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Loading... Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade (edition 2015)by Walter Kirn (Author)
Work InformationBlood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade by Walter Kirn
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I'm not really sure how much I can say about this book. Kirn did a really great job of making me dislike him (Kirn, not Rockefeller). And not because of him being duped by someone like Rockefeller. I thought Kirn handled his own betrayal in a fairly straightforward manner, without asking for pity or sympathy. However, he did write a few offhanded remarks that really got under my skin. It's a little hard to explain without delving into dangerous territory. Suffice it to say, I enjoyed the story behind this and thought it was well-written, but won't be reading anything else by this author.
Although the murder horrifies him, you get the impression that Kirn is more upset about being gulled. “I wasn’t a victim, I was a collaborator,” he concludes. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
This is a chilling, compulsive story of a writer unwittingly caught in the wake of a grifter-turned-murderer. In the summer of 1998, the author, then an aspiring novelist struggling with impending fatherhood and a dissolving marriage, set out on a peculiar, fateful errand: to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from his home in Montana to the New York apartment of one Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector who had adopted the dog over the Internet. Thus began a fifteen-year relationship that drew the author deep into the fun-house world of an outlandish, eccentric son of privilege who ultimately would be unmasked as a brazen serial impostor, child kidnapper, and brutal murderer. This story of being duped by a real-life Mr. Ripley takes us on a bizarre and haunting journey from the posh private clubrooms of Manhattan to the hard-boiled courtrooms and prisons of Los Angeles. As the author uncovers the truth about his friend, a psychopath masquerading as a gentleman, he also confronts hard truths about himself. Why, as a writer of fiction, was he susceptible to the deception of a sinister fantasist whose crimes, he learns, were based on books and movies? What are the hidden psychological links between the artist and the con man? To answer these and other questions, the author attends his old friend's murder trial and uses it as an occasion to reflect on both their tangled personal relationship and the surprising literary sources of Rockefeller's evil. This investigation of the past climaxes in a tense jailhouse reunion with a man whom the author realizes he barely knew, a predatory, sophisticated genius whose life, in some respects, parallels his own and who may have intended to take another victim during his years as a fugitive from justice: the author himself. Combining confessional memoir, true crime reporting, and cultural speculation, this is a Dreiser-esque tale of self-invention, upward mobility, and intellectual arrogance. It exposes the layers of longing and corruption, ambition and self-delusion beneath the Great American con. -- From book jacket.
The true story of a young novelist who meets and befriends an eccentric, privileged New Yorker when he delivers a crippled hunting dog to him from an animal shelter, and later discovers that his friend was a serial imposter and brutal double-murderer. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)364.152Social sciences Social problems and services; associations Criminology Crimes and Offenses Offenses against persons HomicideLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Kirn does not begin with the murder or even what led to it. Instead, he begins with how he met the murderer, Christian Gerhartsreiter. Except Kirn thought he was meeting Clark Rockefeller, yes, of THE Rockefeller family. Turns out, "Clark Rockefeller" was only one of Gerhartsreiter's many aliases. (Kirn makes, in my opinion, the mistake of calling him Clark throughout the book because, Kirn says, that's how he knew him for a long time.)
Other books have been written about the man known as "Clark Rockefeller," but it looks like Kirn was careful to be different. He begins with his drive from his home in Montana to "Clark's" home in New York to bring him a crippled dog he wanted to adopt. Upon their meeting, "Clark" started dropping several clues that his stories were not true. And Kirn berates himself for not catching the lies at the time, with just being impressed with his new friend. For friends they did become. And Kirn continues to berate himself for that.
But good people tend to trust that most people are good. Most people ARE good. Gerhartsreiter is the exception. I hope Kirn has stopped being angry with himself for being one of the good ones. ( )