"Let's give Hans Reiser some more media attention, shall we? You remember Reiser. The Oaklander and "self-described computer genius," as veteran Chronicle crime reporter Henry K. Lee refers to him, made international headlines a few years ago by finalizing a divorce from Nina, his Russian mail-order bride, by murdering her.
At the time, it wasn't immediately clear what had happened. All anyone knew for a while was that Nina was missing, that Hans was evasive and antisocially arrogant, and that their two young children obviously were suffering. Also, and this is important: that Nina had had an affair with Hans' former best friend, a local S&M enthusiast, who later confessed to eight unrelated murders. But still Nina's body had not been found. That's why the name of Lee's new book is Presumed Dead: A True-Life Murder Mystery.
Alameda County Superior Court
Reiser, a self-described computer genius, was convicted of murdering his mail-order Russian bride.
Details
by Henry K. Lee Berkley, 445 pages, $8
Well, by now the mystery has been solved, and the presumption has been verified. Yet the Reiser case — or its proneness to retrospective narrativizing, at least — persists. Just last year, for instance, it served as a sort of fulcrum in Stephen Elliott's book, The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder (in which Lee briefly appears). The last words of that book, from Oakland Assistant Defense Attorney Richard Tamor, were these: "As long as Hans Reiser is alive, this story will never end."
Apparently not. So is this just another one of those weird and terrible and true Bay Area tales, an obsession magnet for the literarily inclined? That would seem the most charitable explanation for why Lee, who by his own account has spent nearly two decades giving voice to the otherwise-voiceless victims of crimes, and "telling stories of the horrible things that people do to each other," should single out the Reisers in particular for the full-length-book treatment. Otherwise, it might seem Presumed Dead's only reason for being is the buck to be made.
Certainly Elliott's book is the more self-consciously literary, with self-consciousness being a large part of what it's about; anyone reading The Adderall Diaries for a complete, just-the-facts account of what happened to Nina Reiser probably won't make it far before flinging that book across the room in frustration. But anyone reading Presumed Dead for anything more than just the facts likely won't feel satisfied either.
To say so is not to impugn Lee's straightforwardly reportorial style, but rather to point out that proceduralism is not the same thing as storytelling. For that matter, proceduralism is a delicate art. "At 8:30 p.m., he got back into the car and drove to Telegraph and Haste Street near People's Park. He used a pay phone outside Cody's Books, the venerable Berkeley institution that had closed its doors for good two months earlier." That's a nice little shout-out there, but does it matter to what's going on? And surely only the most devout of true-crime fans will appreciate knowing the entire contents of Nina Reiser's last grocery list or knowing that Lee made a point of knowing them, considering the immateriality of this information to the case.
Given the precedent of Elliott's book, it's a cruel irony that Lee's few insertions of himself into this story wind up standing out so awkwardly. He's an affable enough presence and obviously a diligent pro, but the established context of his restraint makes the occasional first-person foray feel paradoxically unwelcome. When Lee takes pains to reconstruct a scene of Reiser running away from him, for example, it serves only to point out that the episode later made the TV news. Lee should know that the how-I-got-the-story stuff isn't the story. Except in Elliott's case, when it is.
Qualms aside, Presumed Dead does convert material that is both depressing and familiar into a page-turner. The book suits its unpretentious airport-paperback design, and sits well in our growing library of local true-crime potboilers. Even if its content doesn't sit well. And even if it isn't the last word on Hans Reiser.
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