A powerful piece of true crime storytelling

I can’t really put my finger on it, but The Spider and The Fly by Claudia Rowe reminded me of “Spy versus Spy”; two people trying to get under the skin of each other; picking one another’s brain, each endeavouring to manipulate the other.

Claudia has been twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and is an award-winning journalist who became obsessed with a case where horror was heaped upon horror. The fact that both Claudia and her target, Kendall Francois, have troubled backgrounds merely adds lustre to the piece.

It gets more personal because eight women are killed and the fact that the bodies are stored in various places around the murderer’s house, where his mother, father and sister still lived at the time, lends a whole new surreal air and gruesomeness to the tale, especially when the book is supposed to be about the author trying to research the background to the murderer’s mentality.

The murderer and the author play off each other, both with their insecurities. You can’t help but think of bodies in the attic slowly rotting and the killer passing the odours off as a “dead racoon” after he’d committed the atrocities and rushing up there to wipe down the bodies and deaden the putrid smell.

The scenario inside the house is something I’ll leave to the reader because the intimate details are mind boggling and beyond the boundaries of normality.

Quite a deal of Claudia’s research is done with parents of the deceased.  The intricacies of their relationships are compared to her own and to Kendall’s.  They all have one key ingredient it seemed to me – lack of communication on a meaningful level.

The numerous correspondence and few actual meetings in prison with Kendall lead to a greater depth but never total understanding of the actions of this huge man, whose obesity, coupled with 6’4” frame, made him a target for the wrestling teams in school but, so often, his meeker side took over and he could be beaten by someone half his size.

I’m confident that other readers will be akin to me in wondering who is the spider and who is the fly.  They both appear to be reeling one another in, though understandably, for different reasons.

In psychological crime, I’ve previously read I found it not that complex to understand what was going on inside the perpetrator’s mind.  Kendall’s mind was like surf washing on a beach; one minute there’s something there, the next, nothing, and then he could withdraw as quickly as the blink of the proverbial eye.

Being there with Claudia as she interviewed him in prison was different, at times scary, at others so meek.  Here was a mixed personality of the extreme.

Meanwhile, on the homefront, obsessed Claudia is slowly, but inevitably, going through a breakdown in her relationship with her partner, the main catalyst being the time spent on communication with Kendall though there are fairly obvious personality differences with her partner that fuel the eventual separation.

This causes her to become something of a recluse, living in varying virtual slum-like accommodation until she finally snaps and takes off, without notice, to the other side of America to start a new life and come to terms with who she really wants to be.

In this, she succeeds and it’s not until a decade later that she returns, revisits the police and some others involved in the story and then finally we see “The Spider and the Fly”.  One of the two participants has broken away from the web, the other didn’t make it.

An eminently readable work for those who like their crime from the real world, a recommend from me.

The Spider and the Fly by Claudia Rowe is available now from Dymocks. Click here to learn more.