Book Review of “American Crime Stories”

Abstract

This paper is to review some short crime stories in “American Crime Stories” collected by John Escott. It has found a theme that laziness can change a crime victim into a criminal in some cases. The book mentions this mainly in Chapter Six “Lazy Susan”, which narrates a story of a lazy woman called Susan who was very angry about being robbed but later became a mugger herself since she found that it was easier to make money in that way. This paper will first show the value of the book by focusing on analyzing this short story in two aspects: how laziness influenced the character Susan and how the plot developed. Then it will conclude that “American Crime Stories” is a very interesting book worth reading because it reveals many facts of crimes and allows us to explore the inner world of criminals.

本篇論文是對約翰·埃斯科特所收集并重述的《美國犯罪故事》所做的書評。文中主要探討關於犯罪的一個有趣的事實——有時懶惰可以使一名犯罪被害人變成罪犯。這一主題主要體現在本書的第六章《懶惰的蘇珊》的故事中。該故事講述的是一個名叫蘇珊、非常懶惰的女人在她被搶劫以後非常氣憤，於是進行了一系列的自衛訓練，然而到最後卻自己變成了一名行兇搶劫者。在本篇論文中，首先，筆者將重點從懶惰的性格對主角蘇珊的影響以及故事情節的發展兩方面分析《懶惰的蘇珊》這一故事，并通過詳細的分析該故事來展現此書的價值。最後，得出結論為：《美國犯罪故事》這本書揭露了很多關於犯罪的有趣事實，通過閱讀它我們可以深入探索罪犯的內心世界。