Two men in particular had reason to celebrate the evening of July 9, 1981. One received the Pulitzer Prize the year prior, having refashioned his literary career after a series of controversies, failures, and skirmishes. The other was barely a month out of prison, a murderer whose letters, collected in book form, promised an inside look at the horrors of incarcerated life.

JACK AND NORMAN: A STATE-RAISED CONVICT AND THE LEGACY OF NORMAN MAILER’S “THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG” by Jerome Loving Thomas Dunne Books, 256 pp., $25.99

The latter was Jack Henry Abbott. His book was toasted with white wine that July night at Il Mulino in Greenwich Village. The former was Norman Mailer, who had provided the introduction, an extended thank-you for Abbott’s help on writing that Pulitzer winner, The Executioner’s Song.

The celebration was short-lived. Nine days later, the day before In the Belly of the Beast received a rave review in the New York Times, Abbott was a fugitive. He had murdered again. Freedom evaporated. Once captured, in late September, Abbott would never see the outside world again.

Writers like Michael Mewshaw and Felice Picano assigned blame to Mailer in subsequent essays on Abbott’s book, arguing Mailer went out of his way to ignore Abbott’s lengthy criminal record stretching back to age eleven. Those offering support at Abbott’s trial included Jean Malaquais and Susan Sarandon, part of a group of intellectuals and artists claiming Abbott’s literary talent merited leniency. Three and a half decades later, the finger-pointing continues about where violence meets life and art, and where the responsibility falls.

Jerome Loving’s Jack and Norman is a sturdy, competent account of the tangled relationship between the multi-incarcerated Abbott and the variably-celebrated and infamous Mailer. Loving hits all the notes he’s supposed to hit while carving out a slice of literary history, generously quoting from unpublished letters: He sets up Mailer’s fascination with criminality and his failures of empathy, and questions whether Mailer took enough responsibility when his artistic ideals clashed with real-life consequences. Loving also uses the episode to try to illustrate larger failings of the criminal justice system, an issue that fits awkwardly around the contours of a smaller-scale, if still ethically complicated, tale of the ruined remnants of 1950s literary culture. Jack and Norman is a book that makes one wonder why it took so long for someone to write a full-length treatment of the whole mess—and then again, why it can’t quite measure up to the personalities of the people involved.