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April 4, 2002

A closer look at some selected Books & Journals: William Coles/”Compass in the Blood”

If "The Catcher in the Rye," J.D. Salinger's 1951 tale of teenage angst, had appeared a half-century later, it might well have been marketed as a young-adult novel, says Pitt professor emeritus William E. Coles Jr.

By today's standards, "Catcher" bears the genre's earmarks, Coles points out: Unadorned style. Mild profanity and sex. A plot that centers around a journey of self-discovery by an intelligent yet confused young protagonist, rebelling against the dubious values of the adult world.

Not that Coles is a fan of "Catcher" (its dialogue strikes him as being "a bit phony") but he cites Salinger's classic in arguing that literature aimed at readers aged 14-and-older has outgrown its bland beginnings.

"Today, it's as much a marketing niche as anything," Coles says. "I wouldn't have written my own young-adult novels any differently if they had been for a general adult readership."

Coles, who has taught English writing and literature here since 1974, has written three young-adult novels. They include "Funnybone," written with Stephen Schwandt (a Publishers Weekly Pick of the Lists), "Another Kind of Monday" (an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults), and last year's "Compass in the Blood," a modern-day mystery in which a Pitt freshman and her friends investigate what remains, probably, the most bizarre and sensational real-life crime in Pittsburgh history: the Katherine Soffel scandal.

On Jan. 31, 1902, Kate Soffel, the 34-year-old wife of the warden of the Allegheny County Jail, aided the escape of two brothers awaiting execution by smuggling in saws and guns to them. Kate apparently had fallen in love with one of the brothers, handsome young Ed Biddle. Deserting her husband and four young children, Kate fled with the fugitives in a stolen sleigh. The next day, a posse caught up with them in Butler County.

Ed and Jack Biddle were shot and killed. Kate Soffel also was shot but survived and was sent to Western Pennsylvania Penitentiary, where she served two years. She then lived under an assumed name on Pittsburgh's North Side, working as a dressmaker, until her death from typhoid fever six years later. Kate's husband divorced her shortly after her capture, and reportedly she never saw her children again.

As Coles writes, the scandal usually is told as a love story, "either the sort that made [Mrs. Soffel] into a pathetic romantic fool or one that represented her as a tragic heroine, bravely choosing to endure the world's scorn to follow the dictates of her heart."

But in Coles's novel, those interpretations are challenged by Harriet "Harry" Bromfield, "Pittsburgh's most flamboyant and controversial TV journalist" (modeled, the author says, after O.J. Simpson murder trial prosecutor Marcia Clark, with a touch of the late Patti Burns thrown in). Harry discovers that Mrs. Soffel may have left behind a secret diary revealing the sensational, untold true story of the escape. Harry enlists Pitt journalism student Dee Armstrong as a go-fer, promising her an internship and a bright future in TV news if Dee helps to track down the diary.

Dee's quest takes her from Oakland to Downtown, Shadyside, the South Side, Troy Hill and finally to a Squirrel Hill cemetery where Kate Soffel's cremated remains lie in an unmarked grave, together (according to the novel) with her diary. Along the way, Dee learns hard lessons about loyalty, betrayal, ambition and the futility — and danger — of trying to fit people into neat categories based on age, sexuality or superficial charm.

As the novel progresses, Kate Soffel comes to personify human complexity. "She's like Jay Gatsby," Coles suggests, "in the sense that people can project any identity they want on her: foolish middle-aged wife, feminist victim, depraved monster of adultery and parental neglect." Harry sees Mrs. Soffel simply as a wronged woman. But Dee, struggling to come to terms with her parents' divorce, is troubled by Kate's abandonment of her children.

Coles believes Kate Soffel was considerably more complicated than she has been portrayed in print (Pittsburgh newspapers in 1902 published cartoons depicting her as a sewer-dwelling vampire and a devourer of children), on stage (in his research, Coles found references to a 1903 melodrama based on the Soffel-Biddle story) and on film (unlike many critics and historians, Coles liked Gillian Armstrong's 1984 movie, "Mrs. Soffel," a gloomy, feminist version of the story shot at the Allegheny County Jail and other local sites).

Just as his novel condemns pigeon-holing of human beings, Coles resists literary dogma such as: An old guy like him shouldn't be writing from the viewpoint of a young woman.

"Actually, of the five novels I've written, four were written from the point of view of a young woman," he notes. "I keep waiting for feminist criticism, some bullshit like, 'You're trying to appropriate the female experience,' but so far no one has complained.

"To me, writing from the viewpoint of someone who is different from you in terms of age, gender or race is like learning to draw by looking at your subject in a mirror, or a right-handed person drawing with the left hand. The exercise opens up your creativity by dislocating you from your familiar way of looking at the world."

"Compass in the Blood" offers a highly unfamiliar, mirror-image look at the Soffel-Biddle story: as a conspiracy in which county jail warden Peter Soffel set up the condemned brothers and his own wife.

Coles points out that:

* Prior to the jailbreak, Warden Soffel encouraged his wife to continue visiting the Biddles on death row, ostensibly to comfort them spiritually — even though such visits violated prison regulations and had been criticized by Pittsburgh newspapers.

* The only way out of the maximum-security area where the Biddles were imprisoned was "through an iron door that could be opened only from the outside or with a key from within; it was strictly forbidden for that key to be brought into the prison proper under any circumstances," Coles writes. "Yet the night of the escape one of the guards did bring in the key, which the Biddles stole when they overpowered him."

* None of the three guards on duty the night the Biddles escaped activated the jail's new electric alarm system "though all the guards had been made familiar with its operation, and though the button to set it off was conspicuous in the guardroom," Coles writes.

* The Biddles were only technically murderers (they were sentenced to death for participating in a robbery during which an accomplice killed a local druggist) but they were savvy, career criminals. They planned their escape for months, and had sawed through their cell bars days before the actual breakout. Why did the Biddles choose to escape at 3 a.m. on Jan. 31, 1902 — the coldest night of the coldest recorded winter in Pittsburgh up to that time, with a snowstorm predicted to be on the way — lacking warm clothes, money or any apparent plan for leaving the city or staying overnight with one of their many local friends? Why did they stop by the warden's residence to pick up Kate before they escaped, and why did the conspicuous threesome then travel aimlessly around the city together rather than splitting up?

"To me," Coles says, "it looks as if they had a plan which was aborted in some way."

Coles's novel suggests that Warden Soffel himself masterminded the escape, supplying the Biddles (through the trusting Kate) with cheap, inaccurate pistols and then letting them get away — before springing his trap. But why?

Through his marriage to Kate, Soffel was connected to the Republican Party machine that controlled Pittsburgh politics. Yet, he'd only been given a minor appointment as county jail warden. Coles says his research indicated that Warden Soffel was calculating, priggish, possibly sadistic toward prisoners, a dissatisfied husband, a crack shot and very ambitious.

"So," Coles says, "what if the warden sets things up to look as if these desperate criminals, the Biddles, have taken his wife hostage and are fleeing north? Then, in a gun battle, he drops them both. But alas, his wife also is killed. Overnight, he would simultaneously be a hero deserving of higher office and a bereaved widower. He would also inherit Kate's considerable property, which court records show he'd made her sign over to him, and he would get to raise their four kids exactly the way he thought they ought to be raised.

"I'm not saying that really happened," Coles emphasizes, laughing. "But it fits all the facts."

No one knows who fired the bullet that struck Kate Soffel just above her heart. (Her steel-ribbed corset probably saved her life.) Did the dying Ed Biddle shoot Kate at her request, as is commonly assumed, when capture and shame seemed inevitable? Or was Kate shot by a member of the posse?

"Certainly, it's strange that the first thing Peter Soffel did when he discovered his wife and the Biddles were gone from the jail was to have the Biddles' cells cleaned," Coles continues. "Everything in those cells, Soffel took and burned. He also burned his wife's papers and effects because, he said, he didn't want his kids to be contaminated by them."

But the warden missed at least one of Kate's papers. Following publication of "Compass in the Blood," an anonymous reader mailed Coles a tattered letter, written in pencil.

A historian subsequently confirmed that the letter was a love note from Ed Biddle to Kate, the only one known to exist. The letter is "only about 85 percent readable," according to Coles, who donated it to the Butler Library.

"In this letter, Ed pleads with Kate to help get him and his brother out of jail," says Coles. "If she can't do this, she is to provide him with poison because he and his brother are determined they're not going to die on the gallows. Ed tells her specifically to get…but I couldn't make out the next word. The word looked like it was spelled 'ruffonrats.'" Coles discovered that 'Ruff on Rats' was the trade name of a popular, arsenic-based rat poison of the day."

While sifting through crumbling files in city and county offices, Coles found what one of his novel's characters describes as "a picture of a very regal-looking, dark-haired woman with sad, compassionate eyes": 34-year-old Kate Soffel. Coles compared this photograph with the portrait of Kate that Pittsburgh newspapers published in 1902. He found that, by retouching the original, the newspapers had made Kate appear to be a dowdy, dull-eyed matron. "It fit with the image the media were promoting of her as a foolish, unfaithful wife," Coles says.

Coles's heroine, Dee, follows in the author's footsteps when she discovers that — per Kate Soffel's instructions — Kate's remains were cremated at H. Samson, Inc., in Oakland. (In his research, Coles found that H. Samson was one of two funeral homes east of the Mississippi that were performing cremations in 1902.) Following cremation, Kate's ashes were buried in her mother's unmarked grave.

In "Compass in the Blood," the search for that grave sends Dee (as it sent Coles) to cemeteries in Troy Hill and Squirrel Hill. At last, the grave is found…but here, for once in the novel, Coles scrambles local geography.

In an author's note, he states that Kate Soffel "did not want her final resting place marked or known. Indeed, in spite of looking for her grave for months, I found it only with the help of information from a source I am pledged not to reveal, and then by sheer accident. It is an accident I have done my best to make sure will never happen again."

Okay, but what about Kate Soffel's secret (and purely fictitious) diary? "Compass" ends before Dee and her friends dig for it. Do they find it?

Coles answers that question without hesitation. "That will be revealed in the sequel," he says, "which I'm currently finishing."

— Bruce Steele


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