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Paul's Case: The Kingston Letters
With two of North America's most notorious serial killer / sex slayers as its focus, Lynn Crosbie's novel, Paul's Case, dissects and pathologizes the horrific world of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. In the true-crime tradition of Norman Mailer and a host of others, this book is a remarkable work of theoretical fiction that sensitively, imaginatively, and systematically analyses the abduction and murder of Bernardo and Homolka's innocent victims while exploring, in startlingly graphic detail, the cultural effects of the shocking revelations and controversy surrounding the capture, trial, testimony, videotape evidence, and incarceration of the almost unthinkable monstrous pair. This is compelling, moving, impossible a book which will shock, terrify, and anger a book which will break your heart and change you. You will never forget Paul's Case.
- GenresFictionTrue Crime
185 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
3 people are currently reading
64 people want to read
About the author
Lynn Crosbie
26 books54 followersLynn Crosbie is a Canadian poet and novelist. She teaches at the University of Toronto.
She received her Ph.D in English from the University of Toronto, writing her thesis on the work of the American poet Anne Sexton.
Crosbie has lectured on and written about visual art at the AGO, the Power Plant, and OCAD University (where she taught for six years.) She is an award-winning journalist and regular contributor to Fashion magazine and Hazlitt. She has had columns in the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Toronto Star, Flare and Eye magazine.
She received her Ph.D in English from the University of Toronto, writing her thesis on the work of the American poet Anne Sexton.
Crosbie has lectured on and written about visual art at the AGO, the Power Plant, and OCAD University (where she taught for six years.) She is an award-winning journalist and regular contributor to Fashion magazine and Hazlitt. She has had columns in the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Toronto Star, Flare and Eye magazine.
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March 25, 2013I find it impossible to give Lynn Crosbie's book Paul's Case a starred rating because this book wasn't enjoyable in the common sense of the word. It nauseated me. It made me deeply uncomfortable. It made me long for the times when my commute would be over so that I could stop reading it. And that's kind of the point.
This book is, on the surface, a work of fiction: it's certainly classified that way in the Dewey decimal system. But it's also so much more than that. It is startlingly intertextual, referring back to other texts, informing itself with meanings from great distances away, literature that you would never think to connect with the subject matter. It is a palimpsest of other sources, of images, of words piled one upon another in complicated and sometimes impenetrable layers of meaning. It scrapes away and builds upon, never fully obscuring the layers beneath. The images are disturbing, decontextualized, eroticized, carved out and resignified. It is a hermeneutic running in circles, defining and redefining itself part and whole, in a shifting and unstable geography of meaning. It grasps at everything, and nothing. It is a text that is impossible to pin down and grasp. It is a trip down the rabbit hole, into a nonsensical world that, in bits and flashes, makes sense and then suddenly ceases.
Like the crimes it portrays, the psyche it grasps at.
The book circles and circumnavigates the crimes and person of Paul Bernardo, trying to interrogate him through his victims, through his wife, through himself, through the evidence. The book is the reaction of author and poet Crosbie, as she struggles to come to grips with him by writing him letters. It has to be fiction: non-fiction, essays, lists of facts can't begin to get at it. It has to be allusion, illusion, alliteration, metaphor, imagined words put into dead girls' mouths. It is offensive, repugnant, violating, necessary. What gives you the right to imagine words in a dead girl's mouth? What gives you the right not to?
It is a violent text, filled with violence and violent imagining. Perversion. Obsession. It is a like a horrific sonnet from an author obsessed with Bernardo, with grasping him, conquering him, coming to terms with him - who ultimately cannot.
You won't enjoy this book, and I would be worried if you did. Only you can decide if what the author is doing is worth it.
I papered over the cover like an old textbook: his face disturbs me.
This book is, on the surface, a work of fiction: it's certainly classified that way in the Dewey decimal system. But it's also so much more than that. It is startlingly intertextual, referring back to other texts, informing itself with meanings from great distances away, literature that you would never think to connect with the subject matter. It is a palimpsest of other sources, of images, of words piled one upon another in complicated and sometimes impenetrable layers of meaning. It scrapes away and builds upon, never fully obscuring the layers beneath. The images are disturbing, decontextualized, eroticized, carved out and resignified. It is a hermeneutic running in circles, defining and redefining itself part and whole, in a shifting and unstable geography of meaning. It grasps at everything, and nothing. It is a text that is impossible to pin down and grasp. It is a trip down the rabbit hole, into a nonsensical world that, in bits and flashes, makes sense and then suddenly ceases.
Like the crimes it portrays, the psyche it grasps at.
The book circles and circumnavigates the crimes and person of Paul Bernardo, trying to interrogate him through his victims, through his wife, through himself, through the evidence. The book is the reaction of author and poet Crosbie, as she struggles to come to grips with him by writing him letters. It has to be fiction: non-fiction, essays, lists of facts can't begin to get at it. It has to be allusion, illusion, alliteration, metaphor, imagined words put into dead girls' mouths. It is offensive, repugnant, violating, necessary. What gives you the right to imagine words in a dead girl's mouth? What gives you the right not to?
It is a violent text, filled with violence and violent imagining. Perversion. Obsession. It is a like a horrific sonnet from an author obsessed with Bernardo, with grasping him, conquering him, coming to terms with him - who ultimately cannot.
You won't enjoy this book, and I would be worried if you did. Only you can decide if what the author is doing is worth it.
I papered over the cover like an old textbook: his face disturbs me.
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March 16, 2022Read the book for Criminal Pyschology course.
April 6, 2017
Lynn Crosbie's postmodern take on one of Canada's most notorious murderers is a lot easier to view objectively outside of Canada. There, the book generated passionate condemnations simply for its subject matter. The overall conceit is a great juggling act. Ms. Crosbie writes as a follower of the trial who has decided to write a letter a week to serial killer Paul Bernardo, but rather than making each letter a direct statement of her feelings about the case, the letter-writer catalogs items from the trial, turns found documents into poetry and writes from the viewpoints of various people involved, including Bernardo, his wife and accomplice, Karla Homolka Bernardo, and the victims. Ultimately, she treats the killing, the trial and the attendant publicity as exercises in commodification and consumption: Bernardo treats his victims as objects, the public consumes the trial and its horrifying revelations and the letter-writer commodifies Bernardo, using him to work through her own issues. It's a difficult but provocative read.
July 15, 2025
On goes the struggle to understand human darkness. Canadians, supposedly polite world citizens as distinguished from our gun-bearing southern neighbours, are demonstrably capable of as icky the despicable act as any other nationality. Sadistic Canuck criminals abound. There was the idiot who killed eleven B.C. children fifteen years ago. Some asshole shot thirteen women and then himself in the 1989 Ecole Polytechnic tragedy. Now we have the subject of Lynn Crosbie’s macabre belles lettres, Paul’s Case, about the well-known husband-and-wife team who terrorized southern Ontario for a couple of years late in the 1980's.
The book is what I take to be a subcutaneous treatment of a sensationalized case the media simply treated like bubble-gum, snapping with vigour when a more thorough chewing is what we missed. The news has for many years in Canada been supremely adept at reporting the occasion of all crime. The trouble is that mere names-places-dates and blood-spatter details are scarcely the stuff to move us toward understanding. If anything is moved it is collective outrage. The St. Catharines couple raped and tortured and held hostage their teenage victims for days on end, finally strangling, cutting up, burying and generally dishonouring these other-people’s-daughters to a shocking turn. Hang the bitch and bastard, cried the papers. Who could disagree?
Lynn Crosbie does not necessarily disagree. She has written several books of poetry and is damned intelligent - a Ph.D. in English literature. She has fashioned her treatment in the form of an all-points poetic arrest warrant, requiring most participants of the sorry drama to step up and in separate voices declare their feelings and intentions. It is an eerie, sick and fascinating entree to minds probably better left inanimate on the yellowing pages of the nation’s newspapers. Reading Paul’s Case was thus for me like studying a protracted police report. It is compelling for many reasons, not least in the mystery of just why a book like this was written.
By the end of the next year there will be another shelf full of volumes - at least half-a-dozen now - on the murders of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. Probably there will be a whole bookcase of them by the end of the millennium. We will be reading much about these crimes and still more about the perpetrators and their motivations, quirks and odd synergy. The case has spawned a mini-media industry, the beneficiaries of which are in their obsessions and profit positions as much the sad story as the killers themselves. Ms. Crosbie’s collection of poems, drawings and fragmented scenes is perhaps an early primer to this present and approaching deluge. Perhaps it is a warning. She does not hold this work out to be a work of reportage, rather `...a critical enterprise, ... a work of historical fiction.’
As a work of historical fiction Paul’s Case may not hold up; too much invention. But the novel-style cast of characters is as wide as in any solid thriller; killers, their parents, victims, friends of both, journalists, prison guards, lawyers, police, forensic scientists. The setting is most often inside someone’s head, even inside their bodies. I especially liked a cartoon section wherein a lovelorn fictional investigator crawls inside the assistant murderess’ body and finds the trip distasteful: `...I realize that the place is all torn up, like shredded curtains. Networks of veins, exposed by ruptures, are turning and moving all around me. It looks like a belly lined with worms.’ Less revolting but chilling nonetheless are the numerous sections displaying the husband’s normal teenage fascination with rock poetry, scrawled phrases from the Doors and Led Zeppelin, observing during bored moments the future killer’s revelation that `Yes there are two paths you can go by...’
It was good to see a book on this subject which does not overly display the actual names of the perpetrators. The media did plenty of that and if at all possible it would be great if the many books still to come did not add to the legend of these characters by singing their infamous names. On that score, my only hard criticism of Paul’s Case: Its cover. The ghastly-angelic face of the main character, in colour; so unsightly I cannot let this book sit face up anywhere in the house. I hate the look of it on the bookstore shelves. I enjoyed reading it, though.
The book is what I take to be a subcutaneous treatment of a sensationalized case the media simply treated like bubble-gum, snapping with vigour when a more thorough chewing is what we missed. The news has for many years in Canada been supremely adept at reporting the occasion of all crime. The trouble is that mere names-places-dates and blood-spatter details are scarcely the stuff to move us toward understanding. If anything is moved it is collective outrage. The St. Catharines couple raped and tortured and held hostage their teenage victims for days on end, finally strangling, cutting up, burying and generally dishonouring these other-people’s-daughters to a shocking turn. Hang the bitch and bastard, cried the papers. Who could disagree?
Lynn Crosbie does not necessarily disagree. She has written several books of poetry and is damned intelligent - a Ph.D. in English literature. She has fashioned her treatment in the form of an all-points poetic arrest warrant, requiring most participants of the sorry drama to step up and in separate voices declare their feelings and intentions. It is an eerie, sick and fascinating entree to minds probably better left inanimate on the yellowing pages of the nation’s newspapers. Reading Paul’s Case was thus for me like studying a protracted police report. It is compelling for many reasons, not least in the mystery of just why a book like this was written.
By the end of the next year there will be another shelf full of volumes - at least half-a-dozen now - on the murders of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. Probably there will be a whole bookcase of them by the end of the millennium. We will be reading much about these crimes and still more about the perpetrators and their motivations, quirks and odd synergy. The case has spawned a mini-media industry, the beneficiaries of which are in their obsessions and profit positions as much the sad story as the killers themselves. Ms. Crosbie’s collection of poems, drawings and fragmented scenes is perhaps an early primer to this present and approaching deluge. Perhaps it is a warning. She does not hold this work out to be a work of reportage, rather `...a critical enterprise, ... a work of historical fiction.’
As a work of historical fiction Paul’s Case may not hold up; too much invention. But the novel-style cast of characters is as wide as in any solid thriller; killers, their parents, victims, friends of both, journalists, prison guards, lawyers, police, forensic scientists. The setting is most often inside someone’s head, even inside their bodies. I especially liked a cartoon section wherein a lovelorn fictional investigator crawls inside the assistant murderess’ body and finds the trip distasteful: `...I realize that the place is all torn up, like shredded curtains. Networks of veins, exposed by ruptures, are turning and moving all around me. It looks like a belly lined with worms.’ Less revolting but chilling nonetheless are the numerous sections displaying the husband’s normal teenage fascination with rock poetry, scrawled phrases from the Doors and Led Zeppelin, observing during bored moments the future killer’s revelation that `Yes there are two paths you can go by...’
It was good to see a book on this subject which does not overly display the actual names of the perpetrators. The media did plenty of that and if at all possible it would be great if the many books still to come did not add to the legend of these characters by singing their infamous names. On that score, my only hard criticism of Paul’s Case: Its cover. The ghastly-angelic face of the main character, in colour; so unsightly I cannot let this book sit face up anywhere in the house. I hate the look of it on the bookstore shelves. I enjoyed reading it, though.
October 6, 2019
Canada has produced few genuine monsters. Paul Bernardo is one of them. Paul's Case is a novel based on the Bernardo case. There has been a lot of controversy surrounding this novel but it is difficult not to see it as exploitative. There would be some justification if the book raised new issues, attacked moral questions or ambiguities, but it does not. Designed as a series of letters written by the author to Paul Bernardo in Kingston Penitentiary, it is nothing more than a series of ramblings. However accurate in detail they might be, don't waste your time.
September 17, 2024
if i couls give this book a minus i would a waste of my time reading it her writing to bernardo with no response from him not sure why its called the kingston letters had the idea it was him telling his story very mis leading book
July 19, 2017
This was a really interesting, different, odd, page turning book. I enjoyed it.
August 10, 2012
wonderful poet, disturbing subject.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews