Charmer: A Ladies' Man and His Victims - Hardcover

Olsen, Jack

4.07

412 ratings by Goodreads

9780688109035: Charmer: A Ladies' Man and His Victims

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688109039 ISBN 13: 9780688109035

Publisher: William Morrow & Co, 1994

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The author of Predator traces the story of George Russell, Jr., a bright, young, popular black man whose thirty-year psychological unravelling led to a shocking killing spree. 75,000 first printing. $65,000 ad/promo. Tour.

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Review:

This is the story of George, an African American who grew up in a Caucasian suburb of Seattle, where his unaffectionate mother and racial isolation led him to develop an effervescent personality in order to get along. He became a small-time burglar and an accomplished liar--a wisecracking "smoothy" who pretended to be an undercover detective. George made lots of friends, especially within a subculture of giggly young white women who partied endlessly in upscale Seattle clubs during 1989-90. And he murdered three of them, bizarrely mutilating and "staging" their bodies. The drinks, dancing, and deejays--the group pad where George lived with an adoring coterie of feckless college kids--Olsen gives us the quirky details that make the murderer's well-hidden rage and misogyny all the more shocking. As the New York Times wrote, "Like fine cinema verit�, [Charmer] mesmerizes us with the sense of watching real life, unaugmented, move before our eyes."

From Kirkus Reviews:

Best-selling true-crime writer Olsen's latest account of psychopathic terror is little more than a chronological retelling of the basic facts. This time Olsen (The Misbegotten Son, 1993, etc.) looks at George Russell, who, after an adolescence characterized by minor offenses like marijuana violations and the theft of a friend's rare penny, committed the extraordinarily grisly murders of three women, for which he was convicted and sentenced to life. The book is split in two. The first half lopes through Russell's various oddities and abusive relationships with women, and the second half dives into the pulp, the awful acts of a maniac. Olsen's reporting is as plodding and unimaginative as this color-by-numbers structure suggests. He intimates that a dance club called the Black Angus, where Russell spent much of his time, fueled the future murderer's latent sexual anger. It was there that Russell sat beside the DJ booth reading a newspaper and drinking some of the drinks included on the bar's extensive list of mixers. Unfortunately for the reader, Olsen feels the need to catalogue the suggestively named drinks--e.g., ``Sex on the Beach'' and ``The Sloe Screw''--as well as their every ingredient, loading them in the meanwhile with an exaggerated significance as portents of Russell's violent misogyny. The stretch is typical of the book, which has the feel of uninteresting or mishandled material. Olsen ominously sprinkles the text with references to Russell's race (he is black) but does nothing with it, leaving the reader with an incomplete picture of the man and his motivations. The book's overall weakness is highlighted by its liberal use of quotations from books by psychologists on psychopaths as Olsen scrambles for the cover of ``expert'' testimony that adds nothing. Olsen weakly justifies his stripped-down narrative by saying that, unlike creative true-crime writers like Truman Capote or Joseph Wambaugh, he is among those who ``try to remain with the facts.'' Russell's compulsion to kill is less in evidence here than is Olsen's compulsion to churn out yet another murderous tale. (Author tour) -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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