Book Review: Secrets of the Congdon Mansion, by Joe Kimball (Updated 2017 edition)

The Glensheen mansion in Duluth, journalist and author Joe Kimball, and his book Secrets of the Congdon Mansion, first published in 1985, and updated most recently in 2017.

For decades, the 1977 murders of heiress Elisabeth Congdon and her nurse Velma Pietila have fascinated Minnesotans. Why? Well, the murders occurred in Elisabeth’s house, the beautiful mansion her father Chester Congdon built on the shores of Lake Superior in Duluth. The mansion, known as Glensheen, has been open for tours since 1979. To see the crime scene, all you have to do is buy a ticket for a tour. But for decades, the tour guides never discussed the murders. As a nosy kid, I tried to trick them into revealing some information. Standing in the bedroom where Elisabeth was murdered, I innocently asked “Whose bedroom was this?” Because at Glensheen it is forever 1908, the year the family moved into the mansion, the Glensheen floorplan, and the tour guides, refer to that room as “Helen’s Room.” Apparently now the guides will answer questions about the murders at the end of the tour.  

In addition to the murders being committed in the most picturesque mansion this side of the board game Clue, another source of fascination is that the person found guilty of the murders was Roger Caldwell, Elisabeth Congdon’s son-in-law. Roger was married to Marjorie, Elisabeth’s adopted daughter who was always short of money. If you want to know more about the murders, and all of the subsequent craziness, you should start by reading Joe Kimball’s book Secrets of the Congdon Mansion. First published in 1985, and most recently updated in 2017, the book details the murders and the legal aftermath. In 1977, Kimball was a rookie reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune (now the Minneapolis Star & Tribune) who was going to cover a strawberry festival but heard a news bulletin about a homicide in Duluth and thus became one of the first reporters at the crime scene. Kimball has detailed all of the many twists and turns of the case since then.  

If Kimball continues to update Secrets of the Congdon Mansion, he’ll have to add a section about the fantastic musical Glensheen, written by Jeffrey Hatcher and Chan Poling, that premiered at the History Theatre in Saint Paul in 2015. I reviewed Glensheen here in 2018, and while the summer 2023 production just closed, there is a cast recording available. Glensheen is both funny and touching, and it continues to breathe new life into this most bizarre tale, which goes a long way to proving the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction.  

Kimball’s book is only 104 pages long, but it does an excellent job of summarizing the events, and Marjorie’s subsequent legal problems. Kimball also quotes extensively from Roger Caldwell’s 1983 confession. Long story short, after serving 5 years in prison, Caldwell was going to get a new trial. Rather than go through all that trouble, in a case they might not win, the state offered Caldwell a deal: confess to the murders and we’ll let you off with time served. As Roger asks in the play Glensheen, “What does the state get out of it?” An exasperated prosecutor replies “We get OUT of it!” Caldwell’s confession raised more questions than it answered, and it shows a man living in a deep state of denial. Caldwell was asked: “What did you do then after beating the nurse to death?” Roger’s response was: “Well, I didn’t beat her to death. I beat her and she died.” (p.92) Those lines are repeated verbatim in Glensheen and provide a moment that is both funny and deeply tragic at the same time.  

Kimball also shares the tales of how he got these stories, offering an interesting glimpse at old-school journalism. If you’re fascinated by the Glensheen murders, you need to read Secrets of the Congdon Mansion.  

Book Review: Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell (2013)

Paperback cover of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, by Sarah Churchwell, 2013.

Professor and author Sarah Churchwell.

My signed copy of Careless People. I filled in for Sarah Churchwell in Saint Paul when she got COVID in the fall of 2022. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Sarah Churchwell’s excellent 2013 book Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby is a fascinating read for fans of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Churchwell examines Fitzgerald’s classic novel in detail, and she takes us through Fitzgerald’s time in Great Neck, Long Island, which inspired the setting of The Great Gatsby. By relentlessly combing through primary sources, Churchwell shows us how then-current events may have influenced the gestation of Gatsby. Specifically, Churchwell focuses on the 1922 double murder of Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills in New Jersey, which became a media sensation. 

Careless People opens with Scott and his wife Zelda leaving his hometown of Saint Paul, Minnesota, for New York City. Fitzgerald telegrammed his editor Maxwell Perkins on September 18, 1922, saying he and Zelda would be in New York City two days later. The date is important to me, because I give walking tours of Fitzgerald’s Saint Paul neighborhood, and this is the first time I’ve seen the exact date when Fitzgerald left Saint Paul. (When I met Sarah Churchwell at the 2023 F. Scott Fitzgerald Conference, I thanked her for this information, and she said it took five years to find the exact date!)  

Ironically enough, the time that the Fitzgeralds were arriving in New York City-late September of 1922-is around the same time that the fictional Nick Carraway will leave New York City in The Great Gatsby. Churchwell argues persuasively that Fitzgerald deliberately chose 1922 to be the year that Gatsby takes place in. Fitzgerald seems to have regarded 1922 as the height of what we would now call “the Roaring 20’s.”  

Churchwell uses a fascinating framing device to examine the novel: a list of inspirations that Fitzgerald wrote in the back of his copy of Andre Malraux’s 1938 novel Man’s Hope. While some of the inspirations seem quite cryptic, Churchwell is able to piece them together and show their larger resonance within The Great Gatsby. For Gatsby fans, there are nuggets and connections everywhere, and Churchwell expertly weaves the different threads together.  

Scott and Zelda eventually rented a house in Great Neck, which became West Egg in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald was pondering the themes of his third novel, but he was more immediately focused on finishing his comedic play The Vegetable, which he was convinced would become a huge hit. (Spoiler alert: it was a flop.) By the time the Fitzgeralds left Great Neck for France in May of 1924, Scott had a good idea of where the novel was headed. As usual, Fitzgerald had no shortage of possible titles for the book: Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires, The High-Bouncing Lover, Gold-Hatted Gatsby, and Fitzgerald’s own favorite for quite a while, Trimalchio.  

An interview that Fitzgerald gave to the New York World newspaper that ran on April 1, 1922, sums up much of his worldview. He said that younger people did not believe in the “old standards and authorities, and they’re not intelligent enough, many of them, to put a code of morals and conduct in place of the sanctions that have been destroyed for them.” (p.28) This is a theme that continues throughout much of Fitzgerald’s writing. As Fitzgerald wrote at the end of his first novel This Side of Paradise, his generation had “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” (p.260) So what comes next? Fitzgerald offers us no easy answers. 

Released in April 1925, The Great Gatsby puzzled many of its first reviewers. The New York World’s review was headlined: “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Latest a Dud.” Harsh, old sport. As Churchwell writes, it wasn’t until Gilbert Seldes’ review “that August did anyone seem to grasp that Fitzgerald was saying something about America, about faith, illusions, and cupidity.” (p.298) Fitzgerald wrote to Edmund Wilson in frustration, “Of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about.” (p.298) It’s hard to imagine how this classic novel was overlooked at the time. But Fitzgerald was perfectly summing up the 1920’s, during the 1920’s, and that seemed to go over most people’s heads in 1925.  

Every Fitzgerald fan should read Careless People. No matter how many times you’ve read The Great Gatsby, Sarah Churchwell’s book will bring another aspect of this beautiful novel to the surface.