Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade
Walter Kirn, 2014
W.W. Norton & Co.
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780871404510
Summary
An In Cold Blood for our time, a chilling, compulsive story of a writer unwittingly caught in the wake of a grifter-turned-murderer.
In the summer of 1998, Walter Kirn—then an aspiring novelist struggling with impending fatherhood and a dissolving marriage—set out on a peculiar, fateful errand: to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from his home in Montana to the New York apartment of one Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector who had adopted the dog over the Internet.
Thus began a fifteen-year relationship that drew Kirn deep into the fun-house world of an outlandish, eccentric son of privilege who ultimately would be unmasked as a brazen serial impostor, child kidnapper, and brutal murderer.
Kirn's one-of-a-kind story of being duped by a real-life Mr. Ripley takes us on a bizarre and haunting journey from the posh private clubrooms of Manhattan to the hard-boiled courtrooms and prisons of Los Angeles. As Kirn uncovers the truth about his friend, a psychopath masquerading as a gentleman, he also confronts hard truths about himself. Why, as a writer of fiction, was he susceptible to the deception of a sinister fantasist whose crimes, Kirn learns, were based on books and movies? What are the hidden psychological links between the artist and the con man?
To answer these and other questions, Kirn attends his old friend’s murder trial and uses it as an occasion to reflect on both their tangled personal relationship and the surprising literary sources of Rockefeller's evil. This investigation of the past climaxes in a tense jailhouse reunion with a man whom Kirn realizes he barely knew—a predatory, sophisticated genius whose life, in some respects, parallels his own and who may have intended to take another victim during his years as a fugitive from justice: Kirn himself.
Combining confessional memoir, true crime reporting, and cultural speculation, Blood Will Out is a Dreiser-esque tale of self-invention, upward mobility, and intellectual arrogance. It exposes the layers of longing and corruption, ambition and self-delusion beneath the Great American con. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1962
• Where—Akron, Ohio, USA
• Raised—Saint Croix, Minnesota
• Education—B.A., Princeton University, B.A., Oxford University (UK)
• Currently—lives in Livingston, Montana
Walter Kirn is an American novelist, literary critic, and essayist. He is the author of eight books, including Up in the Air, which was made into a movie starring George Clooney, and Blood Will Out, a memoir of his friendship with the imposter and convicted murder, Clark Rockefeller.
A 1983 graduate of Princeton University, he has published a collection of short stories and several novels, including Thumbsucker, which was made into a 2005 film featuring Keanu Reeves and Vince Vaughn; Up in the Air, which was made into a 2009 film directed by Jason Reitman; and Mission to America. In 2005, he took over weblogger Andrew Sullivan's publication for a few weeks while Sullivan was on vacation. He has also written The Unbinding, an Internet-only novel that was published in Slate magazine.
He has also reviewed books for New York magazine and has written for The New York Times Book Review and New York Times Sunday Magazine, and is a contributing editor of Time, where he has received popularity for his entertaining and sometimes humorous first-person essays among other articles of interest. He also served as an American cultural correspondent for the BBC.
In addition to teaching nonfiction writing at the University of Montana, Kirn was the 2008–09 Vare Nonfiction Writer in Residence at the University of Chicago. He received his A.B. in English at Princeton University in 1983, and obtained a second undergraduate degree in English Literature at Oxford University, where he was a Keasbey Scholar.
Personal life
Kirn's family joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when he was twelve. Although he is no longer affiliated with the church, he received the 2009 William Law X-Mormon of the Year award. In 1995, Kirn married Maggie McGuane, a model and journalist and the daughter of actress Margot Kidder and novelist Thomas McGuane. Kirn was 32 at the time; McGuane was 19. The couple had two children, Masie and Charlie, and are now divorced. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/16/2014.)
Book Reviews
[P]rimarily a tale of seduction. For 15 years, Mr. Kirn allowed himself to fall for the con man then calling himself Clark Rockefeller, certain that if he let their friendship persist, he’d find...a book in it.... There is the part of Mr. Kirn that will always be the Midwestern arriviste [who] sees The Great Gatsby around every corner; he’s certainly right in thinking of Clark as self-invented. As for The Talented Mr. Ripley, that works, too; this is a book about a man who will do anything to steal others’ identities, no matter what it takes to get those others out of his way.
Walter Kirn’s latest book is bound to be shelved in the crime section. But it’s actually about class.... In this smart, real-life psychological thriller, the fake Rockefeller is a zombie Gatsby and Kirn the post-apocalyptic Fitzgerald, chronicling upper-crust America in free fall.... In the end, his book isn’t about the fake Rockefeller but about the mysteries of Kirn’s—and by extension, our—response to him.
Nina Burleigh - New York Times Book Review
[A] fascinating account of the imposter he considered his friend for 10 years… Blood Will Out is an exploration of a hoaxer from the point of view of a mark, and of a relationship based on interlocking deceptions and self-deceptions. The result is a moral tale about the dangers of social climbing on a rickety ladder—for both those trying to scramble up the rungs and those trying to hold it steady below.
Heller McAlpin - Washington Post
Riveting and disturbing, Blood Will Out is a mélange of memoir, stranger-than-fiction crime reporting and cultural critique. The literary markers run the gamut from James Ellroy’s My Dark Places, and Fyodor Doestoevsky’s Crime and Punishment to Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley trilogy and Strangers on a Train. Kirn’s self-lacerating meditations on class, art, vanity, ambition, betrayal and delusion elevate the material beyond its pulpy core… Kirn’s belated acceptance of reality provides the most fascinating and frustrating element of this engaging, self-flagellating memoir.
Larry Lebowitz - Miami Herald
One of the most honest, compelling and strangest books about the relationship between a writer and his subject ever penned by an American scribe… Each new revelation comes subtly, and each adds to the pathetic and creepy portrait of Clark Rockefeller as a vacuous manipulator… The ending of Blood Will Out is at once deeply ambiguous and deeply satisfying. By then, Kirn has looked into the eyes of a cruel, empty man—and learned a lot about himself in the process.
Hector Tobar - Los Angeles Times
Kirn is such a good writer and Gerhartsreiter such a baroquely, demonically colorful subject, you could imagine this being a fine read had they no personal connection. That they did, however, elevates Blood Will Out to another level: Kirn lards his story with detail while reviewing his own psyche, in an attempt to discover how he—a journalist!—could have been so fooled. The irony? With all due respect to Kirn's skills as a novelist, it is hard to conceive of any fictionalized version of ''Clark Rockefeller'' being as compelling as the real thing.
Clark Collis - Entertainment Weekly
Kirn bravely lays bare his own vanities and follies in this heart-pounding true tale; he examines the hold of fiction on the human imagination—how we live for it and occasionally die for it, too.
Judith Newman - More Magazine
The story of Blood Will Out is one of cosmic ironies and jaw-dropping reversals… What makes Blood Will Out so absorbing is its teller more than its subject. Kirn’s persona is captivating—funny, pissed off, highly literate, and self-searching. He’s also an elegant, classic writer… Add the highly readable, intricately told Blood Will Out to the list of great books about the dizzying tensions of the writing life and the maddening difficulty of getting at the truth.
Amity Gaige - Slate
In the summer of 1998, Kirn....entered a wild and murky 15-year friendship with the man who called himself "Clark Rockefeller"—a man who would eventually be the target of a nationwide FBI manhunt and charged with murder.... Kirn’s candor, ear for dialogue, and crisp prose make for a masterful true crime narrative that is impossible to put down. The book deserves to become a classic.
Publishers Weekly
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Library Journal
The complicated, credulity-straining relationship between the author and his subject leaves the reader wondering about both of them. This is a book about two very strange characters. One is best known as Clark Rockefeller, "the most prodigious serial imposter in recent history".... The other is Kirn a respected journalist and novelist.... A book that casts long-form narrative journalism in general, and Kirn's in particular, in an unflattering light.
Kirkus Reviews
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