The Hossack Case, Law and Literature

Margaret Raymond reviews Patricia L. Bryan and Thomas Wolf, Midnight Assassin: A Murder in America's Heartland, published by Algonquin Books (2005), at 57 J. Legal Educ. 293 (2007). In it she compares the book, which is legal history, and which details the real life murder of John Hossack, and the subsequent trial of his wife Margaret, and the fictionalization of the case by Susan Glaspell in her works Trifles and A Jury of Her Peers. Ms. Bryan has also written another study of the Hossack murder case, Stories in Fiction and Fact: Susan Glaspell's A Jury of Her Peers and the 1901 Murder Trial of Margaret Hossack, 49 Stan. L. Rev. 1293 (1997). Professor Raymond also suggests pedagogical uses for the Hossack story and Glaspell works in various law school settings.