Non-Fiction: Men Behind Bars

Men Behind Bars (Phil Hirsch, Ed., Pyramid Books, 1962) Don’t know if Phil Hirsch is still around today, but all the way up to the late 1980’s he was still editing books with intellectually demanding themes ranging from hamburger jokes to true crime. Generally it is true of books as a whole that the older the publication, the more demanding it is in both vocabulary and sentence structure, but in the case of Hirsch, no matter when the book was published the text is never all that demanding.
The “shocking” true stories collected in Men Behind Bars were collected from those two classic publications of North American literature Man’s Magazine and Challenge For Men, as were many of the stories for most of Hirsch’s publications for Pyramid books. But unlike many of Hirsch’s cheesier collections, such as Supernatural, Men Behind Bars still manages to grab one’s attention most of the time.
True, there is one too many stories about attempted break outs and riots, but the other tales tend to be interesting despite their age. The best story is probably “Get A Rope, Somebody” by Walter R: Hecox, which tells of the last public lynching in California, that of Thomas Howard Thurmond and John Maurice Holmes in November of 1933 in San Jose’s St James Park (see photo). Hecox names no names, but he more than adequately describes what the situation was probably like, often making the reader squirm with discomfort. “They Arrested Me As A Sex Sadist” is also a gripping story, and it hardly presents the police in a favorable light. (Luckily for them, victims of police brutality didn’t sue back then. But then, nowadays, people accused of sex crimes seldom get proven innocent, inadvertently or not.)
Good reading for before one goes to bed.....