Chapter 2: Triflers Need Not Apply by Camilla Bruce
True crime meets historical fiction to tell the story of one of America's first female serial killers.
The number of hours I spend with a podcast playing in the background is probably unhealthy. And on highest rotation: true crime. (Another millennial cliche ticked off the list, there).
Triflers Need Not Apply was a book added to my list because I was vaguely familiar with its real-life inspiration. Belle Gunness became notorious as one of America’s most disturbing female serial killers, reportedly killing two husbands, her children and dozens of other men before disappearing after a suspicious fire in the early 1900s.
The book follows Gunness from her young adulthood in Selbu, Norway, through her immigration to the US. The narrative is split between two perspectives – Gunness and her sister Nellie, who grows increasingly uncertain about her younger sibling’s innocence. The latter’s chapters were a reprieve from the often emotionless scheming of Gunness and an insightful exploration of Norwegian immigrant communities.
While reading, I was fully absorbed in the plot and setting. I’d forgotten most of the Gunness story, so the plot remained intriguing. Each time I put the book down, I was itching to return. But I think even those who are familiar with the case will find the imagined elements just as gripping. It does not unfold like a thriller – it’s more a creeping sense of unease in a family drama, building to a wholly unsettling ending.
Yet I did keep wondering whether I would have felt the same were the genders reversed. I think lingering inside the mind of, say, Ted Bundy would have been too disturbing (although I have watched three seasons of You).
The book opens in Norway, with a teenage Gunness pregnant to the son of the wealthy owner of the estate where she works as a maid. When she confronts him, he beats her so violently she miscarries. This trauma reverberates throughout the novel as an explanation, but never an excuse, for the violence Gunness will later perpetrate.
I think this is partly why Triflers Need Not Apply never feels like glorification. The novel hints at some sociopathic or psychopathic traits but also explores how Gunness seems to forever be trying to claw her way into ‘respectable’ Victorian life.
The fact that Gunness’s motivations – imagined though they may be – are so intriguing leads to another question. Why are we so obsessed with trying to understand the seemingly incomprehensible?
Female killers capture attention regardless, but one who so violently dismembers her victims is even more abnormal – and arguably more fascinating for it. As Bruce says, Gunness is not the ‘stereotypical Victorian murderess’ who slipped arsenic in the tea. “Most women also used murder mainly as a means to solve marital issues or disputes within the family, while Belle targeted strangers as well. I think it’s fair to say that she had loftier goals and more intricate schemes than most,” Bruce told Publishers Weekly.
“She was very aware of the female ideal at the time, and used her own perceived fragility to her advantage,” Bruce said. “In one of her letters to a suitor, she goes on about how dearly she needs a man so she herself can stay indoors and spend time with her children, as a woman ought to, and how not even the hardships she has faced has ruined her God-given womanliness. She went on to kill him, of course.”
Triflers Need Not Apply combines true crime and historical fiction to create a compelling, at times chilling, exploration of what might drive a woman to kill in such gruesome ways.
After reading Triflers Need Not Apply, I re-listened to this episode of All Killa No Filla podcast about Gunness.
Bruce’s new novel, All The Blood We Share, is another historical fiction/true crime blend based on “a family of serial killers in the old West bound by butchery and obscured by the shadows of American history”. Sounds interesting!