Goodman, Jonathan 1931-2008 (Jonathan Walter Goodman)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born January 17, 1931, in London, England; died January 10, 2008. Historian, criminal investigator, television director, theatrical producer, stage manager, novelist, author, and editor. Goodman worked variously as a stage manager, theatrical and television producer and director for several years, and as the director of a publishing company for nearly a decade before his curiosity led him toward the livelihood that would sustain him for the rest of his life. He was working as a director for the British television police drama No Hiding Place when curiosity about convicted wife murderer William Herbert Wallace led to skepticism regarding the man's guilt. This led to an amateur but thorough investigation that ultimately exonerated Wallace, as Goodman revealed in The Killing of Julia Wallace (1969). Though it was not his first book, it became the best seller that inspired Goodman's career as a true-crime investigator and author. He wrote many such books and edited several others, but Goodman did not limit himself to reporting true crime. He collected poems about crime, such as Bloody Versicles: The Rhymes of Crime (1971). He also composed crimes of his own in novels like Hello Cruel World Goodbye (1964) and The Last Sentence (1978), which some critics called his best. It is the complex story of a true-crime writer who unmasks a killer, then thirty years later becomes involved in investigating the murder of the murderer. Though many of Goodman's books are investigations of true crimes known best to British readers, his last, Murder on Several Occasions (2007), is a collection of essays about crimes and criminals, including American cases.

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PERIODICALS

Times (London, England), February 18, 2008, p. 48.