Book Review: Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder, by Rachel McCarthy James
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Bookworm Sez
“Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder” by Rachel McCarthy James
c.2025, St. Martin’s Press $28.00 259 pages
Call it a difference of opinion.
You say one thing, your opponent says another. You thrust and parry, they rant and argue, you both agree amiably, then disagree vehemently. Is there a place you can come together, a consensus on which you can settle? You’ll find it, if you’re patient but, as in the new book “Whack Job” by Rachel McCarthy James, be careful how you split hairs.
Over the years, and especially after having co-written a book about a nineteenth-century axe murderer, Rachel McCarthy James has thought a lot about axes as weapons. Doing someone in with a heavy, sharp instrument, she says, has “become a permanent punchline,” found in movies, television, and bad mystery stories. Axe-as-weapon is so “unserious” that we barely even think of it as a mode of murder – but it most definitely is.
Some 430,000 years ago, for instance, a human was felled by a heavy, sharp tool to the head. Fast forward to 2015, when it was determined that the owner of “Cranium 17” was the sure victim of one of the world’s earliest known homicides.
Somewhere between 12,000 and 7,000 BCE, stone tools “began to be consistently attached to handles” – partly as tools and partly for war-making. The Egyptians loved the heck out of that but, over time, the axe’s popularity as a weapon became “a bit lower status.”
Axes were convenient ways for Chinese emperors and British kings to dispatch enemy prisoners and inconvenient wives. They were survival tools for Norsemen and elite items for the afterlives of female rulers. Once Europeans came to North America, axes were “a symbol of war and diplomacy at once,” and tools of “Indigenous resistance to imperialism…”
George Washington was said, incorrectly, to have used an axe. Carry Nation used one, and so did Lizzie Borden, maybe. And, sadly, more than one modern killer has learned that “A hatchet is small, handy, and distinctly wieldy for cutting ropes or meat or throats.”
If you’re a mystery fan or true crime reader, you know that neither comes without a fair amount of blood and guts. So yes, you can expect it inside “Whack Job,” and more: there’s a delicious bit of gruesomeness here, and a pleasantly surprising sense of humor.
And another twist: lovers of history will be delighted, too.
Author Rachel McCarthy James is careful to bring readers up-to-speed with quick, relevant preludes before telling multiple individual stories of the axe as murder weapon. That makes this an easy, informative and wonderfully enjoyable read. It’s also unusual, because those stories include tiny, esoteric pockets of the past as well as highly famous tales, which means you won’t be disappointed by any whack-y omissions. Whodunit lovers and true crime fans will both be satisfied with what they find here.
No doubt, you’ll find “Whack Job” to be a cut above, if you love reading about rare kinds of crimes committed with ghastly and heavy weapons. Readers who throw axes for sport will also enjoy this different kind of true crime book.
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