The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

^Twenty-Five “Gee, Ed, That Was Bad Luck”

Two weeks after Sally Horner’s death, on September 2, 1952, another sensational crime reported by the Associated Press caught Vladimir Nabokov’s attention, and he filled another of his note cards. Unlike Sally’s story, which merited a single parenthetical in Lolita but was seeded throughout the novel, this case got an entire paragraph at the beginning of chapter thirty-three. Humbert Humbert has returned to Ramsdale. Before making himself known in his former haunt, he stops off at the local cemetery, where he wanders as he ruminates upon his past. During his peregrinations, he stumbles across a particular sight:

Nabokov cleverly phrased it so that the reader isn’t clear if Humbert actually stumbles across the murderer’s grave or if he is merely thinking about the case as he looks at the graves. It has to be the latter, because Ramsdale is supposed to be somewhere in New England, an area Nabokov knew very well. The G. Edward Grammer case happened in Baltimore, a city Nabokov did not know at all. Nabokov’s misspelling of Grammer’s last name was deliberate, an opportunity for the noted literary prankster to sneak in another joke. It was also a sly reference to Humbert’s professed intention, earlier in Lolita, to teach French grammar to Ramsdale’s local children.

The text of Nabokov’s surviving note card about the G. Edward Grammer case is close to, but not exactly, the final version. It includes the phrases “Gee Ed, that was bad luck” as well as “god bless our good cops!” But another wry aside about “Mrs. Grammar’s new automobile” and Grammer’s murderous actions did not make it into the final text: “ought to have doctored it first, Ed!”

One could see how this story, in tandem with Sally Horner’s death, served as important inspiration for Nabokov. The Grammer case was a media sensation, capturing public attention for being an almost perfect murder. Grammer very nearly got away with it—except the Baltimore police noticed some details that did not add up, like a pebble jammed underneath the accelerator pedal.

The crime unfolded much as Nabokov described in Lolita. On the evening of August 19, 1952, Ed Grammer was getting ready to go back to New York City after a weekend with his wife and both of their daughters. Dorothy and the kids had moved to Parkville, a suburb of Baltimore, to care for her bereaved mother, while Ed remained in their Bronx apartment. The Sunday night routine was for Dorothy to drive Ed in their big blue Chrysler to Baltimore Penn Station, where he would give his wife some money for the week and catch the 11:28 P.M. train. For a few days after the “accident,” Grammer insisted that Dorothy had dropped him off as usual, and that the last he’d seen her alive was at the train station.

But the facts didn’t add up. The witnesses who saw the Chrysler speed down the hill along Taylor Avenue and sideswipe a telephone pole turned out to be patrolmen. For the victim of a car accident, Dorothy was astonishingly little-bruised in the areas they expected to be bruised, whereas her head had clearly been bashed in. There was blood in the driver’s seat but the spatter wasn’t substantial enough to suggest she had been killed on impact. More curious: Dorothy’s purse and glasses were missing. When the pebble was discovered, pushing the accelerator forward, what seemed an accident transformed into murder, confirmed when Grammer confessed, at last, to Baltimore County police.

The fishbowl atmosphere intensified when reporters sniffed out the prospect of a mistress, which provided a motive for Dorothy Grammer’s murder. But when they found her, she turned out to be a United Nations communications officer named Matilda Mizibrocky who swore she didn’t know her beau was married, and they didn’t print her name right away. Even the court hid her under the pseudonym of “Mary Matthews” so that she wouldn’t be hounded further, and her testimony possibly tainted. It didn’t work. Grammer’s defense team was livid that the court tried to shield Mizibrocky from them, too, and hinder their ability to prepare their case.

It isn’t clear if Nabokov followed the news after Grammer’s arrest. The trial showcased further lurid details, and Grammer’s execution by hanging in 1954 became an added spectacle because it was initially botched. But the main affair—husband murders wife, passes it off as car accident—was enough inspiration for him. The Grammer case clearly echoed the untimely death of Charlotte Haze, struck by a car after running away from the argument with Humbert where she learns of his true designs on her daughter.

The final line of the Grammer paragraph in Lolita reads with further chilling force. Grammer could not conceal his crime from the world after all. Humbert Humbert, systematically raping Dolores Haze for nearly two years on a cross-country odyssey, could, and did. No wonder he concluded: “I did better.”

I bring up the Grammer case because it is another concrete example of Vladimir Nabokov drawing upon real-life crimes to help him with his novel. As with Sally Horner’s kidnapping, the note card’s survival indicates that Nabokov attached enough importance to the case that he wished people to know he did at some future point.

But the case also demonstrates Nabokov’s extended interest in crime stories. This, too, he sought to deny in public; he was also openly critical of mystery novels despite his boyhood love of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales, and he called out Dostoevsky as a hack, though he taught Crime and Punishment to his Cornell students. He disdained those who would reduce Lolita to genre, yet a great deal of Nabokov’s fiction relies on the tropes of crime and suspense: Invitation to a Beheading centers around a man waiting to be executed; Despair hinges upon a man ready to murder his double; and Lolita, of course, is about kidnapping and rape, and culminates in murder.

Which is also why Nabokov’s interest, just over a month after Lolita’s American publication, in a third crime jumped out at me. As Véra told their close friend Morris Bishop when he telephoned with congratulations on the novel’s success, in the week of September 12, 1958, Vladimir had become obsessed with reading up on the stabbing murders of Dr. Melvin Nimer and his wife, Louise Jean, in their Staten Island home. What fascinated Nabokov was that police initially treated their eight-year-old son, Melvin Jr., as a suspect. Even though strips of cloth found on the boy’s bed suggested he had been restrained while his parents were murdered, Melvin’s “unnaturally calm demeanor” raised red flags in investigators’ minds, as did an apparent confession elicited during a mental health evaluation, and the lack of forced entry into the Nimer home.

But the presumed case against the little boy soon fell apart. No physical evidence linked Melvin to his parents’ murders. And police learned that Dr. Nimer had left a set of spare keys at the hospital where he worked, which had vanished—thus answering the “lack of forced entry” question. The case remains unsolved to this day, but there were police detectives still claiming as recently as 2007 that Melvin Nimer was the best suspect in the case.

THE NABOKOVS WOULD VENTURE WEST one more time before Vladimir finished the Lolita manuscript. After so many years of work—five or six, depending on who was counting and who was listening—Lolita was nearly done, despite not being anywhere close to publication. This road trip also proved to be the longest Vladimir and Véra stayed away from the East Coast.

They left Ithaca in that still-reliable Oldsmobile in early April 1953. From there they headed toward Birmingham, Alabama, a pit stop en route to the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona, where butterflies were supposed to be plentiful. What Nabokov discovered upon arrival in May was that the weather was too cold, the wind gusts too strong, for decent butterfly-catching. By the end of the month he and Véra had moved farther west, passing by several California lakes and ending up in Ashland, Oregon.

There the couple stayed from the first of June through the end of August, living at 163 Mead Street. When there were no butterflies to catalog, Nabokov was on a mad sprint to finish Lolita, burning his handwritten pages as soon as Véra typed them up. When their Oregon summer idyll ended, the Nabokovs wended their way back east via Jenny Lake and the Grand Tetons.

Once more, they were back in Ithaca at the start of September, and this time, the end of Lolita was in sight.