: an obscure figure implicated in Oscar Wilde’s downfall, who is now exposed, in Conan Doyle fashion, as just possibly a mastermind of crime. Laura Lee capitalizes on another enticement of true crime biography: the Ripley-Highsmith rogue who gets away with it. Savage’s esteem was no very certain possession, and that he would lampoon at one time those whom he had praised at another.” Savage’s life becomes a precarious seesaw in the balanced antitheses of Johnson’s sentences. Samuel Johnson attempted to elevate the true crime narrative in his “Life of Richard Savage” (1744), about a murderous minor poet who was Johnson’s friend, a beautifully executed work of measured exculpation: “it must be confessed that Mr. Eighteen-year-old Henry Fielding watched Wild hang, and later wrote about him in a satire, “The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild, the Great” (1743), which likened Wild’s duplicity to the machinations of a Whig party leader, Robert Walpole. If you set aside Tacitus writing about Roman emperors, this lust for reading about criminals perhaps begins with Jonathan Wild (circa 1682-1725), who perfected the double role of crimefighter-criminal. Think of Uncle Charlie in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt.” I wonder, dear reader, if your family may have a shady member who is spoken of with a curious affection. I would sit on a tall stool and observe a few of the numbers racket suspects my father had befriended after he left the police force. Which side of the law you find yourself on can be a fungible phenomenon, as I learned by the age of 11, accompanying my father on trips to the New Casino Bar on Davison Avenue near the police station out of which he worked a decade earlier as a Detroit plainclothes detective investigating the numbers racket. Their appeal is not simply to the public’s craving for tales of the illicit, full of mayhem, murder, and sex, but to a keen fascination with what Patrick Radden Keefe calls the “permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds.” Rogue biography, or criminal biography, or true crime books constitute a genre with a history dating back to the 18th century. ‘Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks’ ‘Wilde Nights & Robber Barons: The Story of Maurice Schwabe, The Man Behind Oscar Wilde’s Downfall, who with a Band of Aristocrats Swindled the World’

Rogues patrick keefe