Rose Keefe- True Crime Author

Deadly and Delicious

2012-01-07T11:16:00.000-08:00

On the afternoon of August 30, 1895, Mary Alice Livingston Fleming ordered clam chowder and lemon meringue pie from the kitchen of New York’s Colonial Hotel, where she lived with her three children. When it arrived, she wrapped the pie, poured the chowder into a pail, and asked her ten-year-old daughter Gracie to deliver the food to her mother, Evelina Bliss, who lived nearby.

The gesture was surprising, and suspicious. Mary Alice’s relations with her mother had been less than cordial, despite later protests to the contrary. She had borne three children out of wedlock and was pregnant with a fourth, an accomplishment that drew Mrs. Bliss’ ire. Mary Alice was also desperate for money, and Evelina was all that stood between her and a massive inheritance from her father. When Mrs. Bliss died hours after eating the chowder, Mary Alice was arrested for murder and became the darling of the New York press.

Mary Alice

Arsenic and Clam Chowder recounts Mary Alice’s sensational 1896 murder trial. The case riveted the public for several reasons. One was that the defendant came from one of New York’s must illustrious families: the Livingstons. Another was that the crime was matricide, which was relatively rare at the time. A third, which sent the newspapers into a frenzy and made jury selection difficult, was that if found guilty, Mary Alice could be the first woman to die in New York’s electric chair. These factors, combined with salacious testimony about Mary Alice's unladylike love life, ensured that the courtroom was filled every day of the trial and kept the story on the front pages throughout the summer of 1896.

Henry Hale Bliss

Author James D. Livingston does a nice job of linking Mary Alice to notable contemporary figures. While awaiting trial in the Tombs, one of her fellow inmates was Maria Barbella, an Italian immigrant who nearly became the electric chair’s first female victim. Her stepfather, Henry Hale Bliss, was struck by an automobile in September 1899, making him the first motor vehicle casualty in the United States. She faced Howe and Hummel, the city’s most notorious and corrupt criminal defense team, during a breach of promise suit she brought against a former lover.

In addition to recounting the crime, trial, and aftermath, Livingston explores issues such as jury bias, capital punishment, women’s rights, and the precise meaning of “reasonable doubt” in court cases. I didn’t find these statistic-laden sections as compelling as the rest of the narrative, but readers seeking a broader overview of the forces that helped decide Mary Alice Livingston Fleming’s fate will find persuasive evidence that the jury’s verdict was a foregone conclusion.

Arsenic and Clam Chowder can be enjoyed by True Crime fans, social historians, or mystery buffs wanting to see life imitate art.

Fortune, Fame, and a Ruined Name

2011-06-18T16:03:00.000-07:00

In June 1873, nineteen-year-old Frank Walworth shot his father, novelist Mansfield Tracy Walworth, to death in a Manhattan hotel room. The Walworths were a socially prominent Saratoga family long regarded as models of virtue and civic accomplishment. When Frank justified his actions by claiming that his father had threatened to kill his mother, the New York press dug into the family’s past and unearthed rumors of domestic violence, hereditary insanity, and religious fanaticism. The result was a media frenzy that shattered the sanctity of the Walworth name.

Geoffrey O’Brien’s Fall of the House of Walworth limns this Gilded Age murder and the warped dynamics that provoked it. It’s partly the grim history of a distinguished yet dysfunctional family and partly a Gothic morality tale of the sort Poe might have conceived.

Mansfield Walworth was an aggressive and pompous narcissist. His novels sold moderately well but did not bring him the mass adulation he craved. Impulsive and constantly chasing get-rich-quick schemes, he repeatedly abandoned his family but exploded when his wife, the former Ellen Hardin, finally left him. Hardin, an intelligent and articulate woman deeply involved in civic affairs, received abusive and threatening letters until her devoted son put a stop to it.

O’Brien betrays his background as a poet. The book abounds with descriptions like the following: “A quantity of blood had splattered the washstand, filling the toothbrush dish and mingling with the soap in the soap dish to form a frothy red foam." Normally this type of cinematic writing is irritating in a nonfiction work, but in this instance it’s strangely in accord with the dark and surreal story.

Walworth history is covered more extensively than Frank’s act of parricide and the ensuing trial, something that might annoy readers who prefer less back story. But by clearly demonstrating how abuse, psychosis, and murder destroyed a once noble family, Fall of the House of Walworth imparts a chill that a dedicated treatment of the murder alone could not summon.

The Big Policeman

2011-04-06T08:03:00.000-07:00

The Big Policeman chronicles the career of Thomas F. Byrnes, who headed the New York City Police Department’s Detective Bureau from 1880 until 1895. Among the cases he oversaw or personally investigated were the Manhattan Savings Bank robbery of 1878, the snatching of millionaire merchant Alexander T. Stewart’s corpse from St. Mark’s churchyard, and the Ripper-style murder of aging barfly Carrie Brown in 1891. These and other lesser known investigations are recounted in detail by J. North Conway, whose previous publishing credits include King of Heists: The Sensational Bank Robbery of 1878 That Shocked America and The Cape Cod Canal: Breaking Through the Bared and Bended Arm.

Born in Dublin, Ireland, Byrnes joined the NYPD in 1863. When the New York City draft riots broke out that same year, he conducted himself with such courage and tenacity that his superiors took notice. Over the years his bravery and resourcefulness won him accolades and promotions. He was appointed chief of the Detective Bureau in 1880 and soon became the most powerful policeman in the city, revered by the Wall Street financiers whose assets he personally protected and feared by the criminals whom he systematically set out to ruin.

Byrnes was the bane of New York’s netherworld. He compiled the Rogue’s Gallery, a mug shot portfolio presented to witnesses and victims of crime for identification purposes, and perfected the physical and psychological torture known as the ‘Third Degree’. In 1886 he instituted a ‘Mulberry Street Morning Parade’ of suspected criminals before his detectives so that they could remember the arrestees’ faces and connect them with future crimes. That same year, he published a book, Professional Criminals of America. Author Julian Hawthorn found him so inspiring that he made Byrnes the subject of a series of crime fighter novels.

Byrnes usually got his man (or woman). If evidence was too circumstantial to support a future conviction, he conned confessions out of suspects via mental gimmickry that played on their fears and suspicions. When mind games or verbal intimidation failed, he cheerfully resorted to the Third Degree. Once the cases went to trial Byrnes, who kept the press in the dark whenever he was on unstable ground, reframed events to make himself look like a hero. Jacob Riis, who was a police reporter for the New York Sun, acknowledged his superior detective skills and called him the "big policeman".

Although he acted like a dedicated public guardian, Byrnes was actually corrupt. His salary averaged less than $5,000 a year, but he managed to bank over $350,000, which suggests that he accepted bribes from those who subverted the law. When questioned about this fortune in 1894 by the Lexow Committee, a probe into NYPD corruption, he attributed it to successful land speculation in Japan and good investment advice from grateful Wall Street financiers. Among those who received this explanation skeptically was Theodore Roosevelt, who became president of the New York City Police Commission in 1895 and compelled Byrnes to resign.

The “Big Policeman” took advantage of his city-wide fame and valuable contacts to open his own successful detective agency on Wall Street, and died in luxury in 1910.

The Big Policeman is an absorbing read, because it contains all the salient details of Byrnes’ most notorious cases. Conway also does a nice job of creating period atmosphere by itemizing other interesting historical events that occurred during the investigations. But there’s surprisingly little said about the shadow side of Byrnes’ police career: the bribes he almost certainly took, and the payments he must have made in turn for his promotions, as insiders admitted that advancement in the NYPD was rarely accomplished on merit alone. While Byrnes is not exactly presented as a paragon of civic virtue, he did have serious ethical flaws (besides tricking and beating suspects!) that should have been thoroughly documented in a book dedicated to his life and exploits.

That said, I enjoyed The Big Policeman and recommend it to those who fascinated by the darker history of Gilded Age New York.

Prince of Quacks

2011-03-09T03:40:00.000-08:00

Prince of Quacks is the definitive biography of Victorian era herb doctor and charlatan Francis Tumblety, who acquired a posthumous notoriety when Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey named him as Jack the Ripper in their book Jack the Ripper: First American Serial Killer (1998). The authors based their hypothesis on a letter written in 1913 by Scotland Yard Chief Inspector John Littlechild, who described Tumblety as a “very likely suspect”. Although the majority of Ripperologists (detective-historians who analyze and discuss the Whitechapel murders) were not convinced, author Timothy Riordan recognized the controversial doctor as one of nineteenth century America’s most intriguing figures, and worthy of a book in his own right.

In retrospect, it appears that Francis Tumblety did everything to offend Victorian sensibilities EXCEPT murder five London prostitutes in 1888. He was connected to the Lincoln assassination, charged with peddling abortion drugs, and arrested for homosexual activity. Some of these episodes were well-publicized, but patients still flocked to his offices and bought his herbal remedies because he knew how to beguile the public: whenever he opened for business in a new city, Tumblety took out huge newspaper ads bearing testimonials from leading citizens, and he responded to criticism by publishing pamphlets that ground his detractors into the dust. Even when he wasn’t in trouble, people took notice, as he was fond of riding through the streets in military regalia with two greyhounds trailing him, his chest glittering with medals supposedly bestowed on him by European royalty.

What makes Tumblety so fascinating is that he represented the best and worst of the era he lived in. On one hand he was a wealthy medical professional who hobnobbed with the rich and famous; his name was linked to Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and the Prince of Wales. On the other, he sold contraceptive and abortion medication and carried on steamy affairs with much younger men. Many of his patients hailed the ‘Indian herb doctor’ (as he called himself) for saving them from painful surgical procedures, but the mainstream medical community derided him as a dangerous quack and tried to put him out of business.

When Tumblety went to England in 1888, his notoriety resulted in his being questioned about the Ripper murders. There was no evidence to hold him and he returned to New York. The American press had a field day over a possible U.S. connection to the bloody crimes; reporters converged eagerly on those who had known Tumblety in Rochester, New York, Boston, San Francisco, and other cities. One of these sources, C.A. Dunham, (a known criminal and perjurer), expounded at length on Tumblety’s supposed hatred of women in general and prostitutes in particular. It was this type of testimony that would prompt Chief Inspector Littlechild to remember the doctor as a person of interest 25 years later.

I bought Prince of Quacks because Tumblety is a local legend in my hometown (Hamilton, Ontario). A walking tour points out a location where he supposedly opened an office after moving here temporarily in July 1856. I’d also heard Timothy Riordan being interviewed on Rippercast, a podcast series about the Whitechapel murders, and been impressed both by Tumblety’s story and Riordan’s mastery of it.

The book is a massive research triumph. Tumblety worked and played in Canada, the United States, and Europe, and his career spanned several decades, so putting together such a complete history was no small achievement. I was pleased to see that this is not another ‘Ripper suspect’ book. The Whitechapel murders are included because Tumblety was questioned about them, but the real focus of Prince of Quacks is Tumblety himself.

A minor criticism: from time to time the narrative is slowed down by excessive and arguably superfluous detail i.e. the newspapers Tumblety advertised in, which editions published the ads, etc. But it doesn’t happen often and readers who aren’t interested in such facts can always skim ahead.

Prince of Quacks is a well-written and compelling look at a forgotten nineteenth century maverick. Francis Tumblety may be the only non-royal Ripper suspect whose life overshadows his tenuous connection to the Whitechapel murders.

From the Ashes of Hannah Bradshaw

2011-01-19T08:23:00.000-08:00

As the eighteenth century waned, the Age of Enlightenment settled over Europe, and its impact could be felt as far away as America. One of its byproducts was an explosion of literature with previously taboo themes: social upheaval, ruling class tyrannies, and supernatural influences. The American press catered to the public’s increasingly macabre tastes by printing grisly stories next to war reports and shipping news. One such tale appeared in the January 3, 1771 of the New York Journal.

The Journal informed its readers that on the evening of December 31, a young charwoman visited her employer, thirty-year-old Hannah Bradshaw, in the latter’s Division Street lodging house. Bradshaw was almost certainly a prostitute: author William Dunlap remembered her as being “a woman of large dimensions, masculine person, coarse manners, and notorious in the neighborhood for her boldness, habitual intemperance, and the vices allied to, and engendered by it.” Her nickname, ‘Man-o-War Nance’ allegedly derived from her fondness for sailors and the dives they frequented.

When the two women parted company at seven o’clock, Bradshaw was slightly drunk but otherwise in good shape. She asked her visitor to return the next day to clean her room.

The charwoman dutifully arrived early on New Year’s Day. To reach Bradshaw’s room, she trudged up a rickety wooden staircase on the outside of the building. When no one answered her repeated knocking, she presumed at first that her employer was sleeping off a spree. But when 11:00 a.m. arrived without a response, she became worried and summoned a male lodger to help her break the room’s window and climb inside. There she saw what the Journal described as “the most shocking spectacle imaginable.”

A charred and smoking hole, four feet in diameter, yawned in the middle of the wood floor. Near its edge lay a leg fragment with the flesh still attached and an assortment of bones, some of which had been reduced to ashes. A blackened partial skeleton lay in the dirt of the crawl space below. The intestines remained intact, as did some flesh on the head, shoulder, and leg. A foul-smelling, greasy matter coated the walls and ceiling, and the heat generated by the strange blaze had even drawn the turpentine from the wainscoting. A rush-bottomed chair was burned on the leg nearest the hole, but nowhere else.

Hannah Bradshaw’s bizarre death appears to be the first (recorded) American case of the phenomenon now referred to as spontaneous human combustion. Whether it exists as described (a human being bursting into flames triggered by internal causes) continues to be a source of debate. In Bradshaw’s case, authorities did not know what to think. An overturned candle holder lay a short distance away from the fragmented body, but it did not appear to be the source of the blaze: the candle burned itself out without harming the flooring. So was she murdered by a client who burned her body afterward, or did she really combust?

It’s interesting to note that Hannah Bradshaw died not long before the dawn of the Gothic novel, which used equally creepy mysteries to chill the reader’s blood. William Dunlap, who recalled her in his written history of New York City, was a close friend of Charles Brockden Brown, the American novelist and pioneer of Gothic fiction. Since the two men almost certainly discussed it, Bradshaw’s death may have been an impetus for the literary genre that made violent death and emotional alienation a staple of popular fiction.

Hope Burned Means a Future Lost

2011-01-07T07:46:00.000-08:00

The back cover of Brent Laporte’s debut novel Hope Burned promises that the story is “at once as bleak and moving, tense and beautiful as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” The comparison fits: both books are emotionally provocative tales of horror and hope. I’d even venture to say that Hope Burned suggests the dangerous repercussions of child abuse with the same sinister intensity that The Road stresses the importance of a healthy ecosystem to human survival.

A nameless boy endures years of abuse at the hands of his father and grandfather, who keep him isolated and enslaved on their remote farm. The only other human being he ever encountered was a young blond girl whom his guardians / jailers lured to the property and later raped and killed. We know nothing of the boy’s mother, but one surmises that she probably met a similar fate after giving birth. The memory of the girl haunts him for the remainder of his days. When he finally escapes and stumbles into civilization, he is taken in by kind people who finally give him a name- Tom. Although he grows into a successful and happily married adult, Tom can’t stop questioning what kind of a future he has when his past refuses to stay buried. So he returns to the farm, kills both his father and grandfather, and writes a memoir to help his young son to understand why.

Laporte structured Hope Burned so that it reads like a letter from Tom to his son. It has no chapter divisions, but in this instance such structure might hinder the flow and personality of the prose. Because Tom presents his story as both an apology and confessional, the reader’s voyeuristic instincts are quickly aroused, making it the type of book that’s consumed in a couple of sittings.

The character of Tom reminds me a lot of Canadian-born Sanford Clark, who was abducted from his Saskatoon home by his uncle, Gordon Stewart Northcott, in 1926. Northcott took the boy to his isolated chicken ranch in California and used him as farm hand and sex slave. During that time Northcott also raped and murdered at least three young boys, setting the authorities on his trail. In 1928 they rescued Sanford Clark, whose testimony ensured his uncle’s conviction and execution. (The entire tragedy later became the subject of a Clint Eastwood film, Changeling.) Clark returned to his native Saskatoon and became a leading citizen, but the memories of Northcott’s victims stayed with him. Like Tom, he always blamed himself for his failure to save them.

This is one novel that I highly recommend to True Crime fans. The people and events have so many real-life equivalents that it’s easy to forget that Hope Burned is fiction and not a survivor’s memoir.

Documentary Fiction: the Next Frontier in True Crime

2010-12-22T12:20:00.000-08:00

It used to make me cringe whenever I’d see the expression ‘nonfiction novel’ used. It’s a contradictory term: novels, by definition, are fictitious, even if they’re ‘based on a true story’. But Canadian author Michael Winter has convinced me that there can indeed be such a beast.

In the summer of 1993, a single mother named Brenda Young was found on the floor of her Empire Avenue apartment in St. John’s, Newfoundland. She had been stabbed thirty-one times and her underwear was so tightly wrapped around her neck that the investigators initially assumed that it had been knotted in place. Her on-again /off-again boyfriend, Randy Druken, was convicted of murder and spent six years in prison before being exonerated by DNA evidence. In 2000 Druken received $2.1-million in compensation and a government apology.

Michael Winter intended to write a nonfiction account of Brenda’s murder and its aftermath, but felt uneasy about exploiting the death of a woman whom he later described as being “alive, really alive”. He was also concerned about the effect such a book might have on her survivors and the other people who were drawn unwillingly into the messy investigation and court proceedings. For awhile he shelved the project, but the story stayed with him, its allure becoming stronger with time. Finally Winter yielded- partly. Instead of a true crime book, he wrote The Death of Donna Whalen, a work of what he calls “documentary fiction.”

This novel takes its content and storyline from the public record, and anyone familiar with the case will recognize the real participants’ fictional counterparts. (Brenda Young is Donna Whalen, while Randy Druken becomes Sheldon Troke.) But what keeps the book from being invasive is its presentation as a fictionalized version of a real case.

The narrative unfolds primarily through the direct words of the characters, which are grouped and structured to resemble trial testimony and police witness statements. Liberal use of Newfoundland slang gives a more powerful sense of setting than any description of downtown St. John’s or the harbor. The entire presentation resonates deeply with me personally because I ‘m originally from Eastern Canada, but you don’t have to be a Maritimer to enjoy this dark and compelling drama.

By dressing up an actual murder case as a fictional story, Winter helps outsiders better understand Donna Whalen / Brenda Young, Sheldon Troke / Randy Druken, and their world, which can be incomprehensible: Donna feared for her life, but let the man who slapped her around look after her two children whenever she wanted a night out. Donna’s little girl, Sharon, knew that Sheldon pushed her mother around yet still regarded him as a parent figure, going to him for advice when she had problems with her friends. But Winter demonstrates that violence was a natural and trivialized by-product of that society, where parties could end in knife fights and a jail cell was a second home to many.

Some readers may have trouble with how Michael Winter displaces elaborate descriptions and linear plot in favor of letting the story be told via a series of participant monologues. I admit that his approach is unique. But it makes The Death of Donna Whalen “alive, really alive”, just as he wanted Brenda Young to be remembered.

The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides in the Bath

2010-12-12T09:12:00.000-08:00

In the summer of 1915, the British public experienced a temporary, if morbid, diversion from the horrors of World War I. George Smith, a middle-aged serial bigamist who was accused of drowning three wives for their money between 1912 and 1914, stood trial for murder. The Fleet Street dailies christened it the Brides in the Bath case.

Smith targeted spinsters who were considered past marriageable age. Their gratitude at finding a husband in a world unfriendly to single women weakened their instincts and made them willingly give him control of their assets. After marrying Bessie Mundy (1912), Alice Burnham (1913), and Margaret Lofty (1914), he rented lodgings with a bath and had each wife make out a will and purchase life insurance, in both instances naming him as the beneficiary. Once all papers were signed, he convinced them that they were ill enough to see a doctor. Then Smith allegedly drowned them while they were soaking in the tub, using the recent doctor’s visit to suggest that the women had fainted from ill-health and died accidentally.

The inquests on all three women each absolved Smith of wrongdoing, but his use of the same modus operandi –a bathtub drowning in a boarding house- finally aroused the suspicion of Alice Burnham’s father. But Smith’s conviction was not guaranteed, especially since three inquest juries had seen fit to turn him loose. The Crown turned to eminent forensic scientist Bernard Spilsbury, whose talent for collecting and accurately assessing post-mortem evidence was unparalleled. His testimony withstood the barrages of the eminent Sir Edward Marshall Hall, who represented the defendant, and sent Smith to the gallows in August 1915.

The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides in the Bath skilfully intertwines the new century’s most sensational domestic murder case to date and the evolution of scientific principles in murder investigations. Spilsbury asserted that George Smith had murdered the three women by suddenly grabbing and lifting their legs, forcing their heads under water and preventing any outcry that other lodgers might hear. His medico-legal testimony at the trial likened him to the deductive literary hero Sherlock Holmes, and the awestruck jury found Smith guilty.

But was he?

Author Jane Robins points out that Smith was an undisputed bigamist, but was he actually a murderer? He had married several women between 1908 and 1914, some of whom testified at the trial, and while he maltreated and robbed all of them, only three died. While the powerful similarity between the deaths of Bessie Mundy, Alice Burnham, and Margaret Lofty make his guilt probable, Robins debates whether he would have been executed if tried today. It’s an interesting question- perhaps a skilled defense lawyer would have raised enough reasonable doubt in a modern courtroom to gain Smith a lesser sentence.

RIP Rick Mattix

2010-10-30T05:57:00.000-07:00

On October 27, 2010, the true crime community lost one of its greatest minds, strongest supporters, and best friends. I’m talking about Rick ‘Mad Dog’ Mattix.

I haven’t fully accepted the fact that there will be no more wryly humorous e-mails from Rick, discussing his current projects and encouraging me to persist with a good idea. Even if he was having a bad day, he could reframe all the aggravating people and incidents in a way that made me tell him more than once that he should write skits for Saturday Night Live.

In 2003 Bill Helmer encouraged me to turn my long-time fascination with Dean O’Banion into a book. Rick soon took up that cause, complaining that if he saw another Al Capone biography come out, he’d apply for a bonfire permit. I soon caved in to such hilarious determination and assembled my collection of notes and photocopies into a book, Guns and Roses. When I wrote The Man Who Got Away and The Starker, Rick sent me material, suggestions, and corrections for both titles and graciously agreed to provide the forward for the former. I like to think that they are much better books because of his input.

Like Bill, Rick warmly greeted newcomers to the field of true crime writing. Some forums are zealously (or maybe jealously is a better word) guarded by gatekeepers who regard any new blood as a threat to their standing. Rick thought that was bullshit. He believed that we all stood to learn from one another. He’s right. “Today’s newbies will probably be one of your favorite authors tomorrow,” he told me once. Right again.

Rick, you’re probably having a great time right now and wondering what we’re all fussing about down here, but until we all meet again, please know the following:

Many an aching heart continues to beat for you
and many an eye continues to pay tribute
Too solemn for words.

The Missing Corpse

2010-10-23T08:14:00.000-07:00

The theft of Manhattan millionaire Alexander T. Stewart’s corpse from its ornate vault on November 7, 1878 shocked Gilded Age New York. It triggered one of the biggest police investigations in the NYPD’s history, and inspired Mark Twain’s satiric short story, The Stolen White Elephant. But because the body was never recovered, the public soon lost interest and the case became a grotesque footnote in the city’s wilder past.

The Missing Corpse: Grave Robbing a Gilded Age Tycoon is about a crime that does not initially seem substantial enough to warrant a book. No one was murdered: the ‘victim’ was already dead. Because the police bungled the investigation and the body snatchers were never caught, the whole affair in retrospect seems like life imitating vaudeville. But attorney Wayne Fanebust’s absorbing account of Stewart’s post-mortem abduction reminds us why the case was a public and media sensation in 1878.

When A.T. Stewart, who was widely known as the ‘Merchant Prince of Manhattan’, died in 1876, he was worth an estimated $40-50 million. Although his wealth put him on a par with Morgan, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and other Gilded Age tycoons, New York high society snubbed him because of his common origins and he was a lonely, isolated figure. Because he and his wife failed to have children, he dedicated himself to the building of a Long Island suburb, where he wanted to be eventually buried. Pending the completion of this final resting place, his remains were interred in St. Mark’s churchyard in Manhattan. When they disappeared in November 1878, the press and public went into a speculative frenzy: would there be a fabulous ransom demanded, or was the stunt a backlash against often-tyrannical Stewart personally?

A.T. Stewart's Fifth Avenue mansion circa 1869 (Library of Congress)

Grave robbery was appalling but common in nineteenth century

America

, as medical schools needed cadavers to experiment on and paid well for them. The theft of a millionaire’s bones dragged the practice from its traditional arena of police blotters and private shame and put it on front pages everywhere.

The Missing Corpse: Grave Robbing a Gilded Age Tycoon is more than just an account of New York’s most macabre ‘missing persons’ case. It’s also a journey into the shadows of nineteenth century America, where ostracized millionaires, body snatchers, phoney clairvoyants, and other misfits wallowed and occasionally made history.

Hot Time in the Old Town

2010-09-08T08:16:00.000-07:00

Summer was pretty mild in my neck of the woods this year, but I’ve lived through enough scorchers to know how debilitating hot temperatures can be. Edward P. Kohn’s Hot Time in the Old Town: the Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt is an intense narration of a killer heat wave that tortured New York City for ten days in August 1896. By the time it lifted, an estimated 1300 people were dead, along with William Jennings Bryan’s shot at the presidency.

New York turned into an inferno on August 5th. When temperatures rose to 100-plus degrees, working men and horses dropped dead in the streets and tenement dwellers broiled in their badly ventilated apartments. At night suffering city dwellers clustered on rooftops and along the piers, trying to suck cooler air into their overheated lungs. Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt stepped in where city officials would not, hosing down the reeking streets to lower the temperatures and raise the sanitation levels, and campaigning to provide free life-saving ice to the poor.

Small boys cooling their heads in a public fountain

Horses being cooled off in summertime New York

As this fight for life reached its zenith, William Jennings Bryan, populist from Nebraska and Democratic presidential nominee, came into town to convince the citizens of New York that they should elect him instead of Republican candidate William McKinley. But he was so wilted by a long, hot train trip across the country that he read his Madison Square Garden speech from a paper instead of giving the same type of oratory fireworks that secured him the Democratic nomination in the first place. The heat also proved too oppressive for his audience, which left in droves.

Edward Kohn takes a well-rounded approach to this history of a forgotten natural disaster. His descriptions of a city under siege are unsettling in their specificity. He uses statistics when warranted, but prefers to put a human face on the disaster. We could forget a label like ‘victim number one’ but not the story of fifteen-month old Hyman Goldman, who had arrived with his parents from Russia nine months before and died from "exhaustion" on the heat wave's first day. Another tiny victim, Annie Botchkiss was born on August 6 in a rear tenement, and succumbed to the heat only five days later.

On the surface, a book that combines a killer heat wave and an electoral contest appears to be trying to mix literary apples with oranges. But Edward Kohn proves that not even a presidential candidate was immune to the heat’s negative impact.

Death of an Overseer

2010-09-05T09:40:00.000-07:00

While browsing the true crime offerings in the Sony e-book store, I discovered an Oxford University Press publication titled Death of an Overseer. The synopsis described it as a cultural and sociological re-interpretation of an 1857 murder in Adams County, Mississippi. I enjoy crime books that aren’t limited to a basic narrative so I bought it, despite its unusually high price for an e-book.

In May 1857 the battered corpse of Duncan Skinner, an overseer on a plantation owned by wealthy widow Clarissa Sharpe, was found in a wooded area near the estate. The original investigators concluded that he’d been killed by an accidental fall from his horse, but the dead man’s brother and other sceptical locals dug deeper and found evidence of murder. Three of Mrs. Sharpe’s slaves confessed to killing Skinner, whose harsh treatment of them was notorious, and were hanged after a brief and sensational trial.

Many Adams County residents believed that a fourth party should have joined them on the gallows: a white Irish laborer named John McCallin. During the investigation, several plantation slaves claimed that McCallin had actively incited the murder by telling them that if Skinner were dead, his way would be free to marry Clarissa Sharpe and give them all “better times.” But in 1857 Mississippi law forbade blacks from testifying against whites, and McCallin escaped arrest. He did not go unpunished, however: the plantation aristocrats ordered him out of the community. His intention to marry a social superior seemed to anger them more than his alleged crime.

Author Michael Wayne, a professor of American history, questions McCallin’s guilt. He analyzes the customs and prejudices of the antebellum South as well as the crime and its racially-biased investigation, and concludes that the Irishman may have been a scapegoat. This approach makes Death of an Overseer a detective story in some parts, a history and sociology lesson in others.

I was pleased to see that Wayne reproduced most of his primary sources verbatim and showed in painstaking detail how and why he reached a particular conclusion. He freely admits that the evidence is open to alternative interpretations and encourages the reader to play armchair detective by placing his voluminous research material at their disposal. (The book’s website at www.deathofanoverseer.com actively solicits new evidence and alternative theories.) This approach is a refreshing respite from the slew of authors who sprout fangs and claws when their ‘definitive’ accounts are questioned.

Bugs Moran vs. Al Capone: the informed approach

2010-06-20T11:35:00.000-07:00

While visiting my local bookstore, I saw (yet another) Al Capone bio in the True Crime section. I picked it up and began flipping the pages.

I've lost count of how many versions of the Capone story I've read, but if a person's life fascinates me enough, I can always enjoy a new book on the subject. Unless it's written from a myopic perspective, as this one was. Five minutes later I put it back on the shelf and bought a novel instead.

According to the author, George 'Bugs' Moran was dimwitted. He lost his gang and his North Side territory because he was too stupid to protect either from the intellectually superior Capone's invasion. When a writer presents that argument, I know that they haven't done their homework, and thankfully, so does anyone else who has a decent understanding of the Chicago beer wars.

When researching and writing The Man Who Got Away, I spoke to recognized experts such as Mario Gomes, John Binder, Rick Mattix, and Bill Helmer; interviewed elderly individuals who knew George Moran, and spent years examining FBI reports, court and prison records, and files retained by the Chicago Crime Commission. I soon understood that Moran did not lose the war with Capone because of poor leadership, mental fallibility, or any reason typically offered by those who don't want to do the work it takes to put the bigger picture together. Moran lost because he was up against a stronger mob, one that predated the North Side gang by at least twenty years.

The genesis of the Capone syndicate was the vice ring organized during the early 1900s by Big Jim Colosimo, a flesh trader and political precinct captain. Big Jim stuffed enough dirty money into the pockets of his ward aldermen and the local cops to operate with impunity. His organization was still going strong at the time of his May 1920 assassination, and when his successor Johnny Torrio added bootlegging to the business roster, the resulting riches made it nearly invincible.

Moran's North Siders, on the other hand, sprang into existence at the dawn of Prohibition, along with hip flasks, speakeasies, and bobbed hair. Dean O'Banion, the gang's sly and charismatic founder, was a brilliant businessman who invested his money in breweries and his charm in favorable partnerships, and by 1921 he controlled all bootlegging north of Madison Street. But when he crossed Johnny Torrio in 1924, he was shot to death in the flower shop that he operated as a sideline. His murder began the six year gang war that killed over six hundred men and disgraced Chicago for all time.

O'Banion's successor, Earl 'Hymie' Weiss, (see photo, provided courtesy of Mario Gomes) was a brainy dynamo who chased Torrio out of Chicago and gave the newly ascended Al Capone nightmares until October 1926, when a machine gun fusillade mowed him down outside Holy Name Cathedral on State Street. Vincent Drucci then took over, but his uneventful leadership was cut short in April 1927, when he cursed a temperamental cop and was shot in the back of a police vehicle.

After Drucci's funeral, Moran inherited the dwindling remnants of a mob that had been gradually decimated by the ongoing battle with the much larger Capone syndicate. By that point there was no way he could have emerged the victor, although a former judge recalled in his memoirs that many Chicagoans who had been following the war from the safety of their newspapers were rooting for Moran to win. He did make successful inroads into labor racketeering and dog racing, suggesting that if he had been able to direct the gang's fortunes during peacetime, history might have remembered him differently.

Mario Gomes, Capone expert and webmaster of the encyclopedic My Al Capone Museum website, says, "Though greatly outnumbered by the Capone gang, the North Siders held the fort for many years thanks to the leadership of George Moran. Moran and his men had to constantly out-think and stay one step ahead of the Capone boys in order to survive. (The North Side) was very lucrative, so no wonder it was the last bastion Capone craved so badly. Moran has earned double the respect I have for Big Al."

George Moran may not have been an ingenius strategist like Johnny Torrio or Dean O'Banion, but neither was he the over-muscled dolt of popular lore. He was a hands-on leader, taking the same chances his underlings did, but in the Chicago of his day, that elicited respect, not derision. Even if he had been more proactive than reactionary, he lacked the manpower to beat Capone.

The St. Valentine's Day Massacre on February 14, 1929 marked the end of Moran's reign over the North Side. For over a year, the shaken gangster debated the feasibility of continuing the fight, briefly partnering with minor league Capone rivals like renegade Sicilian Joe Aiello and pimp Jack Zuta. In late 1930 he finally conceded defeat. But he did not slink away in disgrace. The door had closed in Chicago, but he found windows of opportunity elsewhere.

He retained control of his dog racing and labor racketeering interests, both of which remained profitable. On the bootlegging front, Moran moved his breweries outside the Chicago city limits and used his Canadian connections to supply liquor to the Chain O' Lakes area in northern Illinois, a district that soaked up booze like a sponge during the summer months. Having heard good things about the West Coast from a former North Sider who moved there in 1925, he sent emissaries to Los Angeles. Their reports were so favorable that Moran moved in, building breweries and terrorizing the local underworld so thoroughly that the LA County sheriff told newsmen about tough hoodlums literally "begging for protection from Bugs Moran gangsters." If Repeal had not interrupted the invasion, Moran might eventually have taken over the city's liquor distribution and been remembered as a successful booze baron in his own right.

In closing, George Moran was not a bulb with low wattage. He was outmanned and outgunned in Chicago, but when given the opportunity to start over elsewhere, he met instant success. Unfortunately for writers only interested in the quick buck, the truth can take time to uncover, so an entertaining fiction is often substituted. That does not bode well for the future of history.

The Man Who Killed Houdini

2010-05-21T07:59:00.000-07:00

Harry Houdini’s egregious demise has been covered so extensively in books and movies that the very subject reminded me of a nineteenth century crime scene: so many writers have visited that territory, coming away with sensational theories the way Victorian era gawkers scurried off with bloody souvenirs, that nothing new remained to be discovered. Or so I thought.

In The Man Who Killed Houdini, Don Bell focuses on J. Gordon Whitehead, the McGill University student who fatally punched Houdini in the magician’s Montreal dressing room on October 22, 1926. Whitehead later swore in an affidavit that he had pummeled Houdini in the abdomen at the latter’s invitation to prove that his stomach muscles were strong enough to withstand any blow. Days later, the legendary magician died of a ruptured appendix that was assumed to be the result of that demonstration.

Whitehead disappeared from the public eye after the ensuing investigation died down, and no writer or researcher could discover what happened to him. Conspiracy theorists surmised that he might have been the deadly tool of the spiritualist community, whose mediums Houdini had delighted in exposing as frauds. Less imaginative minds dismissed the whole tragedy as an unfortunate accident. Sensing that Whitehead was the key to unlocking the truth, Don Bell embarked on a quest that lasted twenty years and took him all over Canada and the United Kingdom.

The Man Who Killed Houdini is investigative journalism at its finest. Bell tracked down and interviewed former McGill students Sam Smiley and Jacques Price, who had been present in the dressing room when Houdini was struck. (Price recalled that the punching was so violent that he actually pulled Whitehead off, shouting, “For God’s sake, stop!!” Smiley thought that the tall, gangly student behaved too strangely for the affair to be an accident.) Bell also contacted Whitehead’s former girlfriend and younger brother, both of whom proved to be defensive interview subjects, as well as the mysterious puncher’s former neighbors, who were more forthcoming with what they knew. The end result is a book that sets the record straight on who J. Gordon Whitehead really was and what his life was like in the aftermath of Houdini’s death.

Be forewarned: The Man Who Killed Houdini does not validate any conspiracy theories. Bell does not prove that vindictive mediums used Whitehead to stop Houdini’s anti-spiritualist investigations. But Whitehead’s final years leave the reader with a nagging suspicion that the magician’s death was not a mere accident either.

More on Jacques Millere

2010-04-11T13:34:00.000-07:00

This week, additional insight into the mysterious death of Jacques Millere arrived in the form of a nice, thick parcel bearing a Newfoundland postmark. My friend in St. John's, who recently retired after a long career in the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary, scoured the provincial archives for me and made a few calls to police outposts near Deer Lake, where Millere's body was found in March 1909. The package, which contained photocopied news articles from the Western Star and a hastily scrawled police report, is what he calls his first 'check in'.

On the afternoon of March 15, 1909, a mill worker named Frank Penny discovered a half-frozen male corpse in an abandoned camp belonging to the Humber River Pulp and Lumber Company in Deer Lake. Although so terrified that he could not recall later whether he left the shanty "by the door or window", he reported the gruesome find to the manager, who in turn alerted authorities in St. John's. A local judge named March, accompanied by two police officers and a physician named Fisher, boarded the next east-bound train.

Upon arrival, Dr. Fisher examined the body, which laid on its side in a bunk, knees drawn up and arms folded across the chest. Death had evidently occurred several days before, as the stench of decomposition was so strong that even Fisher blanched. Seeing no wounds or any other mark of violence, the doctor opined that exhaustion and exposure had killed the stranger. "The end was evidently peaceful," the Western Star informed its readers on March 17th, "the countenance bearing a look of serenity as if the unfortunate had passed quietly into the great beyond."

Peaceful or not, the five mill workers that the manager had sent to assist the police took one look at the dead man and refused to touch him, citing superstitious fears. Fisher, Judge March, and the two policemen were forced to carry the corpse themselves across the frozen lake to a waiting sleigh, where a new development in the tragicomedy unfolded: " The driver absolutely refused to drive the horse and put as much space between him and the corpse as his legs could accomplish," stated the Western Star. Despite the mass desertions, the men from St. John's managed to convey the body to a nearby house, where the owner, who was made of stronger and more sensible stuff, allowed it to be prepared for burial.

The dead man's pockets contained astronomical drawings, a crude airship blueprint, and rambling dissertations on the relationship between mankind and the planets. Combing through the damp and crumpled paperwork, investigators found two identifying items: a crude self-portrait with 'Jas. R. Millere' scrawled beneath it, and a receipt from a Summerside, P.E.I. post office indicating that a Jacques Millere had recently registered a letter to the Duke of Orleans in Paris.

At the magisterial inquiry, a railway section hand testified that he recognized the body as that of a 'Frank Millere' he had met about eight miles west of Deer Lake the previous week. Millere said that he had been kicked off a train near the small community of Riverhead, and intended to make his way to St. John's. One might naturally conclude, then, that the deceased had been a foreign wanderer, one of thousands that tramped their way throughout the North American countryside during the early 1900s.

But the police weren't so sure. There was something about Millere -perhaps his outlandish scribblings, or the undeciphered connection to the Duke of Orleans- that made them hesitate to dismiss him as a tramp. Newspapers all over the province published an appeal for more information.

"Whether he was some visionary royalist dreaming of the restoration of the French monarchy or an ordinary crank will probably never be ascertained, " the Western Star concluded. And that seems to be the case so far. I'll see if my ex-copper friend digs up additional information. Even if he doesn't, the Millere tragedy is one of those fascinating mini-dramas that make an inquisitive writer or historian pause and wonder whether there's more to the story than meets the eye.

Meet the Ann Rule of Victorian era mayhem

2010-04-02T07:23:00.000-07:00

In Arsenic Under the Elms: Murder in Victorian New Haven, attorney and college professor Virginia McConnell focuses on two murders that shocked the residents of New Haven, Connecticut in 1878 and 1881 but have since been forgotten. The victims were not showgirls or society ladies, but average young women who fell prey to unscrupulous men. Their sensational deaths, however, spawned media frenzies that exposed the contemporary attitudes toward male promiscuity and female virtue.

The first half of Arsenic Under the Elms describes the killing of Mary Stannard, a simple-minded, 22-year-old unmarried mother, who convinced herself and the Reverend Herbert Hayden, a married minister, that she was pregnant with his child. He lured her into the woods in September 1878, saying that he had procured some medicine that would induce abortion. What he actually gave her was ninety grams of arsenic, which did such a surprisingly slow job of killing her that Hayden had to complete his grim task by clubbing her and slitting her throat. The evidence against Hayden was damning, but he went free after his blindly devoted wife provided exculpatory testimony on the witness stand, perjuring herself to protect him.

The second murder case is that of 20-year-old Jennie Cramer, a beautiful girl known as the Belle of New Haven, who defied propriety by associating with two rich, morally bankrupt young men and their prostitute associate. Her body was found floating in Long Island Sound in August 1881, and an autopsy revealed that she had been raped and poisoned with arsenic. Jennie’s erstwhile companions were hunted down and tried for murder, but presented a united front on the witness stand and were, like Reverend Hayden, acquitted.

McConnell’s lucid prose and detailed research make this book more than just a recount of two Connecticut tragedies. The sufferings of Mary Stannard and Jennie Cramer ended the second they died, but McConnell eloquently shows how their deaths forever altered the lives of their loved ones and the communities they called home. By way of example, she delves into public records to show that Mary’s illegitimate son Willie suffered from anxiety-driven rages for the rest of his life, and Jennie’s mother committed suicide.

I read somewhere that Virginia McConnell wants to be the Ann Rule of Victorian era crimes. After reading Arsenic Under the Elms, I’d say that she has an excellent chance of grabbing that golden fleece.

The Mystery of Jacques Millere

2010-03-07T05:42:00.000-08:00

Next to true crime, I'm a big fan of unsolved mysteries, mainly unusual deaths and unexplained disappearances. One such case that I recently discovered in a book about Newfoundland criminal history was the 101 year old mystery surrounding the death of a Frenchman named Jacques Millere.

Shortly after 4:00 p.m. on March 15, 1909, one Frank Penney came across the cooling corpse of a man on the grounds of a pulp and lumber company near Deer Lake, Newfoundland. He notified the police, who searched the body and found some startling documents crammed in the pockets: astronomical drawings, sketches of aircraft designs, planet descriptions, and an eye-opening treatise on the relationship between man and the planets. What aroused the most comment, however, was a post office receipt issued to one 'Jacques R. Millere' at Summerside, Prince Edward Island, which indicated that Millere had recently sent a registered letter to the Duke of Orleans in Paris (pictured at top right).

The discovery of the body and its cache of extraordinary paperwork unleashed a maelstorm of speculation over to who Jacques Millere really was and what his connection to the Orléanist claimant to the throne of France might be. He was not from the Deer Lake area, so no one could enlighten the police on his antecedents. Some thought he might be a scientific genius or crackpot, while others figured that he was a royalist inventor offering to put his skills at the Duke's service.

The book that briefly outlines the case does not specify how Millere died, or give word-for-word examples of the writing found in his pockets. So to satisfy my own curiousity, I called in a favour owed by a retired Newfoundland police officer friend. He's going to see what can be done about retrieving the archived notes from the original police investigation, as well as copy the contemporary news reports.

When I know more, so will you.

Unknown Does Not Mean Forever

2010-02-17T03:34:00.000-08:00

On February 25, 1957, the bruised, naked body of a small boy was found in a cardboard box beside a road in Philadelphia’s rural Fox Chase district. Wrapped in a plaid blanket and seriously underweight, the child appeared malnourished and neglected. Indignant that he had been thrown away like a piece of garbage, investigators from both the medical examiner’s office and the police department initiated a personal crusade to catch his killer and discover his name.

Newspapers all over the country covered the story, and the boy’s photo was even reproduced on gas bills in the hope that someone would recognize him. But he was never identified and is known today as “the Boy in the Box” and “America’s Unknown Child”.

Last weekend I read New York Times reporter David Stout’s book about the case, The Boy in the Box: the Unsolved Case of America’s Unknown Child. Stout interviewed the aging ex-cops originally involved in the investigation, reviewed the boxes of yellowing reports on the still-open case, and turned it all into a book that is one of the best examples of true crime reporting that I have ever encountered.

Like many sensational cases, thousands of leads and theories have poured in over the years. All had to be carefully followed up, but in the end, only two were deemed so viable that both the police and the press took serious notice. The first was that the boy was the illegitimate child of a young woman whose mother and stepfather operated a foster home, and that he was accidentally killed by his exasperated caretakers while misbehaving. The second was that a mentally unstable woman had acquired him from his birth parents and subjected him to years of violent abuse before killing him for vomiting in the bathtub. The latter theory was brought forward in 2002 by a woman who claimed to have witnessed the murder as a young girl. Police investigators, aided in later years by a team of retired cops and profilers known as the Vidocq Society, checked both stories but were forced to abandon them after failing to acquire sufficient evidence.

The case remains officially unsolved, but lack of a ‘happy ending’ does not give The Boy in the Box a hollow ring. Using scenes and dialogue distilled from his research and personal interviews, Stout does a masterful job of revisiting the discovery of the body, the highs and lows of the ongoing investigation, and, most poignantly, the love that the grizzled police veterans gradually developed for the tiny victim. This love drove many of them to continue the quest for justice long after retirement.

And the Oscar for Best Actress of 1824 goes to... Sarah Drew

2010-01-31T16:01:00.000-08:00

On October 3rd, 1824, two men were crossing the London Field, near Hackney, when they heard a woman calling for help. Investigating, they found maidservant Sarah Drew standing beside a shallow pond, muddy and wet up to her chest. She exclaimed that she had been accosted, robbed, and thrown into the water. The men escorted her to a nearby pub, where she told a fantastic tale.

Over a week ago, she had seen a strange man hovering around the silk manufactory where her master worked, but thought little of it until some valuable silks disappeared. The police took Sarah with them to some known thieves' resorts, but she denied seeing the mysterious stranger in any of them. The officers advised her to follow the man if she saw him again, and find out where he lived or worked so that he could easily be located and arrested.

Sarah attended evening church service on October 3rd, and claimed that she was on her way home when she saw the wanted man walking across London Field. She followed him as directed, but did not get far before she was grabbed by two men (presumably the thief's confederates) and dragged to the pond where she was later found. She said that they stole her purse before heaving her into the water and leaving her to drown.

A local rowdy named Edward 'Kiddy' Harris was eventually identified by Sarah as one of her attackers. Harris had an alibi- his wife and children swore that he had been home all evening on October 3rd. But Sarah told her story so convincingly that a jury convicted him, and he was executed at Newgate in February 1825.

Later that year, Harris' attorney James Harmer published a pamphlet called The Case of Edward Harris, who was executed at Newgate for robbing and ill-treating Sarah Drew. This document, which is available in the Google Books online library, makes a powerful argument for Harris' innocence. Apparently the police officers who took Sarah on a grand tour of the thieves' dens actually pointed him out to her and suggested that he was a bad enough character to be the robber. She looked at him closely but denied that he was the man. Then she somehow ended up in a pond, and accused Harris of being one of the abductors.

Harmer suggests that Sarah Drew might have become a little too adventurous with some young men, and tried to save her reputation afterward by claiming that she had been attacked. When found at the pond, her head and shoulders were not wet, which they should have been had she been thrown violently in. Her shoes, which she said she had kicked off during the struggle, were neatly positioned when found. To complete the ruse she needed a dyed-on-the-wool villain, and Edward Harris, who had a criminal record, was made to order.

As he was ascending the scaffold steps, Harris bemoaned his fate to reporters. "Oh Gentlemen, tell them (meaning the public) that I die innocent; I am murdered; I am, so help me God! as I am a dying man. I know I have been a wicked man, and a fighting man, and all that, but of this I am innocent."

If he was, then Sarah Drew was not. And in 1820s England, that would have been reason enough for her to concoct a lie so terrible that it sent a man to an early grave.

E-Reader Home Invasion

2010-01-23T14:34:00.000-08:00

Don't let the title of this post mislead you. My place wasn't broken into by a legion of self-aware Kindles. But I did consciously invite the e-publishing revolution into my home when I purchased a Sony PRS-300 E-Reader earlier this month.

I will always have a soft spot for books, and never stop buying them. Few things thrill me more than the delivery of a big box from Amazon or Chapters. But now that e-readers have dropped in price, more bibliophiles are taking a chance on them and discovering that they like the option of carrying a virtual library in their pockets and purses. As a working writer, I have to be sensitive to trends that affect publishing, so I bought Sony's basic reader at my local Best Buy and began my new learning curve.

Because I live in Canada, the Sony product was the logical choice for me. Until recently, Amazon's Kindle was not available here. That has since changed, but at a price, so to speak: the device ships from the USA and incurs some hefty customs fees when its value is declared at the border. I opted for economy and convenience.

The PRS-300 is Sony's lowest-priced reader, and doesn't have the bells and whistles that the more expensive models offer, such as a touch screen and audiobook support. That was fine by me; I was primarily interested in the reading experience.

This unit utilizes E Ink screen technology that makes digital pages resemble their paper counterparts. The font size is adjustible, a nice option for those who prefer large print, and the pages are turned via a multidirectional button beneath the screen. The bookmarking feature 'tags' pages for later perusal, and each time the machine powers on, it remembers where you left off during your last reading session.

Not bad. But what what I really appreciated was access to thousands of public domain books in Google's database, digitized in a reader-compatible format and available for free download through Sony's online store. Many of these are vintage crime stories like those I have blogged about in the past. Another portal on the Sony site lets me log into my local library account and check out e-books from the hundreds of available titles. 512 MB of onboard memory permits the storage of up to 300 books at a time, making it possible for me carry a wealth of reading and research material in my purse. I love it.

A week and a half has passed, and I don't regret my purchase. It has added a whole new dimension to the literary experience, and judging from the fact that e-reader sales continue to climb, they are no longer a fad item. Some will decry the threat, however weak, to the beloved physical book, but as a writer I'm happy to see that the love of reading is alive and well in the Digital Age.

Scotch Pebbles for Lovesick Girls

2010-01-10T11:08:00.000-08:00

This weekend I found another true crime gem in the Internet Archive’s Open Source Books collection: The Tryal of Mary Blandy, Spinster: For the Murder of her Father, Francis Blandy, Gentleman. Years ago I read about Miss Blandy in an anthology about murderous women, but until now had never come across any primary documents about the case.

Born in 1720 to solicitor Francis Blandy and his wife in Henley on Thames, Oxfordshire, Mary enjoyed advantages seldom available to women at that time: her doting father saw to it that she was well educated and did not want for anything . When her mother died and Francis Blandy did not remarry, Mary, an only child, became the sole heiress to a small fortune. Although she was intelligent, articulate, and modestly attractive, it was probably her future inheritance that attracted Captain William Henry Cranstoun in 1746 and made him propose marriage even though he already had a wife back in Scotland.

Cranstoun promised to have his marriage annulled, but Francis Blandy suspected that he was merely a fortune-hunter and objected to the match. Soon Mary received a present of Scotch pebbles (agates) from Cranstoun, along with a powder supposedly for use in cleaning them. This powder, however, ended up in Francis Blandy’s food in gradually increasing doses.

As she worked on eliminating the one obstacle to her imagined happiness, Mary was not as subtle as she thought. The servants saw her stirring something into her ill father’s tea and gruel, and observed a gritty white substance in the leftovers. They reported their suspicions to the neighbors and even Blandy himself. The aging lawyer’s response was surprisingly sympathetic: he referred to his daughter as a “poor lovesick girl” and added, “I forgive her—I always thought there was mischief in those cursed Scotch pebbles.” When he finally died on August 14, 1751, the authorities moved in and placed Mary Blandy on trial for parricide.

The trial testimony was published in pamphlet form, and is available for download. Medical authorities such as Dr. Anthony Addington (father of future Prime Minister Henry Addington) believed that Blandy had died from arsenic poisoning. When the servants testified that they had seen Mary adding a white substance to her father’s food, she and her lawyers knew that denial would be useless. So she admitted that she had done so, but argued that what she had administered was not arsenic, but a love powder intended to make Francis Blandy regard Cranstoun in a more favorable light. Cranstoun had sent it to her, she said, and if it HAD been poison, she was completely unaware of the fact.

The jury did not believe her. They agreed with the prosecution, which pointed out that even after the ‘love powder’ made her father dangerously ill, Mary did not stop mixing it in his food. While she was under house arrest pending her removal to Oxford Castle prison, she had also hinted to the servants that she was planning to flee the area, which an innocent person would not have done.

While awaiting execution, Mary wrote her own account of the tragic affair, titled Miss Mary Blandy's Own Account of the Affair between her and Mr. Cranstoun. She also exchanged letters with another condemned woman, Elizabeth Jeffries, who had killed her master with help from her lover. When a respectable matron visited Mary in her cell and gently chided her for corresponding with such a depraved person, she accepted the rebuke in polite silence but said afterward, "I can't bear these over virtuous women. I believe that if ever the devil picks a bone it is one of theirs."

On Easter Monday 1752, Mary Blandy was hanged outside of Oxford Castle prison. One of her last requests was that she not be hanged too high off the ground, “for the sake of decency.” Although most hanging victims died via slow strangulation, Mary apparently lost consciousness soon after being turned off the ladder and died without a struggle.

After Mary was convicted, William Cranstoun escaped to the European mainland, and died in Flanders on 2nd December 1752.

Mary Blandy killed for love. In the end, she also died for it.

Before the year is out....

2010-01-03T03:21:00.000-08:00

This morning I awoke at five, and was at my desk by five-thirty. I've always been an early riser, especially during the week, but weekends I usually doze until at least six-thirty. Maybe this is a sign that 2010 will be so packed with writing projects that a 5:00 a.m. wakeup call will become the norm.

2009 certainly ended on an auspicious note. In October I started a new job as a technical writer for a large engineering company. This position strengthened a habit that I've been cultivating for a long time: producing quality copy on demand, without yielding to the vagaries of mood or personal drama. Let's hope that by performing well at my day job, I'll increase and improve my writing output in other areas.

I'm working on a few projects at the moment. One is an article for Rick Mattix's On The Spot Journal about William Howe and Abe Hummel, the legal 'dream team' of the New York underworld from 1869 until 1907, when the District Attorney succeeded in shutting their firm down. Gangsters, showgirls, prizefighters, and philandering bluebloods kept Howe and Hummel on retainer as an operating expense. Some of the stunts they pulled are unbelievable even by today's standards: Hummel once discovered an error in procedure that liberated 240 of Blackwell Island's 300 inmates in a single day. Howe, representing a gangster who had murdered another thug and dumped the dismembered body in the East River, convinced the jury that his client's seven year old girl had actually done the bloody deed. They're so gloriously bad that I'll be sorry to see the research end.

The Dopey Benny Fein project is still in progress. Geoff Fein, Benny's grandson, has been wonderful to work with, but the research itself is taking time because I'm focusing on primary sources, and the requisite legwork is considerable. Benny's activities during the 1920s remain a mystery, although I've come across a few references to drug-related arrests. If anyone reading this blog has additional information, please contact me.

I'm still working with Franklin Abrams on the Our Gotham project. Some new webisode scenes have been filmed, namely the tense confrontation between Kid Twist Zweifach and the Bottler, who is determined to prevent Twist from seizing the profits of his popular stuss game. I've posted two screen shots below: the first shows Zweifach (played by Franklin) in profile, while the second is a re-enactment of Twist's first, menacing visit to the Bottler's den. Franklin is a first-rate actor who practically summons the spirit of these early gang leaders whenever he steps in front of the camera.

Expect some interesting trips to old New York in the coming year! And more on the Dope!

R.I.P. Monk Eastman

2009-12-27T04:49:00.000-08:00

Shortly after 5:00 a.m. on December 26, 1920, two New York City patrolmen found a middle-aged, rough-looking man lying outside the BMT subway entrance near 14th Street and Fourth Avenue. One of them rolled him over, reached inside his coat, and felt his chest, which was sticky with blood. Upon detecting a faint heartbeat, they summoned an ambulance to hurry him to nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

The man had been shot in the chest, stomach, and arms, each 32 calibre bullet shattering a bone or puncturing a vital organ. (The weapon itself was later found on the steps of the Union Square subway entrance.) His pockets contained $140 in cash, ruling out robbery as a murder motive. An autopsy revealed huge quantities of ethyl alcohol in his system, suggesting that he’d been killed in a drunken fight instead. The man was clearly a brawler: scars covered his broad face and short but muscular body, and both his ears and nose were disfigured by abuse. But who was he? And who had shot him?

Attendants at the city morgue found no means of identification save a label on the inside coat pocket that read “E. Eastman. Oct. 22, 1919. No. 17434 WB”. The tag was traced to Witty Brothers Tailors, a well-known men’s suit manufacturer. When the owner confirmed over the telephone that he had made the suit in question for one Edward ‘Monk’ Eastman, extras began flying off the presses at lightning speed.

Monk Eastman was a name that New Yorkers recognized immediately, even in 1920. Before his 1904 downfall and imprisonment, Eastman had been the most feared and storied gangster in the city, maybe even the country. In its Big Town Biography series, the Daily News recalled, “In his glory, Monk … commanded an army of 1,200 of the city's meanest thugs, a grimy bunch of safecrackers, pickpockets and general ruffians from dangerous dives with names like the Flea Bag, the Bucket of Blood and Suicide Hall.” He stood barely five foot six, but he was pure muscle and as ferocious as a bulldog in battle. When he strolled throughout his fiefdom, a derby perched carelessly on his head and stubby features crinkled in a scowl, even the beat cops eyed him with trepidation. For years he was as much a part of the Lower East Side cityscape as the crumbling tenements, raucous Bowery, and Chinatown.

That all changed in April 1904, when Eastman was sentenced to ten years in prison for first degree assault. He was paroled in 1909 and returned to his old stomping grounds, but his power had faded and he did not attempt to regain his former notoriety. Instead, he undertook a lower profile livelihood as a dope peddler. Because of his infamous past, however, the New York police kept hunting him down whenever major crimes took place. Eastman sought an escape by joining the army when the United States entered World War I. He served with valor in France, the Manhattan gang wars having prepared him well for the European battlefields, and came home a decorated war hero. He told reporters that he was “going straight” but by 1919 he was working for Arnold Rothstein as a loan collector and preparing to go into bootlegging once Prohibition became law. Now he was dead, murdered just as the Volstead Act was on the verge of turning gangsters into millionaires.

Newsmen tracked down and interviewed Charley Jones, a former Eastman gangster who now sold automobiles. Jones said that as far as he knew, his former boss had gone straight and opened a pet store on Broadway. The aging ex-thug did suggest that “young squirt gunmen” might have spotted Eastman on the street and, trying to make a name for themselves, shot down a legend in cold blood.

Three days before New Year's, over four thousand spectators assembled in the cold to watch a local legend be laid to rest. Eastman’s army comrades exchanged fond, teary memories with grizzled veterans of the 1902-03 Manhattan gang wars. The latter took one last look at their former boss, a now-peaceful figure dressed in full military regalia, and watched with lowered heads as he was buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Queens.

Unlike most gangland murders, Eastman’s was ultimately solved. On January 4, 1921, a shady Prohibition agent named Jerry W. Bohan turned himself in.

Bohan claimed that he had killed the one-time gang lord in self-defense. On Christmas night, he, Eastman and some friends went to the Blue Bird Café, a basement speakeasy on Fourteenth Street, and drank bootleg liquor for hours. At around 4:00 am, they began arguing. According to Bohan, the dispute was over how much to tip the staff, but since he and Eastman were partners in a bootlegging enterprise, they probably clashed over how much they, not the waiter, had coming to them.

Bohan said that he tried to leave the café when tempers became dangerously high, but Eastman chased him outside and accused him of having been a “rat” ever since he became a Prohibition agent. The gangster then allegedly reached into his coat pocket as if going for a weapon. The dry agent drew his gun, fired several times, and jumped into a cab heading north on Fourth Avenue.

The jury at Bohan’s trial listened to his version of events with scepticism, knowing that his past was not exactly spotless. In 1911 he had killed Brooklyn stevedore ‘Joe the Bear’ Faulkner under questionable circumstances and been acquitted, but this jury was not so gullible. They found him guilty of manslaughter, and the judge sentenced him to three to ten years in Sing Sing. He was paroled the following June, his minimum term having been reduced for good behavior.

According to the promotional literature accompanying the Our Gotham film project, “The life and crimes of Monk Eastman faded for awhile from public memory as the Twenties progressed and millionaire gangsters like Al Capone and Bugs Moran assumed the cachet of movie stars. But sooner or later, antiquity becomes modernity, and Eastman has been resurrected time and again in literature and film…. Today, Monk Eastman lives on in the popular imagination as the archetypical early New York gangster. His name is not always remembered, but with his harsh ‘Noo Yawk’ accent, battle-ravaged features, and multi-notched club, (he) remains an integral part of Manhattan mythology.”

Life, Crimes, and Confession of Bridget Durgan

2009-12-08T03:32:00.000-08:00

On August 30, 1867 an Irish domestic named Bridget Durgan was hanged in the New Brunswick, New Jersey jail yard for the murder of Mrs. Mary Ellen Coriel. Soon after the execution, one of her spiritual advisors published a 30-plus page account of the crime with a confession section that was allegedly dictated by Bridget herself.

If Bridget Durgan actually wrote the confession, her reason for murdering Mrs. Coriel was revenge for a lifetime of abuse and injustice. She claimed to have been born to respectable parents in County Sligo, Ireland, in 1843, but 'went wrong' when an employer's son seduced her. After being paid to leave the area, she sailed to New York and found work as a housekeeper. Her mistress ordered her out of the house when a tryst with an unnamed gentleman left her pregnant. "From that moment, I began to hate everybody," Bridget wrote, "but most of all mistresses, and I resolved to kill someone if only the chance came my way."

After giving birth in a charity hospital, the bitter young woman worked for a few months in a slum brothel. One night the police raided the resort, but Bridget evaded arrest by vaulting over a fence. She fled to Brooklyn and went back into domestic service, but it proved to be almost as bad a decision as selling her body: she and her employer, a Mrs. Horning, soon hated each other. Finally Mrs. Horning called her "a devilish infernal slut" and fired her. Only the presence of the woman's husband prevented Bridget from stabbing her on the spot. The furious maid was determined to kill her former employer though, sending her poisoned cakes and skulking outside the house with a knife. She only gave up after Mrs. Horning died of natural causes.

Her plan thwarted, Bridget went to Newmarket, New Jersey, where she found a position in the house of Dr. and Mrs. Coriel. Eventually, she wrote, "it came into my head that if Mrs. Coriel were only out of the way, that I would have a very good place with the Doctor, as he would no doubt still keep house and have me take care of it and Mamey (the Coriels' baby) who was fond of me. This brought Mrs. Horning into my mind, and instantly, like a flash of lightning, I felt impelled to kill Mrs. Coreil."

So she did. On the night of February 26, 1867, while the doctor was out, Bridget stabbed and clubbed her mistress to death. (She wrote that she allowed the bloody, dying woman to kiss her baby one last time before finishing her off.) After setting the house on fire, she grabbed the child and fled to a neighbor's home, where she wailed that robbers had killed Mrs. Coreil. Her wild behaviour and speech aroused suspicion. So did the fact that the house bore no visible signs of a break-in.

Bridget Durgan was arrested and charged with the murder of her employer. A jury found her guilty and the judge sentenced her to hang, but she seemed unperturbed and defiant until her final night on earth. Perhaps she had been convinced that she would obtain a last-minute reprieve on account of her gender. When that didn't happen, she wrote a confession that she instructed the Reverend Brendan to publish after her death.

The Life and Crimes of Bridget Durgan was published after chapbooks of this type stopped being extended sermons, so it is an interesting and readable account of a forgotten case. Equally fascinating is how the prose and illustrations reflect the public's reaction to Bridget herself. She broke almost every social taboo in existance at the time: she was an Irish servant who killed a doctor's wife to satisfy a bloodlust and further entrench herself in the doctor's household. In consequence, the pen and ink drawings in the book depict her as a husky she-demon with wild hair and troll-like features. When she murdered an American lady of a superior class, she relinquished her rights to any leniency that the courts showed to female defendants during this period. She was no longer a woman, but a vicious monster whose destruction was necessary to protect American households.

The Life and Crimes of Bridget Durgan is included in the Open Source Books collection at Archive.org and can either be read online via a specialized viewer or downloaded in pdf format.

Shades of 1918

2009-11-22T15:26:00.000-08:00

The other night, I was enjoying an evening stroll near my home. As I passed a walk-in medical clinic, a figure in hospital garb, complete with face mask, stepped outside and put a sandwich board on the sidewalk. It proclaimed in bold red letters 'H1N1 FLU SHOTS AVAILABLE HERE'.

I have not been vaccinated yet, although I plan to be. My immune system has always been excellent, but if the 1918-19 flu epidemic is an accurate indicator, that could be a liability.

I am currently reading John Barry's The Great Influenza, an account of the Spanish flu devastation that wiped out millions. In early 1918, when World War I was at its height, a contagious and lethal influenza A virus of the H1N1 subtype exploded in a Kansas army camp and migrated east, its first step in a global journey that claimed an estimated 100 million victims. Modern science's most illustrious practitioners struggled to understand and contain the epidemic, which killed more people in one year than the Black Death consumed in a century.The tragedy was amplified by the fact that the majority of victims were in the prime of life: children lost their parents, newlyweds were cruelly separated, and aging parents lived to see their adult children precede them in death. A few survivors have been in the news this past year, recalling those days of isolation, loss, and terror.

I often heard my grandmother talk about her two aunts who died when the flu reached Nova Scotia: one had just turned thirty while the other was only thirty-two. Both were strong-willed, vivacious women who had plenty to live for, something I appreciated even as a child. I remember poring over my grandmother's photo album, looking at the youthful faces of her aunts Clarice and Eva and trying to understand WHY.

Barry's book has helped me understand why, at least from a medical and scientific standpoint. The 1918 flu virus was the most lethal to young adults because their strong immune systems overreacted (a process known as a 'cytokine storm') and ravaged the body as mercilessly as the virus itself. Children and seniors reacted less intensely and therefore recovered. It was a twisted reversal of Darwin's theory, and caused people to live in fear. No wonder: in some cases mere hours transpired between the first flush of fever and the last dying gasps. You could never say "See you later" to anyone and be sure that you actually would.

The Great Influenza is a monumental study of the Spanish flu epidemic. A reviewer for Newsweek called it "Terrifying.... the lessons of 1918 couldn't be more relevant." Judging from the fact that people are lining up everywhere to get the H1N1 vaccine and hand sanitizer dispensers are in most public places now, the lessons appear to have been learned.

The Genesis of Organized Crime

2009-10-25T10:54:00.001-07:00

The Mafia is one of those organizations that Hollywood and the media have turned into a household name. Its current public face is the fictional Tony Soprano. The closing years of the nineteenth century and the dawning of the twentieth were the halcyon days of Giuseppe Morello, who was known to cop and criminal alike as ‘the Clutch Hand’ because of a deformed arm. The nickname could just as well have derived from his talent for seizing any opportunity to make crime pay.

Mike Dash has written an engrossing account of Morello’s ascendancy from the dusty streets of his native Corleone, Sicily to the saloons and tenements of New York, where he became the much-feared boss of the Italian-dominated rackets. He counterfeited American and Canadian currency, masterminded insurance scams, and unleashed Black Hand terror on his frightened countrymen, all the while building and strengthening a gang that became the first organized crime family. Morello’s vicious rule encompassed some of the most sensational examples of mob violence in the city’s history, such as the Barrel Murder of 1903 and the Masseria-Maranzano war of Sicilian succession. The ageing Clutch Hand served as advisor to Joe ‘the Boss’ Masseria in the latter conflict, and was killed by Maranzano gunmen in August 1930.

As with his previous books, Dash focuses on primary sources, such as the records of the U.S. Secret Service (which tracked Morello during his counterfeiting days) and the memoirs of its New York bureau chief, William Flynn, who pursued the Clutch Hand’s gang as doggedly as another legendary mob-buster, NYPD Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino (whose war with the Mafia and brutal murder are both covered in detail). Chilling anecdotes mingle with archival evidence to tell a story that rivals the best crime fiction.

“The First Family” is one of the finest accounts of the Mafia’s shady and bloody beginnings. Those who enjoyed this book are advised to also read Thomas Hunt and Martha Machecha Sheldon’s “Deep Water”, which is a similarly authoritative and original treatment of the 1890 assassination of New Orleans police chief David Hennessy, which was America’s first widely publicized Mafia hit.

The Demon in the Belfry

2009-08-23T15:52:00.000-07:00

In April 1895, two young women followed a man they trusted into the Emmanuel Baptist Church in San Francisco’s Mission District and did not emerge alive. The bloody, disfigured corpse of 21-year-old Minnie Williams was found in the library the day before Easter Sunday, and soon afterward searchers discovered the naked body of Blanche Lamont, who had been missing since April 3, in the belfry. Clues and witness statements directed the police to Theo Durrant, a young medical student who also happened to be assistant Sunday School superintendent for the church.

Durrant’s murder trial was attended by such eminent spectators as Presidential hopeful William Jennings Bryan and Gold Rush millionaire John Mackay. The evidence against him was so overwhelming that the jury brought in a guilty verdict in less than half an hour. While his January 1898 execution brought closure to the families of Minnie Williams and Blanche Lamont, it also left a lot of unanswered questions. Why did he kill two young women whom he’d known well and never born any malice against? And what motivated a man who had been devoted to his parents and sister and active in church affairs to commit murder in the first place? The press hinted that he was a depraved monster disguised as a pious youth, and referred to him as ‘the Demon in the Belfry’. In Sympathy for the Devil, Virginia McConnell questions the justice of these assumptions.

I’ll admit that when I began reading the book, I had doubts about McConnell’s impartiality: in the introduction, she wrote, “His two tragic deeds aside, I would have been proud to call him ‘brother’ or ‘friend’.” But unlike the mindless, adoring women who simpered over Theo Durrant during his courtroom appearances, McConnell has credible reasons for her partiality. Reviewing his family and medical history, she points out that his father was manic-depressive and prone to impulsive actions, and Durrant himself nearly died from meningitis, or ‘brain fever’, a condition that often left survivors with brain damage. She suggests that he may have been in a manic phase when he killed the two women, and the behaviour he exhibited at that time corresponds to the profile: loquaciousness, impulsivity, and unnatural energy levels. When not in the throes of the disorder, Durrant was apparently a mild-mannered, caring individual who placed women on a pedestal.

Sympathy for the Devil is a sympathetic, but not sentimental, treatment of the Emmanuel Baptist murders. It includes rare and unsettling photos, such as a vibrant young Blanche Lamont, the belfry landing where her nude body was found, and the blood-spattered walls of the room where Minnie Williams met her death. Any future books about the case have a very high bar to leap over.

Attorney for the Damned

2009-08-16T07:45:00.000-07:00

I have just finished reading Donald McRae's The Last Trials of Clarence Darrow. If a one-word review was sufficient, I'd just say "Wow". Or "Amazing." But it's not, so here goes.

Clarence Darrow had two principle reasons for living: winning and women. We know a lot about his courtroom victories, thanks to a succession of books, articles, and film adaptations. The Last Trials of Clarence Darrow delves into more intimate territory, namely his relationship with Mary Field Parton, socialist writer and reporter. She prevented him from committing suicide in 1912, and despite disillusion and heartache, supported him while he built his legacy as America’s greatest defense attorney. Compassionate yet conceited, equal parts earthy and intellectual, few American lawyers have attained the mythical status of Clarence Darrow. He turned seemingly hopeless cases into judicial triumphs, spawning the nickname ‘Attorney for the Damned’.

In 1924 he saved teenaged thrill killers Leopold and Loeb from the gallows by persuading the judge that mental illness was sufficient grounds to commute the death penalty. An ardent civil libertarian, Darrow defended John Scopes, who stood trial in Tennessee in July 1925 for teaching Darwinism in a state-funded school. The following October, he joined the defense team of a black physician, Ossian Sweet, who had moved into an all-white neighbourhood in Detroit and caused a riot that saw one white man killed and another injured. His closing statement in that trial is regarded as a civil rights landmark.

Previous reviewers have complained that this book contains no new information about Darrow’s career or personal life. That may be: I admit that this is the first biography I’ve read of the man whom Variety called "America's greatest one-man stage draw." As an introduction to Darrow’s legacy, I found McRae’s book to be engrossing. It may not be especially critical or insightful about the legal issues of the day, but this is a book aimed at the popular history market and has its limits in that regard.

What appears to be new in McRae’s treatment of Clarence Darrow’s story is his emphasis on the stormy relationship with Mary Field Parton. Although she had the misfortune of falling in love with a man whose moral compass was broken at birth and has been trivialized by some as a peripheral floozy, she was part of Darrow’s life for over thirty years, and shared in both his greatest highs and darkest lows. McRae’s access to her diaries gave him, and therefore the reader, a little more insight into how the ‘attorney for the damned’ affected those close to him.

Tenement Nights

2009-08-15T12:31:00.000-07:00

On August 3, Bad Seeds in the Big Apple author Pat Downey and I gave a presentation at the Tenement House Museum in New York. The evening's theme was Dead Guys in Suits and the subject matter was- yes, you guessed it- New York gangsters. Thanks to mentions in Time Out New York and other publications, a good-sized and sincerely interested crowd turned up.

At the end of Pat's and my presentation, we gave the attendees a surprise treat. Actor Franklin Abrams and two colleagues performed a scene from an upcoming Monk 1903 webisode: a confrontation between Max 'Kid Twist' Zweifach (Abrams) and Ritchie Fitzpatrick (Mike Lubik) over who will assume the throne left vacant by Monk Eastman's prison sentence. Zweifach's granddaughter and other family members were in the crowd, and enjoyed the performance hugely. Just an FYI- Franklin and I are collaborating on a one-man show about Kid Twist, and hope to launch it at the museum in the New Year.

Why all this emphasis on Kid Twist? To begin with, he was a ruthless but fascinating figure whose impact on New York gangster history has been underestimated. Since Monk Eastman was likely not Jewish, Zweifach is therefore the New York City's first Jewish gang lord. When he was murdered at Coney Island in May 1908, he left an estate valued at $50,000 to $100,000 (over a million dollars today), an astronomical sum for a twenty-four-year-old gangster to possess, especially since he did not run women or sell drugs, the two major organized vices of the early twentieth century. We know that he dreamed big- in 1905, when he was barely twenty-one, Zweifach masterminded a scheme to forge $5,000 worth of phoney railroad passes. He was caught for that one, but judging from the unusual size of his estate, he must have gotten away with many more. As I told the crowd at the Tenement House Museum, "Further study into Zweifach's past will yield valuable information about early Jewish crime in America."

Chicago's Original Big Feller

2009-07-04T09:23:00.000-07:00

Read any book about Chicago’s criminal past and chances are that you’ll come across the name of Michael Cassius ‘Big Mike’ McDonald. He was the founding father of a sophisticated, profitable, and far-reaching crime confederacy that included politicians, police officers, and even the mayor’s office. But so much time and chicanery has passed since his heyday that McDonald has receded into Chicago mythology. What Richard Lindberg has done in The Gambler King of Clark Street is employ dedicated research methods to crack through the lore and remind us that Big Mike was Chicago’s original ‘Big Feller’.

McDonald’s methods were alternately insidious and blatant. He bonded many a poor immigrant out of jail, aware that such favors translated into ethnic community votes. This in turn made him invaluable to the local bosses. His multi-storey gambling palace on Clark Street looted workingmen of their scant wages and sucked in the funds that enabled him to buy the police and the judiciary. No one could ever accuse McDonald’s game plan of lacking a grass-roots element.

Big Mike controlled everything except his wives. The first, Mary Noonan, ran off twice, first with an actor and the second time with a Catholic priest. His second spouse, a buxom blonde Jewess named Dora Feldman, was several years younger and ended up finding a teenaged lover whom she eventually killed for infidelity. The latter debacle is said to have hastened McDonald’s death in 1907.

The Internet Age has granted access to public records, newspaper archives, photo collections, etc, to anyone with a computer. History writers no longer have to be local or on a well-paid sabbatical to conduct research. The bar has been raised, but in this instance, Lindberg sails over it effortlessly. I was fascinated by the humanizing detail that he uncovered about Mike McDonald’s early years, and pleased to note his use of family stories and popular anecdotes, which demonstrate how the person is remembered by those who knew him or were affected by him.

Author Pat Hickey notes in his ingenious review of The Gambler King of Clark Street: “The story is an eye-opener…. the lakefront liberals who castigated John McCain and the GOP so savagely last fall, turn a blind eye and say nothing about the 130 years of non-stop corruption in the City of Chicago – most of it perpetrated by the Lords of the Machine, of which Mike McDonald was its founding father.” I heartily agree, and stand by what I wrote for the book’s jacket: “Chicago history aficionados owe Richard C. Lindberg a debt of gratitude for providing a deeper understanding of how the city became what it is today.”

Misled by a book, and loving it

2009-05-31T06:45:00.000-07:00

In August 1849, Frederick Manning and his Swiss wife, Maria, lured a middle-aged moneylender named Patrick O'Connor to their home in the Bermondsey section of London. O'Connor and Mrs. Manning had been lovers prior to her marriage, and probably for awhile afterward too. They shot and clubbed him to death, covered his body with quicklime, and then buried it under their kitchen floor. Maria hurried to O'Connor's rented room, where she stole money and railway share certificates. Then she and Frederick fled in opposite directions: she went to Edinburgh while he sailed to the Channel Islands. When a concerned friend reported O'Connor's disappearance, the police went to the Manning home and discovered the makeshift grave. After a nationwide manhunt, the murderous couple was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. They were hung at Horsemonger Lane Gaol in November 1849, in front of a raucous crowd.

Using the title alone as a point of reference, London 1849: a Victorian Murder Story appears to be about the Manning case. But it isn't. Michael Alpert has written a social history of London in the year 1849, when the O'Connor murder shocked the city. The first chapter is dedicated to the crime and the apprehension of Frederick and Maria Manning, and the concluding one uses their trial and execution to illustrate the workings of the British justice system. But the rest of the book is an admittedly fascinating look at the daily lives of mid-nineteenth century Londoners: what they ate, where they went for entertainment, how the class system worked, and the waning role of religion in their lives.

Whenever possible, Alpert frames his topic to suggest what the Mannings might have done in a given circumstance. For example, in the chapter about recreation, he proposes that Maria would not have been interested in the Frith paintings at the National Gallery, as she had been a lady's maid in wealthy homes prior to her marriage and probably seen her fill of such masterpieces. When discussing the modes of public transportation available in 1849, Alpert presents a reasonably accurate re-enactment of Frederick Manning's flight from London to the Channel island of Jersey, where he was finally apprehended.

I love social history and true crime, so have absolutely no complaints about Michael Alpert's marriage of the two genres. But he runs the risk of disappointing true crime fans who pick up his book expecting to read a concise account of the 'Bermondsey horror'. These people will be better off tracking down a copy of Albert Borowitz's The Woman Who Murdered Black Satin: The Bermondsey Horror.

Free Audiobook MP3s from BN

2009-05-10T11:23:00.000-07:00

I've hopped on the audiobook bandwagon a little late in the game. I admit it. As a bibliophile, I've always been resistant to books being produced in any format that didn't involve paper and ink. Although I still prefer my reading matter to be in the traditional format, I warmed to e-books when so many valuable old volumes that I need for research were only available electronically. With that point of resistance pierced, the route to audiobook fan was not a long one. That mission was accomplished this week.

While browsing the Barnes and Noble website for new releases in the true crime genre, I discovered an Audiobook MP3 free download offer. You can choose one or all of the nine stories available. Nothing turns me into a potential customer more than a try-before-you-buy option, so I signed up and selected the titles that interested me. Seconds later an e-mail arrived containing the requisite download links, and I had something to listen to while I cleaned my workspace. I liked some more than others, but nothing was so heinous that I'd never listen to it again.

According to the Barnes and Noble site, the free audiobook offer ends May 16 at 2:59 a.m. EST., so if you're interested, act now.

If your first love of books came from the stories that your parents read to you at bedtime, there's something comforting about letting another person tell you a story. As an author, I also think it's important to embrace new technologies in the area of information dissemination. It's no field for a technophobe.

True Crime Writing in 1838

2009-04-21T05:04:00.000-07:00

Most True Crime works published prior to 1850 were really half sermon, half cautionary tale. Their basic message was that the devil motivated the perpetrators, and criminal impulses could be overcome if one obeyed their parents and the Ten Commandments. Mitigating circumstances were nonexistant, and sympathy for the criminal out of the question.

Last weekend, while browsing Google's database of digitized public domain material, I found a 62 page volume titled EUGENE ARAM who was executed for the murder of Daniel Clark in 1759. It was published in England in 1838, and so popular during its day that two editions were released. What made the book comparatively unique was that the author, Norrisson Scatcherd, did not write it to preach or condemn. On the contrary, he became fascinated by Aram's story while still a boy, and traces of that seminal awe can be detected throughout the book.

"I became seized with an insatiable curiousity to know something about that extraordinary man (Aram) and the particulars about his case," Scatcherd wrote in the preface. He recalled being laughed at "for hunting after old men and women, to pick up the fruits of their observations, or the traditions of their forefathers." He spoke to an old woman who shook hands with Aram while he was awaiting execution at York Castle, and a man whose relative acted as a maid to the widow of Daniel Clark, Aram's alleged victim.

In my opinion, Norrisson Scatcherd was over a hundred years ahead of his time. He was an investigative writer before the term even existed, refusing to let religious dogma shape his perspective. He believed that Eugene Aram did not kill Daniel Clark, and defended his conclusion with facts taken from personal interviews and the trial transcript. I can understand why the reading public found his book so beguiling: instead of offering yet another execution sermon, Scatcherd breathed life into a man long since consigned to a murderer's grave.

EUGENE ARAM can be read online here. Both writers and fans of True Crime will enjoy this early example of the genre.

Fall River Outrage

2009-04-12T13:46:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the Easter Holiday, I've had three days off. When not eating or sleeping, I've had my nose buried in a book given to me as a belated birthday present: David Richard Kasserman's Fall River Outrage: Life, Murder and Justice in Early Industrial New England.

Sixty years before Lizzie Borden and her legendary axe splashed blood over the name of Fall River, Massachusetts, the growing industrial community was the site of a murder whose social implications affected the industrial revolution and an emerging form of Christianity.

In December 1832, unmarried and pregnant mill worker Sarah Maria Cornell was found hanging from a haystack support pole outside Fall River. A prominent Methodist minister named Ephraim Kingsbury Avery was accused of seducing and then murdering her. When Avery went to trial, two large and opposing institutions faced off.

The Fall River industrialists portrayed Sarah Cornell as an innocent victim of a "wicked married man". Kasserman wrote, "In trying to clear her name, they protected their own." Their concerns were valid: in 1832 more women were leaving their parents' homes to take jobs in mills and factories, and if these workplaces became known as hotbeds of immorality, parental intervention could deprive them of badly needed workers.

The Methodist Episcopal Church supported the opposite impression of the victim: the more lascivious she appeared to have been, the less likely it was that Avery alone had a reason to kill her. Methodism, with its emphasis on emotionality and easy salvation, was regarded with suspicion in a society dominated by the austere Calvinist Congregational Church. The Methodist leaders could ill afford to have a scandal topple the precarious position the church occupied in Jacksonian America. Apparently Avery's lawyers, in condemning Sarah Cornell as a harlot, were the first to use the character of the female victim as a defense strategy.

I'm half-way through, and impressed by what I've read so far. Good writers like Kasserman, in reminding us what made these cases so important during their day, contribute greatly to our understanding of early American society.

"The Starker" reviewed on 'Best Yeggs'

2009-03-22T07:47:00.000-07:00

I've been following a blog called 'Best Yeggs' since its inception. Marisa not only reads historic true crime, she is also a tenacious researcher and an excellent writer if her blog posts are any indication. She is especially intense when it comes to the subject of Vivan Chase, a female gangster (Chase was too self-possessed to be a mere gun moll) who, like Bonnie Parker, died violently in a car. I understand that unstoppable fascination all too well- it spawned three books and is giving me no rest until my fourth one is completed.

Marisa recently reviewed The Starker for 'Best Yeggs'. I've copied the text below, but encourage anyone who reads this to click through to her blog. In my opinion, she is someone to keep an eye on: the Vivian Chase story is as mysterious as it is tragic, and there is every indication that Marisa will one day publish the fruits of her research.

Anyone who's followed my blog is aware that I enjoy Rose Keefe's work so it won't come as any surprise that I think this book is much better than good.

What surprised me was Keefe's ability to bring Zelig to life. While I was excited when I heard about the book (research on a period that deserves a more detailed look), I had my doubts that someone who has been dead for over 90 years and who has NOT been studied in depth could be “brought to life” {clichés exist for a reason}. As much as I love her work, I honestly wondered whether Rose Keefe could pull it off. She did!

“Big Jack Zelig” is only a marginal figure in most crime histories. He rose to prominence as ‘the” NYC Jewish Gang leader in the first decade of the 20th century. Here’s a man who died in 1912 and, in most histories, whose chief claim to fame had been the circumstances of his death. He was murdered by Red Phil Davidson in order to keep him from testifying for the defense in the Herman "Beansy" Rosenthal murder trial. The Rosenthal murder was the crime of the century during this time period. Charles Becker a NYPD Lieutenant was railroaded and executed for the murder. Zelig was to testify in his defense but was killed to prevent his naming the true killers and exonerating Becker.

Keefe introduces readers to Zelig Zvi Lefkowitz more person than myth. A young, bright child, who did not understand why the money that he drew wouldn't ease his family and neighbors' lives, Zelig, was a bright kid from a respectable family who chose to steal (how familiar). In his teens he became an accomplished "gun" as pickpockets were called then. When he was younger he could bring tears to his eyes at will when he was caught to feign hunger and desperate need so his victims would have sympathy for him. Oddly enough, he was only a peripheral member of Monk Eastman's gang, while he was a good thief, Zelig wasn't a standout thug. He actually chickened out on the first murder he agreed to do. A trip to Chicago and a severe beating at the hands of gamblers changed that. He returned to NYC a hardened man who would not back down. Keefe writes about Zelig's world detailing an array of colorful gang members, seedy gamblers, and corrupt politicians with just enough detail to be enjoyable with out ever getting too scholarly.

To me a good historical biography knows what to leave out. The book never stopped being about Big Jack Zelig. It would be easy to let the Herman Rosenthal murder and the Becker trials overwhelm Zelig's story. I could go on and on but in a nutshell Rose Keefe did a lot better than I would have thought possible. She takes her subject a man who has become a marginal figure in the 90 years after his death and lets the reader understand just who Big Jack Zelig is and why some people called him great. This book is a lot better than good. Take a look at Rose Keefe's Zelig web page for more information: http://www.jackzelig.com/

But He Was Good To His Mother

2009-02-06T04:37:00.000-08:00

As an author, I always enjoy meeting professional colleagues whose books provided me with research material and inspiration. On January 31, I had dinner with Professor Robert Rockaway, whose study of Jewish crime, But He Was Good To His Mother, had a permanent place on my desk while I was researching and writing The Starker. My copy is pretty dog-eared by now, so when Bob gave me a new one, I was 'chuffed', as I used to say back in London, to accept.

Bob currently lives in Israel, but was in New York City for the premiere of Lansky, an off-Broadway show starring Mike Burstyn. The one-man drama was inspired by But He Was Good To His Mother, so he was a guest of honour. When I was working on The Starker, I'd peppered Bob with one question after another about early Jewish-American gangsters, and he was so gracious in his replies that I jumped at the chance to meet and thank him in person.

Franklin Abrams and I caught one of the prerun performances of Lansky at St. Luke's Theatre on the 31st. If you live in New York, it would literally be a crime to miss it. Veteran stage actor Mike Burstyn depicts Meyer Lansky as a businessman-gangster who, while waiting for official acceptance as an Israeli citizen, asks himself whether the steps he took to attain the American Dream have tarnished him as a Jew. Burstyn received a standing ovation afterward.

Bob, Franklin, and I retired to a restaurant afterward, and had an enlivening conversation about Jewish gangsters and how they viewed their sometimes vicious livelihoods. They regarded the thieving, white slavery, shakedowns, and murders as a means to an end, but unlike their Italian counterparts, they did not want their sons following in their footsteps. Lansky et al appeared to understand that they were doing wrong, unless they were inherently vicious ('Pittsburgh Phil' Strauss comes to mind here). In that respect, they were more affected by their faith than the Mafiosi.

Thanks to Bob Rockaway for a memorable evening. His book is back on my desk, along with other volumes that mention Dopey Benny Fein. I warned him that he'd be hearing from me regularly in the coming months, and he assured me that it was not a problem. Bob- now my debt to you is even bigger :) Next time we'll eat at the Waldorf!

A Bibliophile's Paradise

2009-01-25T07:20:00.000-08:00

Considering the amount of money I've spent on books over the years, I should own a controlling interest in Amazon.com, Borders, Barnes and Noble, and even Abe Books, which makes thousands of out-of-print crime titles accessible once again. Now that I'm older, wiser, and am carrying a bigger credit card balance, I've been seeking ways to moderate spending without giving up access to valuable research material.

One site I highly recommend for access to older and FREE reading material is the Internet Archive. Declaring itself to be 'Universal Access to Human Knowledge', it has thousands of books available for download or online viewing. Most material published in the United States prior to 1923 is now in the public domain, and the Internet Archive is a virtual library of these older treasures. (According to attorney Stephen Fishman, the U.S. Copyright Office estimates that 85% of all works published between 1923 and 1963 ever had their copyrights renewed, so there are plenty of good books, magazines, photos, etc from this later period that have no restrictions on reproduction and distribution.) Among the books that I have downloaded from this site and enjoyed are:

Apaches of New York, by Alfred Henry Lewis. Originally published in 1911, this series of portraits of Lower East Side crimes and criminals is more entertaining and accurate. But for those who are looking for a good 'feel' of the period, it's a winner.
Crime of the Century, or the Assassination of Dr. Patrick Henry Cronin, by Henry M. Hunt. Published in 1889, this book was the first and only serious investigation of the disappearance and murder of Chicago physician Dr. Cronin. It's probable that he fell victim to the Irish terrorist element that he was known to despise. Some of the illustrations are unsettling even by today's standards, especially an artist's sketch of Cronon's bloated corpse after it was retrieved from a water resevoir.
The Trial of the Reverend Mr. Avery. In 1833, a Methodist minister was tried for the murder of pregnant factory worker Sarah M. Cornell, with whom he'd been having an affair. The case received national attention and was one of the longest murder trials in Rhode Island history. This volume is a trial transcript as opposed to a book-length treatment of the case, but absorbing nonetheless.
Darkness and Daylight, or the Lights and Shadows of New York. Published in 1886, this 740 page book has three authors- a female missionary, a journalist, and a police captain. It's a grim and eye-opening series of essays, commentaries, and sketches of Manhattan low life.

If true crime researchers ever had a Holy Grail, this site is it. Happy hunting!

Ambrose Bierce- so bitter he's funny

2009-01-24T06:45:00.000-08:00

While reading Harold Schechter's engrossing volume True Crime: an American Anthology, I was introduced to Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913?), an Ohio-born writer whose acidic stories and pessimistic commentary earned him the nickname 'Bitter Bierce'. It's debatable whether he was bitter or just shell-shocked by his Civil War experiences, but in any event, I found his articles for the 1860s publication News Letter to be corrosive yet brilliant satire. Below is an example:

The other day, the dead body of a Chinaman was found in an alley of this city, and taken to the morgue for identification. Deceased was addicted to doing odd jobs about town for what he could get, but otherwise bore a good character. The body was found partially concealed under a paving-stone which was embedded in the head like a precious jewel in the pate of a toad. A crowbar was driven through the abdomen and one arm was riven from its socket by some great convulsions of nature. As deceased was seen by two eight-hour men enjoying his opium-pipe and his usual health just previously to the discovery of his melancholy remains, it is supposed he came to his death by heart disease.

News Letter August 6, 1870

Bierce's closing comment was preposterous, but considering that the Chinese Exclusion Act was only twelve years in the future, the authorities probably voiced the same conclusion. He was a tireless critic of the criminal justice system and other institutions that were fundamentally flawed. What makes his articles so enjoyable are the pearl of truth embedded in all the sand and slime that he forced upon his readers.

Any true crime author whose subject matter involves late nineteenth century America should acquaint themselves with Bierce's works. 'Bitter Bierce' told it like few dared to, and the researcher will see the time and place as they really were as opposed to how they wish to be remembered.

J*Grit

2009-01-20T05:19:00.000-08:00

If you have not done so yet, be sure to visit J*Grit- the Internet Index of Tough Jews. I discovered this site in December, when I was whiling away an evening clicking on Pat Hamou's recommended links. Naturally, the first section I went to was 'Criminals'. There were some well-written articles about the Purple Gang, Dutch Schultz, and Martin 'Buggsy' Goldstein, who was allegedly the model for Edward G. Robinson's gangster persona. The site, however, doesn't restrict itself to remarkable crooks. An 'Athletes' category features boxers Barney Ross and Benny Leonard as well as karate champion Marilyn Fierro. Other categories are 'Adventurers', 'Military & Spies', 'Public Servants', 'Radicals', and 'Resisters'.

After spending hours reading the profiles of Jewish men and women who distinguished themselves in the fields of sports, public service, espionage, and crime, I contacted the site owner and offered to submit a story about Jack Zelig. He accepted, and posted the article here. Last week, he also posted an article that I wrote about Max 'Kid Twist' Zweifach. I must have been bitten by a J*Grit bug, because I intend to submit pieces about Monk Eastman and Dopey Benny Fein as well.

For those of you in the New York area, I will be appearing with Ron Arons, Rich Cohen, and one other author at the Tenement House Museum on March 11. There will be a panel discussion, followed by a reading and a book signing. Hope to see some of you there!!

Another nice review

2008-12-19T15:36:00.000-08:00

Thank you to the administrator of the McMinnville, Oregon Public Library blog for the following review of 'The Starker':

Much like Rose Keefe’s earlier works Guns and Roses: The Untold Story of Dean O’Banion and The Man Who Got Away: The Bugs Moran Story, The Starker is quite an achievement in historical research. Unlike some of her contemporaries in the true crime field, Keefe does not simply reexamine documents well-worn by other researches and conjure up a different conclusion. Keefe does her leg work, often finding documents no one thought to look for and gathering testimonials from the person of interest’s friends and family members, who’s voice up to that time had not been heard. Because of this, long-held beliefs about criminals of yester-year fall away, leaving the reader with a well-rounded, human rather than caricatured, picture of that person.

The First half tells of Jack Zelig’s transformation from a petty pickpocket into the most important gang leader in 1910 New York. Midway through the book, the point of interest changes to the biggest crime of the day, the murder case of gambler Herman Rosenthal and how Zelig tragically gets caught up in it.

The reviewer hit the nail on the head when they wrote, "... long-held beliefs about criminals of yester-year fall away, leaving the reader with a well-rounded human rather than a caricatured picture of that person." That's exactly what I strive to do. Gangsters are not the easiest biography subject, because they rarely if ever left behind diaries, letters, or similar clues to what they were really thinking and feeling. Most times you have to piece together their story from newspapers and court records. If you're really lucky, you meet your subject's friends and relatives, and they choose to share memories with you. That's when you do more than just write a book- you rewrite history.

Sweet Home Chicago

2008-12-17T18:11:00.000-08:00

Earlier this month, I flew to Chicago for a series of continuing education seminars. The mornings and afternoons were spent learning more about the year's advances in web design technology. When the skies darkened over the Boul' Mich', which remained brightly lit thanks to the miles of Christmas decorations, I went to the Harold Washington Public Library or the Barnes and Noble near Roosevelt University. I've spent time at both places when researching and writing my three books, and I can't visit either without experiencing nostalgia for what was produced at their tables and optimism over the projects sure to come.

On December 10, I attended an intimate gathering that had been assembled in my honor by fellow author Pat Hickey, who's got two fine books under his belt and a screenplay on the way. Among the attendees were my old friend and literary hero Richard Lindberg; Kay Henderson, whose great-uncle Johnny Rogers had been an 18th ward alderman and veteran of the early twentieth century gambling wars; singer Terry Sullivan, Pat's lady love, who I hear is the modern incarnation of the great Blossom Dearie, and Nick Novich, who graciously let us use his bar to host the get-together. We clinked glasses, ordered pizza, and dished the dirt on a psychotic writer who belonged in one of his own crime books. We also talked about our future projects: I'm researching the life of Dopey Benny Fein, Pat has a screenplay about the Chicago Stockyard strikes of 1904 in the works, and Rich has finished a comprehensive study of gambling kingpin Big Mike McDonald, who dominated Chicago until his death in 1907.

Make no mistake about it- publishing can be a tough and disappointing business. But the support of friends helps us see possibilities where others just see setbacks, and enable us to hope for a better tomorrow when today brings just frustration.

Nice review from Booklist Online

2008-10-28T18:09:00.000-07:00

When my publicist at Cumberland House Publishing sent my weekly publicity report, I saw that The Starker had been reviewed at Booklist Online, which consists of book reviews from the American Library Association. Jenn commented that it was a favorable writeup, so I checked it out for myself, liked what I saw, and obtained permission to reproduce it here.

Keefe limns the New York gangster who represents a major link between Monk Eastman’s seminal Jewish gang and Arnold Rothstein’s criminal enterprise that would eventually spawn, under Meyer Lansky, the Jewish contingent of Lucky Luciano’s crime cabal that dominated America’s underworld for decades. As such, the book is a valuable resource. It is also excellent reading that brings organized crime in the early twentieth century alive in detail and with a bit of humor. Jack Zelig was a gang leader only relatively briefly before he was assassinated to keep him from testifying against bookmaker Herman Rosenthal’s killers. Oh, really? Keefe argues that, rather than a straight gangland-witness killing, the hit was political, motivated by adversaries displeased by Zelig’s clout. Reviewing the case, Keefe exposes the seeming contradictions in the official version of Zelig’s demise and, for that matter, in Zelig’s life, since the gang leader had grown up in comfortable circumstances rather than grinding urban poverty like his peers in the rackets. As true-crime tome and organized crime history, this one’s a keeper.— Mike Tribby

Talk about a nice way to start the week! Thanks to Mary Frances Wilkens at Booklist Online for permission to reproduce the review here.

The Becker Case- a modern legal perspective

2008-10-26T15:45:00.000-07:00

I met Michael O'Rourke, author of O'Banion's Gift, four years ago at the Golden Age of Gangsters Convention in Itasca, Illinois. Michael is a former criminal court judge and still maintains a busy legal practice, so I recently asked him to comment on the treatment of Lieutenant Charles Becker's case by the New York courts. I sent him a link to the Court of Appeals decision in the People v. Becker (May 25, 1915), which affirmed the policeman's conviction and denied the defense's motion for a new trial. This is what he had to say:

"I got a chance to read the case you sent some while ago (People v. Becker), and I had a few observations regarding it.

My understanding is that your interest in the case relates to the fact the Zelig was about to testify at the trial when he was killed. I know nothing of that aspect, but I found several features of the Court of Appeals opinion to be interesting, and I have the overall sense that the trial would have been conducted differently -- generally to Becker's advantage -- in a modern American courtroom.

That's not to say that the reviewing court would have been more likely to remand the case for a third trial, but rather that the trial judge would have felt less need to rigidly apply the rules of evidence. For example, the dying declaration of Dago Frank would likely have been admitted, not under the classical exception for dying declarations discussed by the appeals court, but rather under what is generally referred to in state law as "Subsection 24" (or Federal Rule 807, "Residual Exceptions"), under which a trial court may determine that the "interests of justice will best be served by admission of the statement into evidence." That wide exception did not exist when Becker was tried. It was his misfortune to go to trial during a period when the rules of evidence were narrowly and dogmatically applied in most states.

On the other side, it is my view that Shapiro's statement that "Becker had the cops fixed," would have been excluded at trial -- not because the trial judge's technical analysis was incorrect (he properly instructed the jury not to consider the statement for its truth or falsity) but rather because of its extreme prejudice.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the analysis by the reviewing court relates to corroboration. It has always been the law that a conviction cannot be based on the uncorroborated evidence of an accomplice(s), but there is a wide variance in what courts hold to be sufficient to qualify as corroboration. (Finger prints or DNA would be strong corroboration, whereas an inferred motive would not). In this case it seemed to have been a close call -- in which event the appeals court properly deferred to the trial judge's ruling. In today's world, though, it is less likely that the corroboration would have been deemed sufficient by the typical trial court.

So, given the time period, I'm not surprised by the court's decision upholding the result in the second trial. But I'm appalled by the manner in which the clemency request was handled. For the former prosecutor to fail to recuse himself is nothing less than astonishing and should, in and of itself, have been grounds for a separate appeal to a judicial tribunal. It might also have been grounds for a petition to impeach the governor.

Although unrelated to the merits, I was interested to see that the famous mouthpiece Bourke Cochran was involved in the case. He was a remarkable person and the idol of the young Winston Churchill, whose mother Jenny was Cochran's good friend. Churchill credited Cochran with most of his own public speaking skills."

Thanks for that, Michael.

Charles Whitman should have recused himself in the matter of Becker's clemency request. He did not. Becker had the misfortune to go on trial for his life when trial by newspaper set the tone for jury verdicts, the rules of evidence were more rigidly applied and the governor was more ambitious than merciful.

Six For Five Blog

2008-10-19T18:26:00.000-07:00

Montreal-based artist and researcher Pat Hamou, whom I am privileged to call a friend, has a magnificent blog called Six For Five. Its subtitle is An Illustrated History of New York City's Jewish Criminal Community 1900-1941. With few exceptions, each blog post consists of a well-written and insightful profile of a Jewish gangster, accompanied by one of Pat's incomparable drawings. See some examples below:

Pat was kind enough to review The Starker in a recent entry. He's got his own work in progress and if it's anything like his blog, it'll be a masterpiece.

Here's to you, Pat!

The Bowery Boys

2008-10-18T16:01:00.000-07:00

There are a few podcasts that I listen to on a regular basis, such as Mur Lafferty's "I Should Be Writing" and the Rippercast series that analyzes the Jack the Ripper crimes. These days, I find myself listening to the Bowery Boys more and more. No, I'm not referring to the lovable onscreen hooligans who had their genesis in the Dead End Kids. The Bowery Boys are a lively duo who talk about New York history. Examples of past topics are McSorley's Old Ale House, the Triangle Factory fire of 1911, the Blackout of '77, and the Stonewall Riots. Today I listened to them discuss the 1841 murder of Mary Rogers, aka the 'Beautiful Cigar Girl', whose grisly death spawned one of Poe's most famous tales, "The Murder of Marie Roget."

If you are interested in New York history, visit the Bowery Boys blog, where their past broadcasts can be accessed. If you have iTunes installed, you can subscribe to the show and have each new episode downloaded automatically to your computer.

Speaking of podcasts, on October 26 I will be appearing on the Dave Gordon Radio Show, which features stories about the Middle East and Judeo-Christian values as well as opinions and commentary, news, profiles of newsmakers, and much more. I will be speaking on the subject of Big Jack Zelig. The show will be available for download afterward.

'The Starker' on the streets

2008-10-10T03:50:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday a release party for The Starker was held at the Bowery Hot el on the Lower East Side.

If you haven't stayed at this unforgettable oasis of vintage character and modern elegance, I strongly suggest that you do so. Stepping into the lobby is the closest I have ever come to stepping back in time: the potted palms, dim lighting, dark wicker lounge chairs, and intricately tiled floors are all throwbacks to the grand hotels of 1912. The suite that I booked for the party had factory windows that presented a dazzling view of Manhattan. All told, it was a perfect setting for the celebration of a book covering the time period that the hotel emulated so beautifully.

October 5, 2008 was also the 96th anniversary of Zelig's death. Among the scheduled attendees were members of the Lefkowitz family, who had provided research assistance and moral support while The Starker was being written. My book gave them previously unknown insights into the life of a relative who'd been spoken about only in whispers, if at all.

Zelig's parents and eight siblings had clearly mourned his memory. They sat shiva for him. Then a wall of silence fell between that generation and the successive ones. I have concluded that there were two reasons for this. The first is that although he was a beloved brother and son, he also threw a faint shadow over the name of an accomplished and altruistic family: his father Frank helped found an association that assisted disadvantaged Jews with interest-free loans, and his brother Herman died after gangrene set into a wound received while participating in a rescue effort. The second is that Zelig's older nephews came of age when Jewish gangsters achieved unprecedented prominence in organized crime. Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Lepke Buchalter, and their associates would have looked favorably on a new recruit with blood ties to the legendary Big Jack Zelig, should one of the boys have been tempted enough by money and his uncle's glory to approach them.

The party went extremely well: members of the local media showed up, and Monk Eastman and Lollie Meyers even made a grand appearance! (Not really, but webisode guru Franklin Abrams donned a dark suit and hat to recreate a menacing Monk, while his steel-eyed buddy Ryan, who is also an accomplished hip-hop artist, turned heads as Lollie.) Cartoonist Nancy Beiman provided a caricature of Big Jack that was an instant hit, so much so that I could not resist reproducing it at the top of this entry. Well done, Nancy- I had the picture framed and it's hanging on my office wall as I type this.

In addition to throwing the party at the Bowery Hotel, I joined author Pat Downey in hurrying all over the city, visiting every Borders and Barnes & Noble that we came across and signing all copies of our books that each location had in stock. One assistant manager even came to the party for awhile!

If the time and resources are available, I strongly encourage any author to host a launch party for their newly released book. It's like throwing a rock into a pond: the actual splash is over quickly, but the ripples go on and on. I'm not just indulging in wordplay here: on Wednesday I received an email from a happy customer who bought The Starker on the recommendation of Diane, the B&N assistant manager who showed up. This person purchased the book on Monday, finished it in two days, and assured me that he was going to encourage everyone he knew to pick it up. Music to my ears that will translate into coins in the piggy bank. If I have to advance funds to host a party that has this kind of aftermath, then in the words of Mike Meyers, "Party on, Garth!"

Monk Eastman webisode

2008-09-21T07:41:00.000-07:00

I know I've mentioned Franklin Abrams' Monk Eastman websiode project on my site, but since Franklin has now aired a sample scene involving Monk Eastman and Jack Zelig, I thought I'd post additional information here.

Last June I flew to New York to be inteviewed for the project. Franklin, whose acting credentials have made his directorial abilities more lively and innovative, came up with the concept of both revisiting Eastman's past and imagining how he'd react to modern challenges like the internet, computer-based crimes, etc. It was a novel idea, and I was more than happy to provide input for the historial segments.

Franklin was especially interested in recreating a conference that took place between Eastman and his former protege Zelig. Monk, recently released from prison and faring poorly in both health and career prospects, approached Zelig to solicit his aid in a narcotics running operation. Unfortunately for him, Zelig was firmly against the drug trade for personal reasons, and not even an appeal from an old mentor could sway him.

In the video below, I provide opening commentary before the scene commences. Monk is played by Franklin, and the role of Zelig is assumed by none other than the gangster's great grand-nephew, Jan Lefkowitz. It's Jan's acting debut, and you'll agree that he's incredibly believable as Zelig.

A Writer's Retreat

2008-07-19T07:00:00.000-07:00

I inherited my love of reading and writing from my father. Although he never chose to take a stab at publication, Dad did produce some impressive poetry and essays that he shared with me when I was old enough to appreciate them. We also had more bookcases in the house than any other item of furniture. When I was small, I used to leaf through Dad's volumes on Roman warfare, Canadian naval history, and other subjects about the world's fighting past, and marvel over the vivid illustrations and photos.

One book that held special attraction for me, although its title and author escapes me now, was about writer's workplaces. I wanted to be an author when I grew up, so I'd study the photos accompanying each writer's essay. Did I want to produce my masterpieces on a rough-hewn wooden worktable overlooking acres of daisy-spotted fields? Or in a garret studio in a stately Victorian home on a leafy city sidestreet?

So far, I haven't acquired either, but I'm not so sure I want to now. I've come to appreciate that writers transcend their surroundings if they're dedicated to their craft: I've hammered out first drafts in tomblike libraries and madcap airport lounges, accomplished rewrites in my local Starbucks, and sent the completed manuscript to my second book, The Man Who Got Away, during a break in a trade show I was attending. My 'permanent' workspace is an imitation cherrywood desk whose sleek surface is taken up by a flatscreen monitor, candlestick telephone, scanner, keyboard (which is in desperate need of a cleaning!) photos of Big Jack Zelig and Darla, a pet ferret who passed away last year, and a mountain of books (The Practical Writer by Eiben and Gannon, Sacrificed by Henry Klein, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers by Amy Gilman Srebink, We Are Not Afraid by Seth Cagin and Philip Dray, and Ship Ablaze by Edward T. O'Donnell).

The key to being a prolific writer is adaptability: be ready and able to work wherever life and fortune happen to situate you. Your dream workspace will come to you eventually, but only if you've been able to produce excellent work in less ideal surroundings.

The Practical Writer- All You Need

2008-07-13T08:45:00.000-07:00

I don't buy books about the writer's craft any more. Not since I picked up The Practical Writer.

Edited by Therese Eibe and Mary Gannon in conjunction with the staff of Poets and Writers Magazine, this volume covers everything from conceiving original ideas to successfully placing the finished manuscript with a publisher. It's not a 'how-to' manual with carefully planned 'Point A to Point B' steps, but rather a series of essays that help both emerging and veteran writers make intelligent and informed choices at every stage of their project. Among the topics covered are choosing the perfect title, submission strategy and protocol, getting low-cost publicity for a small press title, digital marketing, and cultivating your local booksellers.

Some essays provided more insight than instruction, and these were the ones that I found myself mulling over long after I finished reading the book. Helen Benedict's "Fiction vs. Nonfiction: Wherein Lies the Truth?" was one of them. Like many nonfiction writers, I shied away from fiction and literature in favor of immersing myself in works of history, current events, true crime, etc. I saw no value in imaginary worlds and people unless I was looking for an escape, and even then, I preferred a good history volume as a type of retreat. Benedict argues that even nonfiction has its limits in exposing and depicting the truth: interview subjects color their stories, authors are wary of injuring innocent parties, and everyone fears a lawsuit if they're completely honest in print about a contentious issue. With fiction, writers are free to expose unpalatable truths via imaginary characters, as Vladimir Nabokov did with his obsessed child-lover Humbert Humbert in Lolita. History abounds with examples of literature leading to social change: Uncle Tom's Cabin shone a harsh glare on the morality of slavery, Charles Dickens helped the cause of the poor, and Theodore Dreiser humanized the prostitute, the unwed mother, and other figures of universal derision during his day.

Another essay that stayed with me was Robert McDowell's "Publicity for Your Small Press Title". Like me, McDowell believes that the author is a crucial part of a book's success. After his poetry volume On Foot, In Flames was released, he spent nine days driving through eastern Oregon and Washington to promote his book. He read before twenty-two classes of high and middle school pupils, gave readings at local libraries, and even presented his work at a senior's home in Fossil, Oregon. Only three people showed up at a reading scheduled at a small-town hotel, but guests entering the lobby would stop and listen. McDowell only sold one book that night, but as he put it, "Even though the author in me could have easily retreated to a humiliating place, the marketer and proselytizer in me was proud of that sale. My poetry had just taken one more small step out into the world."

The Practical Writer belongs with each year's Writer's Market on any serious author's bookshelf. The latter points to doors, the former helps push them open and make the most of the opportunities presented.

Dean O'Banion recognized in Ireland

2008-07-06T05:10:00.000-07:00

Ten months ago, I went to Chicago to be interviewed by AbuMedia, a TV production company that had flown over from Ireland to film a series about Irish gangsters in America. They wanted me to talk about Dean O'Banion and his role in the Prohibition drama. The crew was fantastic to work with, and I had a great time.

Months afterward, I received a DVD of the episode that I appeared in. It was dedicated entirely to O'Banion's life, and included interviews with T.J. English, author of Paddy Whacked, and Craig Alton from Chicago's popular Untouchables Tour. It has since been broadcast in Ireland, but has yet to be seen in North America.

In most instances, I find the reenactment segments of these projects to be disappointing or downright embarrassing. The actors that are chosen to play O'Banion, Capone, etc look nothing like their real-life counterparts, and Irish-American gangsters speak with a ridiculous brogue that belies their actual birthplace. The AbuMedia production, however, was an exception. They treated O'Banion's story with respect, especially at the beginning, when his Maroa childhood was revisited. The actor who portrayed Dean was close to the mark in appearance- same height, weight, face shape, etc. The cinematography was spectacular, and the musical score that accompanied the reenactments was so compelling that O'Banion's death scene actually brought a lump to my throat. I really hope that they televise it here soon, as it was the best film treatment yet of O'Banion's life.

I've posted some screenshots below. The first two show him writing a letter to his invalid mother, the remaining two depict his death.

Yeah, well, you're not from Chicago

2008-07-05T05:29:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite scenes from Brian DePalma's The Untouchables takes place mid-way through the movie. With help from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Untouchables intercept a Capone booze shipment at the border and capture one of Big Al's top boys. When the gangster refuses to talk, Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery) punches him in the face, and then completes the scare campaign by grabbing the corpse of a lesser hood and blowing its head off... without bothering to reassure their prisoner that life was extinct first. The manacled hoodlum begins talking the moment he stops pissing himself, but for the commanding officer of the RCMP, the ends don't justify the means. "I do not approve of your methods!" he snaps, to which Elliot Ness (Kevin Costner) coolly replies, "Yeah, well, you're not from Chicago."

It's not so entertaining when you hear the same phrase employed in reference to you. One anonymous Amazon.com reviewer didn't exactly slam Guns and Roses, but he did complain about "authors from Iowa and Canada writing about Chicago." (The Iowa author he was referring to is Rick Mattix, who covered Chicago crimes and criminals extensively in The Complete Public Enemy Almanac.) At my request, Amazon pulled the review, and I later learned that the defensive Chicagoan was a frustrated author whose own manuscript about the Windy City mob had been rejected so often that he resorted to self-publication.

Most people are enlightened enough to appreciate a well-written, solidly researched work regardless of the author's origins. Harold Schechter and Ann Rule have written eye-opening and perceptive books about the world's worst serial killers, but no one accuses them of being unfit to deal with the subject matter because bodies aren't buried in their basements. Unfortunately, there exists a minority who think that if your birth certificate doesn't say 'Chicago' on it or you only live there during research trips, your attempts to write about events in the city's history are akin to what one well-meaning Chicagoan called, "a Norwegian trying to write an Italian cookbook."

I don't dispute that for some books, appropriate credentials are crucial. I wouldn't buy a medical textbook unless the author's name ended in 'M.D.' I'll even allow that living in Chicago is a definite asset when you're writing about the city's current events, as these issues impact your own life and give you a perspective that someone in Hayden, Idaho could never have on the same topic. But when the subject matter involves history, all you really need is strong research skills and the ability to ask questions when you don't know something.

During my last visit to Chicago, I went to Holy Name Cathedral to take some pictures. For me, this beautiful church has special significance because the parking lot across the street is the former site of Dean O'Banion's flower shop, where he was murdered in 1924. Two years later his successor, Hymie Weiss, died in the cathedral's shadow when bullets from a machine gun nest ripped his body apart.

While I was angling the camera, a middle-aged gentleman paused to watch. After I snapped the photo, he approached and commented, "Holy Name is a lovely church. Are you taking pictures for a magazine?"

"No, for myself. I did mention Holy Name in two books that I wrote, though."

When he pressed for details, I told him about the O'Banion and Weiss murders. He kept punctuating my speech with "You're kidding!" and "I never knew that!"

"Are you from Chicago?" I asked.

"Yes- born here and lived here all my life. I also go to Holy Name every Sunday. Never knew about this gangster connection before though."

As I watched him continue up State Street, I remembered another line from The Untouchables. When Sean Connery questions a police recruit about why he wants to be a cop, the young man looks confused and then mumbles something about "wanting to help the force." After the interview is concluded, Connery mutters, "There goes the next chief of police." Gazing at the amiable stranger's back, I thought, "God help me if he decides to write a book. He doesn't know much about the city's history, but at least he's from Chicago."

For some, that's all that seems to matter.

Creative Nonfiction- the slippery slope

2008-07-04T05:08:00.000-07:00

I recently finished reading John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I loved it and hated it at the same time.

Like me, Berendt is a creative nonfiction writer: he embraces certain fiction techniques, such as plot, dialogue, characterization, and point of view, to make the story more compelling. But there's a line, and in my opinion Berendt crossed it. To make the real-life scenes flow more smoothly, he invented transitions, a process he called "rounding the corners." It was meant to make the book more enjoyable to read, and I'll admit that he achieved the desired effect. But what he also did was make me distrust the entire work.

It's not necessarily an ethical violation to veer away from the literal truth for the sake of a more lively narrative. I've done it myself. If an interview subject says to me, "I saw Bugs Moran in the lobby of the Parkway Hotel and said hello to him", I might translate this statement as "Seeing Moran in the Parkway Hotel's lobby, John Doe said, "Hello, George."" This is more engaging prose than "John Doe said hello to Bugs Moran in the lobby of the Parkway Hotel." But what's not permissible, in my opinion, is to write something like "Seeing Moran in the Parkway Hotel's lobby, John Doe said, "Hello, George." Moran returned the greeting, then stepped out into the sunny August afternoon. The recent killing of his old friend Bill was on his mind, and he was in no mood to talk." It's an even better literary treatment of the encounter than my own version, but unless Moran explicitly told John Doe that he was still upset about his friend's murder and not inclined to talk, an elaboration like that is unacceptable.

It's my opinion that if you have adequate research skills and know how to ask the right questions during interviews, you can come up with enough compelling material without abusing creative license. Do not cheapen your work by inventing dialogue, characters, and incidents for the sake of appealing to the beach novel crowd. Truth can be much more engaging than fiction, and if you have any real talent as a writer, you can apply that principle successfully.

You Wrote It- Now Make Sure They Come

2008-07-02T07:47:00.000-07:00

Congratulations on getting your book published! Months, maybe even years have passed since you began putting your idea into manuscript form, and now all those rewrites, revisions, re-everythings are over and you can relax….. but you shouldn’t.

You’ve accomplished one of two primary goals in the writing business: finding a publisher for your work. Now, if you care about your book’s success, you should apply your creative energies with equal vigour to the second step of the process: helping it sell well.

I’ve spoken to writers whose attitude is, “I’ve written the book- it’s the publisher’s job to sell it.” Theoretically, that’s true. But certain realities have to be faced: approximately 500 titles are published every day in the U.S., and publishers have a daunting job persuading bookstore buyers, reviewers, and readers to consider your book out of hundreds. There’s a lot that you as the author can do to create a demand that will give your creation a competitive edge.

Give the book, and yourself, an online presence. I can’t stress enough the importance of using Internet resources as marketing tools. A website reaches a much broader audience than a printed ad ever could, and its content can be updated instantly. Below are some suggestions that will help you get the most out of your Internet-based campaign.

Register a domain name (i.e. www.yourname.com) and build a site. If you’re technically challenged but want to take a shot at designing your own author web page, Yahoo! Geocities has a free site hosting service that includes easy-to-use tools for building your page. For as little as $8.95 a month, they offer an advanced hosting package that includes registration of your chosen domain name. If you’d rather be writing your next book instead of mastering a site builder program, Authors on the Web (www.authorsontheweb.com) offers slick site design and useful add-ons like blogs, message boards, and multimedia. Although Authors on the Web has an excellent reputation and writers like Nelson DeMille and Rita Mae Brown are among their clients, they are pricier: a basic package starts at $2,500. Determine what your budget is and take it from there. You can always hire a local design company at a reasonable rate.

Update your site regularly. Your author page shouldn’t be treated as merely a cyber-resume. Add fresh content that will keep visitors coming back. You want to maintain their interest in not only your current book but all those that you intend to write in the future. If you’ve written a work of nonfiction, write short articles about your chosen topic and post them on your site. You’ll come across as an authority on the subject. If your publisher gives you the green light to do so, post a sample chapter from your book. Fiction authors can provide additional background information on their characters and post some short stories- I know of one author who received such an enthusiastic response to one of her ‘shorts’ that she developed it into a full-length novel that continues to sell well. Authors of all genres can sign up for a free blog at www.blogger.com and post personal messages to readers.

Join a forum or e-mail list dedicated to your subject. Author M.J. Rose advises, “For every niche you can think of, you can find at least one newsgroup, e-zine, newsletter, or listserv on the Web targeted to that group.” She’s right. Unless your book deals with a really obscure topic, you’ll probably find several net-based forums containing potential readers. Make a list of the most popular and relevant ones, and then e-mail the owners / administrators directly to solicit a book review or see if they will let you host a Q&A or chat. Unless they’re territorial or competitive, chances are that they’ll love this kind of direct attention from a published author. Another, albeit lower key approach, is to choose three or four of the best groups and join them. Participate in their discussions without actively promoting your work, which could be interpreted as tacky and self-serving. You should, however, insert the name of your book in your e-mail or forum post signature. It won’t be long before other members begin commenting on the signature and asking you about the book. Personal responses to their questions creates a loyalty that will translate into sales, because readers love to interact with authors directly. Building a good relationship with your readers will turn them into a sales force for not only your current books but any future ones you may write on a related topic.

Set up a MySpace or Facebook page. Profiles on social networking sites are ridiculously easy to set up and use. Because they are so popular (not mention searchable, allowing you to locate fans of your book topic), several of my author associates forgo setting up their own websites in favour of having a presence on either of these networks. They have groups dedicated to all kinds of topics, and you’re sure to find one that caters to your target audience. When I was promoting my third release, The Starker: Big Jack Zelig, the Becker-Rosenthal Case, and the Advent of the Jewish Gangster, I created a MySpace profile that appeared to be maintained by Big Jack Zelig himself. True Crime fans got a kick out of it, and even learned to speak 1912 gangster jargon.

Sign up for an Amazon Author Blog. Once your title is listed for sale on Amazon.com, you can sign up for AmazonConnect, a program that allows authors to post messages to their readers and create a profile page with personalized information. All posted messages will appear on your book’s product page as well. This is a great tool for informing readers about future book signings, TV and radio interviews, and (fingers crossed!) movie deals.

Join GoodReads.com. I personally love this website. Founder Otis Chandler describes it as “a place where you can see what your friends are reading and vice versa.” It’s like a MySpace for books and book lovers. Authors are given profile pages where they can post messages, articles, stories, YouTube videos, and more. They can also host Q&A discussion groups. GoodReads is unique in that it sponsors contests to win free copies of pre-release books. Publishers can list their upcoming books, and readers can apply to receive one. Winners are picked randomly at the end of the giveaway period.

Contact local book clubs. If you don’t mind public speaking, spend some time researching book clubs and reading groups in your area. Your local library is a good place to start, and larger groups often have websites that will show up on an Internet search page. Once you’ve found a club whose members read the type of book you’ve written, e-mail or call the president, introduce yourself, and offer to read to them. They’ll probably be thrilled to have you make an appearance at a future meeting, and you’ll have a terrific opportunity to impress potential buyers.

Internet marketing tools and book groups achieve a dual objective: increasing awareness of your work and fostering communication between yourself and your readers. They allow you to, in the words of author Linda Richards, “fill the gaping hole that used to exist between the publisher and the reader.” Since a book’s author can be its best salesperson, you should be as crucial a part of the marketing process as you were in all prior stages of your book’s development.

Why I hate "The Sopranos"

2008-07-01T08:57:00.000-07:00

I don't really. I have to admit that I watch it every chance I get, and cried a bit when Silvio whacked Adrianna. But what mob dramas like The Sopranos has done is spoil the appetite of some readers for books that approach all those backroom intrigues, backseat shootings, and double-dealing from a historical perspective.

There was a time when those of us who specialize in the Prohibition or Depression era desperadoes could write something like, "In the fall of 1928, the Capone gunmen met in secluded Cranberry Lake, Wisconsin, to discuss the problem of George Moran." There's still nothing to stop you, but you're guaranteed to get a couple of whiney Amazon.com reviews complaining that the book wasn't "exciting enough." These people don't want to be informed, they want pure entertainment like they get every time a Sopranos episode comes on. If your coverage of the Cranberry Lake meeting doesn't include prose like "We gotta whack that crummy bastard Bugs" or "Those motherfucking Gusenbergs are gonna eat lead for what they done to Jack McGurn", then you're going to get accusations of "dull!" One day people like this will move out of their mother's basement and learn that invented dialogue is a fiction technique, but until then, they're free to wail their disappointment all over the Internet. Solomon Short once said, "I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters." Change that to keyboards and you'd have my vote.

Don't get me wrong- there's nothing amiss about liking a good piece of noir or mafia-based fiction. One of my favorite books is Schooley and Sellers' Hard Boiled Love (Insomniac Press). But unless the ballsy dialogue and shocking inside stories are part of the official record, you're not going to find anything comparable in a work of historic True Crime. If you value entertainment more than information, rent a Sopranos DVD instead, and spare the serious authors your misguided, flawed reviews.