NELSON ALGREN AND THE MURDERER. I posted here five years ago about Art Shay’s photograph of a nude Simone de Beauvoir, which was receiving quite a bit of attention at the time in French publications as well as in the New Yorker. I said proudly that I had once spent some time with Art Shay and that he was “one of the most interesting people I have ever met.” A story he told us about Nelson Algren shows how extreme (to Art Shay and to me), Algren’s sympathy for the underdog and the sinful was. As I remember the story, a family had been murdered. Algren looked at two photographs in a newspaper: one was of the five coffins in a church, two large ones and three small ones. The other was of the killer holding his hands up to show the words “HARD LUCK” tattooed on the backs of his fingers. Algren said: “The poor SOB.” He meant the killer.
That’s the way I have always remembered the story. In 2007 Art Shay wrote a book, CHICAGO’S NELSON ALGREN, with astonishing photographs of Chicago (including the de Beauvoir photograph). He told the story there. Here it is, on Google books.