The Poet and the Murderer: A True Story of Literary Crime and the Art of Forgery

Rating:
Summary: Bad on Almost All Accounts
Review: A forged poem attributed to Emily Dickinson turned up in 1997 at auction, years after the forger had been imprisoned for murder. Author Worrall takes this late development as a pretext for revisiting the Mark Hofmann case, from several years previously. Dickinson is really just a walk-on in this book, as the principals are Hofmann and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Only the first bit and a few sections later are really concerned with the forged Dickinson poem. Worrall's treatment of her life and poetry is brief and fair-enough. A in-depth reading isn't really called for in this book, so Dickinson fans oughtn't be too disappointed not to find more literary analysis. Though she is billed as a co-headliner in this story, she is actually more of a footnote.

An unprepared reader might be overwhelmed by the quickly multiplying number of characters in the first chapters, as the poem goes to auction and more and more experts and dealers get consulted. But these are soon moved offstage as the viewpoint switches to Hofmann's. We also get digressive chapters on the history of forging, which are interesting but are obviously makeweight.

The implied exposure of shady doings at the big auction houses never comes to pass, apart from some fuming quotes from people who had been burned by the forgeries.

The meat of the book is the telling of how Hofmann forged important Mormon documents, playing the top church leadership like a pawnshop Gibson in a Pete Townshend impersonation contest. The technical details of how Hofmann worked his dishonest magic are amazing enough, but more so is how brutally accurately he sized up the church's leaders. For one legendary document, he took a chance and left it vulnerable to carbon dating, knowing that the church wanted the document to be true and would not destroy a portion of it to date it. The Mormon church gets a very rough ride in this story, especially in the background material, and it's hard not to feel that they couldn't have tried to be more skeptical, lest the sky fall.

A bibliophile blanches to think how many forged Hofmann manuscripts and autographs are still out there, perhaps even shaping our view of history, as the Mormon documents did for awhile. I don't know what use a natural talent for forgery could be put to in a law-abiding life, but he certainly mis-used his to the hilt. Thanks to Mark Hofmann, "don't believe everything you read" has a whole new sinister tone.

Rating:
Summary: Bad on Almost All Accounts
Review: As someone who lives just a few miles from Amherst, has a number of Mormon friends, and a fair amount of knowledge about Emily Dickinson, I was pretty unhappy with this book. I'm sorry to report that the author has a poor understanding of the concept of nuance. This book is full of sweeping generalizations -- about Mormonism, about Dickinson, and about the area around Amherst. The sections about forgery are very interesting, but it doesn't make up for the author's lack of scholarly understanding of his subject matter, nor for his constant rambling between subjects.

Rating:
Summary: The Art of Forgery
Review: Even though I am not an admirer of Emily Dickinson's poetry, the premise of this book intrigued me enough to purchase it. "The Poet and the Murderer" sets out to tell the life story of Mark Hoffman, a master forger, who fooled top authorities and key members of the Mormon church hierarchy. Simon Worrall begins this tale in Amherst, Massachusettes, Dickinson's hometown, where a library raises money to buy a newly discovered poem by Emily Dickinson. Little did they know that the poem was a forgery by a man already in prison.

Worrall then spins the narrative of Mark Hoffman's life. Raised in the Mormon faith that is steeped in secrecy and mystery, Hoffman early on becomes a sceptic of the Mormon foundations. He grows to hate the Mormon church and sets out to create a series of documents that undermine some of the key principles and teachings of the Mormon faith. He wants to expose Joseph Smith as the con-artist Hoffman believed him to be. And since the Mormons are so secretive, he knows that his forgeries will be bought to ensure silence that could make the church look back.

Worrall goes into an abundance of detail regarding the art of forgery, detailing how it was possible for Hoffman to create these new documents that looked like they were from the correct time period. If Hoffman can fool even the most celebrated forensic experts, who wouldn't believe him? But as the tales and lies that Mark Hoffman weaves become bigger and broader, so do his debts, and he finally resorts to murder, which lands him in jail for life.

Perhaps the title of this book is mere titilation, because there is little material regarding the life of Emily Dickinson herself. Yet Worrall does point out some consistencies in character that may have drawn Hoffman to attempt to create a work of poetry that Emily herself may have written in her secretive seclusion. "The Poet and the Murderer" is well-written and relatively fast-paced. It makes one wonder if what one actually believes to be authentic can ever be proven to be so.

Rating:
Summary: The Art of Forgery
Review: Even though I am not an admirer of Emily Dickinson's poetry, the premise of this book intrigued me enough to purchase it. "The Poet and the Murderer" sets out to tell the life story of Mark Hoffman, a master forger, who fooled top authorities and key members of the Mormon church hierarchy. Simon Worrall begins this tale in Amherst, Massachusettes, Dickinson's hometown, where a library raises money to buy a newly discovered poem by Emily Dickinson. Little did they know that the poem was a forgery by a man already in prison.

Worrall then spins the narrative of Mark Hoffman's life. Raised in the Mormon faith that is steeped in secrecy and mystery, Hoffman early on becomes a sceptic of the Mormon foundations. He grows to hate the Mormon church and sets out to create a series of documents that undermine some of the key principles and teachings of the Mormon faith. He wants to expose Joseph Smith as the con-artist Hoffman believed him to be. And since the Mormons are so secretive, he knows that his forgeries will be bought to ensure silence that could make the church look back.

Worrall goes into an abundance of detail regarding the art of forgery, detailing how it was possible for Hoffman to create these new documents that looked like they were from the correct time period. If Hoffman can fool even the most celebrated forensic experts, who wouldn't believe him? But as the tales and lies that Mark Hoffman weaves become bigger and broader, so do his debts, and he finally resorts to murder, which lands him in jail for life.

Perhaps the title of this book is mere titilation, because there is little material regarding the life of Emily Dickinson herself. Yet Worrall does point out some consistencies in character that may have drawn Hoffman to attempt to create a work of poetry that Emily herself may have written in her secretive seclusion. "The Poet and the Murderer" is well-written and relatively fast-paced. It makes one wonder if what one actually believes to be authentic can ever be proven to be so.

Rating:
Summary: Emily's just a teaser for the Hofmann forgery/bombing tale
Review: I liked this book more than most of the 42 earlier reviewers, although most of them did like it. I'm kind of the perfect reader for Simon Worrall, for two reasons: first, I've spent the past 25 years, part-time, researching all things Dickinson because in the 80's I wrote a play about the surviving kin who brought her poetry to the world amid adultery and feuds and greed and envy. Second, I've read three books about the astonishing and evil career of forger/murderer Mark Hofmann. So not everything in the book was new to me, although the information which was new was fascinating. It is not a perfectly written book, nor a perfectly organized one, nor a perfectly edited one. It would have benefitted from lots more photos of Hofmann's forged documents and of the victims of his bombs and deceit. Prior reviewers all make those points. However, it still is a worthwhile read, and the more so if you do not know as much as I do about Emily or about Hofmann's criminal activities. I won't rehash here the history of the Mormon Church, which is an essential ingredient in the tale and has nothing to do with Emily but everything to do with Mark Hofmann and why he became a killer. Some of the other reviewers chose to comment on that aspect in detail. Likewise, Mr. Worrall takes a few liberties with Emily which do not really belong in this story, such as relating a dream of taking a walk with her, and later trying to solve the mystery of the famous "master" letters---items which Hofmann did not forge, and which might relate to one of three men Emily probably had crushes on during her life (some think a woman might have been the object of these sad love letters.) Worrall tells us his pick, but there is no better evidence for it than for any of the other candidates, although I would also pick the same guy. Those few pages are unneeded in this tale, and should have been saved for some future magazine piece about Emily's life. Those criticisms aside, this remains a good read. One of the "heroes" is former special collections curator Dan Lombardo, then of the Jones Library in Amherst, Mass., Emily's hometown. I never met him, but during the creation of my play, which took a couple years of research and a couple more to put in final form, he and I corresponded. He was quite helpful to me, a total nobody, and I have always been grateful. It was nice to find out that during a huge crisis in his professional career, he behaved with honor and courage. (Yes, even librarians can have situations which can mean life or death to their reputations, jobs or institutions!) Mark Hofmann tried to pass off one of his own poems as an Emily Dickinson manuscript in order to make money and to make fools of the experts, and he almost succeeded. That's part of what the book is about. The rest of it details his anti-Mormon forgeries and a few other of the hundreds of fake items he sold in the late '70's and early '80's, before he killed two people to try to stave off financial ruin and exposure for himself. It is, then, at heart, a true crime story. Hofmann has been the subject of a bunch of other books, but none in which the Dickinson forgery is the starting point. If you like Emily, or true crime tales, this one is worth reading. I also recommend "The Mormon Murders." And for more on Emily, there is nothing as good as Richard Sewell's "The Life of Emily Dickinson" which will take months to read, but is wonderful.

Rating:
Summary: More editing and deeper analysis needed
Review: Simon Worrall once more retells the remarkable story of master forger and sociopath Mark Hofmann. A facile popular treatment--there is no index--the book also includes loosely connected chapters on Emily Dickinson, the history of forgery, and the questionable ethics of major auction houses.

Nevertheless, Worrall needs better editing. Not only does he repeat himself, he also makes a number of small errors about Mormon history and practice. If Worrall believes, as I do, that Joseph Smith was a fake, fraud, and sex addict, then he might have increased his credibility with more judicious language and more careful checking of his facts.

Furthermore, Worrall might better have tied Emily Dickinson's fist-shaking against God with Hofmann's using any number of quotes from the teenage Dickinson to draw parallels with Hofmann's rebellion against Mormonism during the same period of his life. (For instance, the fifteen-year-old Dickinson wrote, "The world allured me & in an unguarded moment I listened to her siren voice. From that moment I seemed to lose interest in heavenly things.... I felt my danger & was alarmed, but I had rambled too far to return & ever since my heart has been growing harder." Fortunately, Dickinson was not attracted to forgery or explosives.)

Finally, after hypothesizing that Hofmann was largely motivated to commit his crimes by his enmity against the LDS Church, Worrall should have examined the extent to which the Hofmann forgeries damaged Mormonism. Such a conclusion would have been more satisfying than Worrall's retailing of self-serving statements by Hofmann's ex-wife or his attempt to turn Amherst curator Daniel Lombardo into the tale's hero.

Rating:
Summary: Good True Crime Story, But not Good Dickinson Scholarship
Review: Simon Worrall's new book is a true crime story about something that was not so much a forgery as a fabrication. Mark Hofmann wrote a poem imitating the style of Emily Dickinson and then created a document that he passed off as a manuscript copy of the poem.

Worrall does a good job of summarizing the criminal career of Mark Hofmann and then outlining the path that Dickinson devotees had to walk through initial delight in the find, then raising money to purchase it, then having their suspicions aroused, and finally to exposing the crime that had been committed.

This book is an expansion of an article that appeared originally in the Paris Review. Worrall's explanation of the crime and its discovery is entertaining, although some of his writing sounds as if he took this piece through critique at a creative nonfiction workshop. (There is a lot of physical description of the participants that could be laying the foundation for casting decisions when the book becomes a movie of the week.)

Worrall has added material about the background and milieu of Emily Dickinson that was absent in the original article. The book is weakest here. He oversimplifies many areas of this complex subject and repeats without caveat certain stories and attitudes about Dickinson and those who knew her which are thought by scholars to be produced by self-serving individuals with axes to grind. His material on Dickinson is derivative and in many instances inaccurate.

As a piece of true crime investigation, the book is an entertaining read. As a source of information about Emily Dickinson, however, the book has little value.

Rating:
Summary: breathlessly fast read...
Review: Simon Worrall's The Poet and the Murderer has probably made a lot of people angry. In it the author dwells on the shaky foundations of the Mormon Church, whose founder, Joseph Smith, is revealed as a sex-crazed charlatan. He also writes about the near criminal practices of auction houses, particularly Sotheby's, which seems to have deliberately ignored evidence that the "new" poem by Emily Dickinson it was auctioning was in fact a forgery. But the rest of us, who are neither Mormons nor Sotheby's employees, can only delight in Worrall's fascinating book.

The Poet and the Murderer tells the true-life story of Mark Hofmann, a disaffected Mormon with a genius for deception. Hofmann's forgeries--of Emily Dickinson, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Joseph Smith, Daniel Boone, and over a hundred other historical figures--were expertly produced, a feat that requires far more than the superficial replication of a subject's pen strokes. Hofmann used paper ripped from period books, manufactured his own ink, and wrote under self-hypnosis so that his forgeries would not be betrayed by evidence of hesitancy. Many of Hofmann's forgeries were intended to undermine the religion he had grown up to despise, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, by inserting into the historical record documents that were embarrassing to the Church. One could almost admire this man, who was so scrupulous in his work and so evidently intelligent--except that his crimes did not stop at forging.

Worrall also devotes much of his book to a discussion of Emily Dickinson, the "poet" of the title, as one of Hofmann's more daring forgeries was a poem that he composed and passed off as one of her lost works. Her reclusiveness, sexuality, handwriting, potential incontinence, and bizarre family life are all discussed, as is the sale of the Dickinson poem by Sotheby's years after Hofmann's imprisonment for murder. But while Dickinson shares equal billing with Mark Hofmann in the title of Worrall's book, The Poet and the Murderer has more to do with the Mormon Church than it does with Amherst's famous recluse. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Nor is there very much wrong with this book. On a few occasions the author repeats himself. His narration in the Epilogue of a dream he'd had about Dickinson is perhaps a bit much. More importantly, when it comes, Hofmann's transformation from a brilliant and seemingly unassailable forger into a cash-strapped inventor of fraudulent investment schemes seems too abrupt. Why would Hofmann, who was otherwise so controlled, have adopted behavior almost certain to get him caught? Why, for example, did he accept nearly $200,000 as payment for documents he never intended to forge? Perhaps the answers to these questions were not forthcoming, and perhaps Hofmann's downfall was indeed thus abrupt.

One thing Worrall does succeed at particularly is transforming Hofmann in the reader's mind from a relatively harmless, almost admirable white-collar criminal into a reprehensible, sociopathic villain. Worrall's account of Hofmann's murders--to get creditors off his back he blew up two people with pipe bombs--and his description of the physical remains of Hofmann's two wholly innocent victims are chilling. And Worrall's book as a whole is gripping. Don't miss it.

Debra Hamel -- book-blog reviews
Author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

Rating:
Summary: Opportunity missed ..
Review: The premise linking a forged Dickinson poem, forged Mormon documents, and the forger enticed me to read this book.

Parts of the book describing how forgeries are done and detected were very interesting. Alas however, there are no pictures of the forged documents that the author talks about. Thus you are left to your imagination when things such as "the second loop in the S" come up. Finally, I printed off samples of "The Oathe(sic) Of a Freeman", "Salamander Letter", and "Anthon Transcripts" from the web. Do this if you want to follow the descriptions in the book.

Often the author states "in pictures of Hoffman from the...". But NONE of these pictures are in the book. This took a lot away from the quality of the work. Behind the book there are two pictures of Dickenson poems, one forged and one real. That's it.
The writing is good in parts but somewhat disjointed as a flowing narrative.
There is nothing new in regards to the forger, Mark Hoffman, and his Mormon forgaries.

Rating:
Summary: Good attempt for first edition, first-time author
Review: Well, now how can this book have an average rating of four stars? Reviewers on Amazon.com are so laudatory of mediocre work.

I read this book as part of my continuing interest in the "Mormon Related True Crime" Sub Genre. For the record, other books I have read in this area include: Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer, The Prophet of Death by Jack Early and the Executioner's Tale by Norman Mailer. I've also recently read No Man Knows My History by Fawn Brodie(A biography of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, which is simply an essential read, as far as I'm concerned.
So, I'd recommend all of the books above, except for Prophet of Death, which is a tad intense for the general reading public. However, I would NOT recommend this book.

First of all, the whole thing reads like the expanded New Yorker article that it is. I don't have a problem with the New Yorker, but an article should stay an article and a book should be a book.

The story of Mark Hoffman is an interesting story (please read below reviews for more details). However, Worrall's inexplicable choice to bookend the story by focusing on a forged Emily Dickinson poem is just, well, inexplicable. I suppose the explanation is that Worrall learned about Hoffman through his coverage of the Dickinson forgery.

This doesn't excuse the fact that Worrall skips through the Mormon forgeries that rocked Utah. His sourcing inside Utah is bad to the point where the reader can practically imagine the writer itching to finish his interviews.

He includes a chapter on the "art of forgery" that is just useless. The editing in this book is sloppy. Forgery sounds like an interesting subject, but I didn't learn much about it from this book. True, perhaps I shouldn't have expected much, but the subtitle IS "A true story of literary crimne and the art of forgery".

I note that there is another book about the same topic called "Salamander". Since that title refers to Hoffman's most famous Mormon forgery, I regret that I chose this book over that one.

Oh well, I did manage to score a hardback version of this title for a buck fifty, so I guess nothing much is lost. And this book really is a fast read (maybe two and a half hours tops).

Good as a piece of intellectual fluff, but don't expect The Poet and the Murderer to rock your world.