Cheryl Truman on books

Well, if not my life, at least my sanity.

Because all I can tell you about the last week, people is: Get your flu shot. None of this nonsense about how the shot makes you sicker than the flu. Because, folks, NOTHING makes you sicker than the flu.

Or the mysterious flu-like illness. Or whatever it was that hit me like a sack of bricks starting last Tuesday.

After the first few days, I found that no matter how bad you feel, you can indeed grow weary of those VH1 tart shows, and you can only watch on-demand South Park and Dave Chappelle reruns so much. Eventually the sound of the television makes you ears ache. (I am now told that was an ear infection.)

So I pulled out True Crime: An American Anthology (Libary of America, $40), edited by Harold Schecter, which was released in September. Starting with such writers as Benjamn Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, the book winds up with Dominic Dunne on the Menendez murders.

In between, there are numerous “trials of the century”: Turns out that many crimes you never heard of, and a few you have, were considered in their day to be the greatest crimes ever. One that you never heard of was the Cleveland serial killer in the ’30s who stalked hobos and those on society’s margins and was probably more sophisticated in his criminal pursuits than Jack the Ripper.

But the highlight of the collection for me was Damon Runyon. I’d read about Damon Runyon and yet never read anything by Damon Runyon. “The Eternal Blonde,” based on the case that inspired The Postman Always Rings Twice — basically, husband done in by conniving wife and her lover — is a treat. “He constantly belittled her. He threatened to blow out her brains. He was a good provider for herself and their nine-year-old daughter, but wouldn’t take her out — so she took to stepping out, as they say. An old, old yarn — Friend Husband is a non-stepper, Friend Wife full of go.”

I also got a fair amount read in The Guersey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and a few chapters in the new Maisie Dobbs mystery, and enough of Gina Kolata’s Flu to remind myself that at least I didn’t have the Spanish flu of 1918.

But Damon Runyon: Ah, there’s a keeper.