ck’s Reviews > Honor Killing: Race, Rape, and Clarence Darrow's Spectacular Last Case > Status Update

I’ve now reread all the notes in sequence at the end of the book, as well as trying to read each chapter’s notes as I finished the chapter. Time well spent. Oh, and I found what seems to be the full text of the Pinkerton Report online. Woot!

… of the events leading up to the case, as well as the perspectives of central players and the military brass who tried to influence certain outcomes.

The second is this book by American Studies professor David Stannard, who came to Hawai’i in the early 1980s and likely spent years accessing and assembling the multitude of resources he has used to tell this story.

… the intestinal fortitude to source and Wade through the reams contemporaneous materials, some of it quite hard to come by, and/or distasteful. Thus far, I have come across two exceptions. The first was Cobey Black’s book — she came to Hawai’i as an adult and stayed, becoming a respected journalist. She also had good access to contemporaneous military documents, important in reviewing various facets …

Every so often, a book or a screenplay or dramatization will be issued — often with the breathless imprimatur of Hollywood — purporting to delve into the Massie case and present a clear explanation of the series of events that began in 1931, continued into 1932, and still echo in the next century.

Most of these works are spearheaded by people who have an outside point of view. And frankly who don’t have …

actions and local self-government all collided in 1931 with the very human and complicated relationships of Thomas Massie and his wife Thalia, the overweening self-importance of Thalia’s mother, Grace Fortescue, and some exceedingly disturbing prejudice among people who were comfortable bandying about such disgusting terms as “half-caste” and many more.

The infamous Massie case was something most of us had vague knowledge of by the time we reached high school, though by then it had happened almost a half-century earlier. Those of us who focused at all on Hawai’i politics or modern history in college soon learned much more. And yet, at least for me, the more I read, the more puzzled I became. There was an abundance of fuzzy logic (if you could dignify it by …