The Quaalude Tablets
Digital edition
Ships in 2 to 5 working days. Delivery quoted from your address at checkout.
Read the opening free
5,644 words · no email, no account
No. 030 · Crime · Crime
The Bargain
a biography of Orenthal James Simpson
What the book is
On the morning of June 13, 1994, two bodies were found outside a Brentwood condominium. Sixteen months later, a jury took less than four hours to acquit the man the country had watched flee down a Los Angeles freeway in a white Ford Bronco. He would spend the next three decades as the most famous defendant in American memory, alive and unwelcome, golfing in Florida and signing autographs in hotel ballrooms, until cancer took him in the spring of 2024.
Bernard Pell's biography of Orenthal James Simpson begins in the San Francisco housing projects and follows its subject through the Heisman Trophy at USC, the broken-field runs in Buffalo, the Hertz airport sprints, and the Brentwood marriage that ended on a tiled walkway. It traces, too, the second life: the civil verdict, the Las Vegas memorabilia room, the nine years in Lovelock, the parole, the diagnosis.
Pell is interested less in the question of guilt — long since settled, in two courtrooms, by two different standards — than in what the country did with its answer. How did a single trial come to hold so much: the Rodney King verdict, the Fuhrman tapes, the daylight gulf between a Black jury pool and a white viewing public?
A portrait of a man who traded everything for celebrity, and of the bargain a country made to watch him do it.
At a glance
- Subject
- Orenthal James Simpson
- Shelf
- Crime · Crime
- Written by
- Bernard Pell
- Chapters
- 19 across 207 pages
- Narrated by
- Alasdair Finn
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
- Content notes
- domestic violence · homicide
Contents · 19 chapters
- 01Potrero HillRead free
- 02USC and the Heisman (1965-1968)3,692 words
- 03The Buffalo Bills (1969-1977)3,376 words
- 04The Hertz Years2,713 words
- 05Marguerite Whitley2,755 words
- 06Nicole Brown2,798 words
- 07The Abuse3,084 words
- 08The Divorce, 19923,011 words
- 09June 12, 19943,203 words
- 10The Bronco Chase2,884 words
- 11The Dream Team2,914 words
- 12The Trial5,802 words
- 13The Verdict3,630 words
- 14The Civil Trial2,804 words
- 15If I Did It2,939 words
- 16Las Vegas2,739 words
- 17Prison and Release2,766 words
- 18April 10, 20243,350 words
- 19The Cancer3,534 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 207 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- Hardcover · $24.99
- 6 × 9 in · 207 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90470-025-6 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Alasdair Finn
ISBN 979-8-90623-006-5
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The Bargain about?
Orenthal James Simpson. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Bargain — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 5,644 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 64,000 words, 19 chapters, 207 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
06Does this book carry content warnings?
Yes: domestic violence; homicide. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle.
The writer
This book deals with
- domestic violence
- homicide
Listed before you buy, not after.
