The Seattle Review of Books

Paul Constant

January 24, 2017

We’ve been trained by popular culture to visualize serial killers in a very specific way: they’re sleek, efficient, charming hunters of humans. Sociopathic and hyper-intelligent, serial killers are always five steps ahead of everyone else. They’re willful, clever, highly manipulative loners, and they’re relentlessly driven by some lone traumatic incident in their childhood. They’re not so much human beings as puzzle-boxes to entertain and alarm us for a couple hours until they’re finally captured and the closing credits roll.

The serial killer in Seattle Times education reporter Claudia Rowe’s first book, The Spider and the Fly, completely confounds those serial-killer tropes. Kendall Francois lived with his parents and sister in a quiet Poughkeepsie neighborhood. Rather than murder his prey with elaborate rituals, Francois would simply lose his temper after hiring a prostitute. She’d say something innocuous that would set him off and he’d choke the life out of her and then dump her dead body in the attic of his house, where it would rot for months — even years.

Francois was not charming, or cunning. He didn’t have an elaborate plan. He seemed to be practically begging to be caught. But he continued murdering women and stashing their bodies in a kiddie pool in the attic until, basically, society couldn’t ignore him anymore.

This is not to say that Francois was dumb, or that he lacked any sort of guile. Once he’d already been arrested for his crime, Francois was contacted by Rowe, at the time a young reporter doing piecework for the New York Times. Rowe thought she might be able to get a juicy story out of Francois. Instead, she gained a pen pal. Her first letter from Francois clumsily evoked Hannibal Lecter’s quid pro quo deal with Clarice Starling from The Silence of the Lambs in such a way that it practically feels like fan fiction:

…For every ten pages (typed) I will answer ANY four questions you have for me, completely and honestly…I will answer your questions with the completeness and honesty you answer me. I want to know about your hometown, childhood house, elementary school and high school up through college, your first car, your first kiss, the dress you wore under your graduation gown, I want to know the first time (if ever) you gave a guy a blow job, the first time you had intercourse, the last time, people you hate at work, affairs, when (if ever) you dyed your hair, the types of computers you have/use. Remember the more details the better.

Rowe almost immediately shut down the sexual angle of Francois’s questioning, but soon the two were corresponding with alarming regularity.

The Spider and the Fly brings Ann Rule’s account of working with Ted Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me, to mind. That is a high compliment: Rule is the patron saint of true crime, and Stranger is her masterpiece. But while Spider begins like a true crime book — detailing Francois’s life and crimes in reportorial (and, it must be said, occasionally purple) prose — it gradually slides into memoir. “The first rule of reporting is that the writer is never the story,” Rowe warns us early in Spider, “so my tale, by definition, is not journalism.”

This gear-shift, from the gawking exploitation of true crime to the more introspective exploration of memoir, is a transition that could likely lose some readers. That’s their loss. Spider is not Francois’s story. It’s about Rowe, and how she responds to Francois’s monstrous acts.

In one of her early letters to Francois, Rowe writes that “It’s hard for me to explain why I have trouble getting along with bosses and parents and people I know well, yet feel so much for people I’ve never met.” That’s part of the story: she’s misanthropic and anti-authoritarian — two traits that make for good reporters — but she’s also drawn to self-destruction, making bad choices and putting herself in bad situations seemingly just to find out what happens next. Some part of her identifies, or wants to identify, with some small, damaged part of Francois.

True crime buffs might be frustrated by Spider’s unwillingness to tie everything together, to slap a moralistic Law & Order-style framework on the story. But readers who are interested in deeper conversations than a childlike fantasia of good versus evil will find sentences of this book echoing around in their brain for weeks afterward. So much of this book is dedicated to big concepts: the idea of forgiveness, the question of whether it’s possible to change, the thought that if one of us commits a preventable heinous act that maybe we all carry a little bit of that stain on our souls.

Spider is a messy, complicated book about a messy, complicated human. It’s about finding yourself inextricably bound in a situation that you never wanted. But most of all, it’s about the terrifying notion that when you scratch enough of yourself down on paper and throw it into the void, the void might just decide to write back.

Books in this review:

The Spider and the Fly

by Claudia Rowe

Dey Street Books
January 23, 2017
288 pages

Provided by publisher
Buy on IndieBound

Quid pro quo

Paul Constant

About the writer

Other recent reviews

Talk about the weather

Paul Constant

The man show

Paul Constant

Accidentally honest

Paul Constant