A Writer Jailed for Murder

Inside the Tolland County Jail

The Mansfield (Connecticut) Historical Society Newsletter for March 2010 published an article by Tolland town historian Barbara Cook on Leonard Cline. Last year it was posted, with a few photos (of Cline's house, and of the inside of the jail itself), on the Mansfield Historical Society website, here. 

The article is based on many newspaper accounts, and is fairly accurate, as such things go. I am quoted in it, but the "interview" with me was not current: it was almost thirty years ago, when I visited the Tolland area in 1993. Barbara passed away in March 2021 at the age of 87. At the age of nine, in the spring of 1943, she moved with her family into the Tolland County Jail, where her parents ran the jail from 1943 through April 1947. Barbara wrote a short memoir "Growing up at the County Jail." 

Cline wrote an article on his time in the jail, "Jail Hill," which appeared the November 1928 issue of  Plain Talk, a fiery monthly edited by G.D. Eaton. Eaton previewed the article in the October issue by calling it "An excellent picture of a Connecticut jail where Mr. Cline . . . spent a number of months, It is witty and informative and written in the author's best and inimitable style." 

G.D. Eaton (1894-1930) was, like Cline, raised in Michigan and educated at the University of Michigan. His first novel was Backfurrow (1925); a posthumous second novel was John Drakin (1937). He was known as a book critic, and reviewed Cline's God Head in The Morning Telegraph (of New York), sometime between October 10th (the day the book was published) and December 6th (the day the below advertisement was published) in 1925 (I have been unable to find the review itself,* frustratingly), though I have seen a few quotes from it. A publisher's advertisement in The New York Times gives the following quote:

God Head gives me more than one thrill. Cline, as a novelist, is Jack London back from hell, a vastly improved London philosophically, and a London with a few new tricks of phrase, but in the main, with the same old powerful glamour, somewhat polished up  . . . The book is almost too good to be true.

When Cline proposed the article on "Jail Hill" to his agent, he described it as:

It would be a series of short character studies and episodes drawn from life in this most incredible and unknown of all institutions: a  New England country jail. The general theme would be, more or less, the futility of jails; but it would be never succinctly stated. With 400 words for the maximum episode, I could go on--perhaps almost in diary form--for as long as an editor's patience would last.

Cline's manuscript, titled "On Jail Hill," was written in the Tolland Jail on 5 January 1928. 

*If anyone can turn this review up and supply it, I'll be very grateful!