Blood Will Sell? Cullen’s Saga Still On the Shelf

When millionaire T. Cullen Davis was arrested last summer and charged with trying to hire an assassin to kill the judge in Davis’ pending divorce case, journalists speculated that one of the spin-offs of the event would be that writer Gary Cartwright would become a very rich man.

Cartwright, who had covered Davis’ Amarillo murder trial for Texas Monthly, would now have everything he needed to write a best-selling book. So far however, that thesis has proved to be less than correct. Cartwright’s chronicle of the Davis trials, Blood Will Tell, and a competing book, David Phillips’ Great Texas Murder Trials, have not proved to be the fastest-selling non-fiction titles on Dallas and Fort Worth bookstore shelves this summer. A check of four local bookstores in mid-August showed that the two books had sold about 500 copies each, compared with Gail Sheehy’s non-fiction work Passages, which sold more than 900 copies at just one of the stores.