Somehow you never think of a professor who teaches tax law as someone who would write a book about a murder, especially a murder that happened over a hundred years ago.
But that’s just what Patricia Bryan and her husband Thomas Wolf did. “Midnight Assassin” is a gripping, fascinating account of the unsolved murder of a prominent Iowa farmer, John Hossack, his family, the community and an accounting of the times in 1901. It is a book you can’t put down, and part of the reason the whole thing holds you is that it’s so well written and structured.
From the beginning you know who is killed and how. You even know the murder weapon — an axe — the same axe that only days before had been used to kill the Thanksgiving turkey. And only hours before the murder, that same axe was used to split wood.
While John Hossack lay sleeping beside his wife in a downstairs bedroom, six of their nine children asleep upstairs, someone hit him in the head with an axe. Hossack lived several hours, doctors called in, neighbors crowding the farm house, his wife weeping at his bedside.
Did she do it? After all, she was only inches away from the victim when it happened. Was it true the whole family lived under the violent temper and unrelenting control of the man thought by the whole community to be a good and upstanding citizen and neighbor? Or was the terrible deed done by some wayfaring stranger who came and went through the unlocked door so carefully even the farm dog sleeping on the porch lay undisturbed?
Some said they had seen a stranger earlier in the evening. Some said the dog acted as though it had been drugged. If any of that was true, what was the motive? John Hossack paid his bills, didn’t cross his neighbors, and nothing was taken from the farm house.
It’s all a puzzlement, still unsolved over a hundred years later, though Margaret Hossack, the wife, was tried and convicted in one of the most publicized trials the country had ever seen. Her trial, with its jury of 12 men (women were not allowed to serve on juries at that time) was read and discussed, argued over and divided people, even marriages, into two camps; those who believed she was the only one who could have done it and those who believed her an innocent victim of a male-dominated society.
A young reporter for the Des Moines Daily News, Susan Glaspell, covered the trial and later wrote a short story, “A Jury of Her Peers,” that has been included in “Best American Short Stories” and in every college anthology since. It’s an unforgettable story, one that led Bryan and Wolf to research newspaper accounts of the trial, visit the area and talk to descendants of the lawyers who tried the case. In their skilled and masterful presentation of the facts and findings, Bryan and Wolf balance the case so the reader goes back and forth on who did the actual murder.
“Midnight Assassin” is a work of literature in the way art, in the hands of professionals, can transform a skein of reality into something mesmerizing and lasting.
Patricia Bryan teaches tax law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Thomas Wolf is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. He works as a writing consultant for the Association of American Medical Colleges.
