Author: Brian Kannard
Publisher: Grave Distractions Press, 2009
Price: £11.99 (paperback)
Isbn: 9780578046143

This book’s promise to deliver 45 true tales of disturbing the dead is only just met and I take except­ion to the foreword’s statement that it is “more than a collection of trivia”. With one notable except­ion, however, it is more than a bunch of urban legends: the author was unable to confirm the story of a radio listener in Minne­sota who confessed that he had stolen a friend’s body to fulfill his wish for a Viking-style funeral, and concludes that it could have been a hoax.

Most of the tales are sourced, though the 322 endnotes are rather cryptic and the biblio­graphy less than solid. I was also a little puzzled at the inclusion of a group of obscure 19th-century newspaper items about grave robberies instead of, for instance, the exhumation by an angry mob of the body of a Russian mystic in 1916. With only a couple of sentences about the taboo of disturbing the dead, the author groups the tales by
the reasons for desecration: science, religion, sorc­ery, politics, celebrity, friendship, greed and vandalism.

The publisher is to be comm­ended for offering the book in an electronic edition. Breezing through it on my Amazon Kindle, I was able to revisit the itinerant skulls of Austrian composer Joseph Haydn and Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, the cross-country escapade with the brain of American physicist Albert Einstein, the obligatory story of Scottish murderers Will­iam Burke and William Hare, the expertly embalmed body of Argentine First Lady Eva Perón, the souvenirs of American murd­erer Ed Gein, the pilfered ashes of American entertainer Groucho Marx, and the plots to steal the bodies of Abraham Lincoln, Elvis Presley, and Charlie Chaplin. And in fact I came across stories that were new to me, a scholar of death for 25 years: the posthumous hist­ories of English poet John Milton, American revolutionary Thomas Paine, American actor John Barrymore, and Native American leader Geronimo. Specifically, I did not know that Argentine revolutionary Ché Guevara had the foresight to make a dental cast before leaving for the Congo to assist in the identification of his remains should he be killed in combat. And I was unaware that “Einstein uttered his last words in German, to a nurse who did not understand them…”

So, there are a few interesting morsels in here, like the metaphor that “Forest Lawn is the Fort Knox of cemeteries,” which make up for the unapologetic use of gallows humour.

But Skullduggery is also unfortunately riddled with malapropisms and misspellings. My favorites: “this age old tenant of respecting the sanctity of the dead”; “the funeral precession of sixteen white Cadillacs”; “the same coroner that preformed Sinclair’s autopsy”; “the three could not be charged with sexual assault, because the statue does not address necrophilia”; and best of all, “Chaplin’s [..] body was being held for random.”