John J. Lennon: The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us. (2025)
Mon, Oct 20, 2025./noise/books | LinkKindle. Lennon has written several articles for the New York Review of Books (and many other venues) from the uncommon perspective of a presently-incarcerated man so I wondered what he would say at book length. True crime is not a genre I read much of, excepting perhaps decision making in wars and associated lawering.
It's very New York: Lennon assumes you know the geography of NYC and the character of the localities (Hells Kitchen, etc.). He namechecks many famous prisons like Sing Sing and Attica. The book consists of portraits of himself and three others in an interlaced structure that amplifies themes at the cost of narrative. He offers a barebones sketch of his own crime (the murder of a friend/peer drug dealer, his two pleas of not guilty) but does not linger on motives beyond a desire to present as tough while living "the life" — which amounts to nothing you won't find in any number of gangsta movies and songs from long ago. (Lennon is now tough enough to be vulnerable.) Two of the others are similarly lacking in motivation, bringing environmental factors such as fatherlessness and poverty to the fore, the general decay of society. The third, Michael Shane Hale, more clearly committed a crime of passion as a result of trauma and abuse. On his take none of the four are psychotic, at least not before gaol.
Why these prisoners were selected is never made clear. Robert Chambers is so opaque (permanently high, evasive, morally incompetent) that we don't learn much beyond what's on the extensive public record; his activities in gaol (helping deaf prisoners with their paperwork, etc.) add colour but no insight. Milton E. Jones grew up in poverty in Buffalo, N.Y. and seems to have been too easily led. We're told he converted to Islam but it's unclear how this helped him; he undergoes a long slide into mental illness that nobody can arrest. Lennon asserts that as a youth he was "intellectually disabled, mental illness likely broaching" but it's difficult to square the first part with his obtaining a masters degree in theology. The accounts are all incomplete, perhaps necessarily so.
Addiction is a minor theme: AA works for Lennon, at least most of the time. He doesn't touch on his own religious beliefs or lack thereof, or spill too many words on gangs or affiliations. Clearly he hates being incarcerated. Apparently he has enough money for all the ameliorations. We're told that rape in prison is out of fashion but I wonder if the same is true of the Federal prison system. He doesn't really set out what he thinks prisons are for these days, or what the length of his own spell was intended to achieve. It feels a bit transactional. I was more hoping for more analysis, more big picture; the whiplash of changing policy (much of it arbitrary and capricious) is felt everywhere now.
The prose gets rambly at times, which is unsurprising given the restrictions imposed on the writing and editing processes. But even so it could have used another round or two of editing and thinning.
Pamela Collof for the New York Times. Marin Cogan at the Washington Post. I'm not sure these men are all that complicated. Goodreads.
