Pete Hamill Book Review, New York Times Book Review


More than seventy years ago, a Queens Village housewife named Ruth Snyder achieved tabloid immortality: she became the first woman in New York history to be executed in what the reporters of my own tabloid youth still called the “hot squat.” Her crime: breaking her husband’s head with a sash weight. A photograph of the event was taken at Sing Sing on January 12, 1928, by Tom Howard, who had a miniature camera strapped to his ankle. A wire ran from the camera up his leg to the shutter release in his jacket pocket. At 11:11 p.m., as Snyder was hit with thousands of volts, Howard lifted his left trouser leg and clicked.

The next day, the photograph ran on page one of the Daily News under the headline: DEAD! It did not matter that the photograph was out of focus; the shuddering blur made the image universal. That front page has since been reproduced hundreds of times; it hangs proudly among several dozen other Daily News front pages in the hall leading to that newspaper’s city room. New York Noir: Crime Photos from the Daily News Archives (Rizzoli.) ranges across those decades when the great tabloid proudly called itself “New York’s Picture Newspaper” and had the best photo staff in town.

The photographs, and their subjects, are marvelous to see. In those days, gangsters knew how to dress. Trousers had razor creases. They all wore perfectly blocked hats, many of them used to cover faces during perp walks. Every shoe has been brought to a high black sheen. The homicide cops wear belted coats and gray fedoras, and even at the most squalid crime scene, their shoes are immaculately shined, too. Those shoes encase huge loaflike feet, but even a flatfoot insisted on style.

So did every moll. These glorious dames - tough, sleek, dangerous - stride on stilleto heels. They curl their lips in defiance. They weep beside fresh graves. In one image, we see Virginia Wright posing for a group photo in a police station with ten other member of a stickup gang. The men look defeated. That cannot be said of this insolent young woman. Among the bent noses and agate eyes of her exhausted confederates, Miss Wright looks like the toughest person in the room.

Today, the dark unsettling toughness of these photographs and their subjects remind of us film noir classics from Out of the Past to Miller’s Crossing. But there was a time when such fictional movies reminded audiences of these remorseless urban photographs; that is, of life itself, with its tough guys and tougher women, its corpses, its streets glistening with rain.

In his researches, archivist William Hannigan discovered the original negative of Snyder’s execution. Its banality is more chilling than the cropped print. In the original, while Snyder dies, others stand casually in the room, and we see a gurney awaiting the corpse. The moment is absolutely decisive, but it is something other than what we thought it was. All these years later, that’s news. – Pete Hamill