TRUE CRIME: AN AMERICAN ANTHOLOGY
Hardcover: 900 pages
Publisher: Library of America (September 18, 2008)
ISBN-10: 1598530313
ISBN-13: 978-1598530315
Americans have had an uneasy fascination with crime since the earliest European settlements in the New World, and right from the start true crime became a dominant genre in American writing. True Crime: An American Anthology offers the first comprehensive look at the many ways in which American writers have explored crime in a multitude of aspects: the dark motives that spur it, the shock of its impact on society, the effort to make sense of the violent extremes of human behavior. "The human community," as Harold Schechter notes in his introduction, "finding itself under assault from within, searches desperately for a framework or context to explain the apparently unexplainable."
Here is the full spectrum of the true-crime genre, from William Bradford's account of the hanging of a murderer who came over on the Mayflower to Dominick Dunne's relentless narrative of the case of the Menendez brothers. It focuses on some of the most notorious criminal cases in American history: the Helen Jewett murder, the assassination of President Garfield, the Snyder-Gray murder (the inspiration for Double Indemnity), Leopold and Loeb, the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Black Dahlia, the Manson family, the "Son of Sam."
True Crime presents the writing of a range of significant literary figures: Nathaniel Hawthorne's account of a visit to a waxworks exhibit of infamous crimes, Ambrose Bierce offering a cynical run-down of crime in 19th-century California, Mark Twain on frontier violence, New England poet Celia Thaxter on a shocking double killing, Theodore Dreiser observing a murder trial eerily reminiscent of his own American Tragedy, James Thurber revisiting the Hall-Mills murder case, Joseph Mitchell reporting on an execution, Elizabeth Hardwick interpreting the criminal career of Caryl Chessman, Truman Capote interviewing Manson associate Bobby Beausoleil. It draws as well on sources as varied as execution sermons, murder ballads, early broadsides and trial reports, and tabloid journalism of different eras. It also features the influential true-crime writing of best-selling contemporary practitioners like James Ellroy, Gay Talese, Albert Borowitz, and Ann Rule.
The Devil's Gentleman: Privilege, Poison, and the Trial that Ushered in the Twentieth Century
Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books (September 25, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0345476794
ISBN-13: 978-0345476791
From renowned true-crime historian Harold Schechter comes the riveting exploration of a notorious New York City murder in the 1890s, the fascinating forensic science of an earlier time, and the grisly court case that became a tabloid spectacle.
The wayward son of a revered Civil War general, Roland Molineux enjoyed good looks, status, and fortune–hardly the qualities of a prime suspect in a series of shocking, merciless cyanide killings. Molineux’s subsequent indictment for murder led to two explosive trials and a sex-infused scandal that shocked the nation. Bringing to life Manhattan’s Gilded Age, Schechter captures all the colors of the tumultuous legal proceedings, gathering his own evidence and tackling subjects no one dared address at the time–all in hopes of answering a tantalizing question: What powerfully dark motives could drive the wealthy scion of an eminent New York family to murder?
Pocket Star, March, 2004
384 pages
Mass Market Paperback
ISBN: 0-7434-8335-9
San Francisco, the 1920s. In an age when nightmares were relegated to the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and distant tales of the Whitechapel murders, a real-life monster terrorized America. His acts of butchery have proved him one of history's fiercest madmen.
As an infant, Earle Leonard Nelson possessed the power to unsettle his elders. As a child he was unnaturally obsessed with the Bible; before he reached puberty, he had an insatiable, aberrant sex drive. By his teens, even Earle's own family had reason to fear him. But no one in the bone-chilling winter of 1926 could have predicted that his degeneracy would erupt in a sixteen-month frenzy of savage rape, barbaric murder, and unimaginable defilement -- deeds that would become the hallmarks of one of the most notorious fiends of the twentieth century, whose blood-lust would not be equaled until the likes of Henry Lee Lucas, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer.
Drawing on the "gruesome, awesome, compelling reporting" (Ann Rule) that is his trademark, Harold Schechter takes a dark journey into the mind of an unrepentant sadist -- and brilliantly lays bare the myth of innocence that shrouded a bygone era.
Pocket Star, July, 2003
336 pages
Mass Market Paperback
ISBN: 0-671-01450-1
In an era that produced some of the most vicious female sociopaths in American history, Jane Toppan would become the most notorious of them all.
AN ANGEL OF MERCY
In 1891, Jane Toppan, a proper New England matron, embarked on a profession as a private-duty nurse. Selfless and good-natured, she beguiled Boston's most prominent families. They had no idea what they were welcoming into their homes....
A DEVIL IN DISGUISE
No one knew of Jane's past: of her mother's tragic death, of her brutal upbringing in an adoptive home, of her father's insanity, or of her own suicide attempts. No one could have guessed that during her tenure at a Massachusetts hospital the amiable "Jolly Jane" was morbidly obsessed with autopsies, or that she conducted her own after-hours experiments on patients, deriving sexual satisfaction in their slow, agonizing deaths from poison. Self-schooled in the art of murder, Jane Toppan was just beginning her career -- and she would indulge in her true calling victim by victim to become the most prolific domestic fiend of the nineteenth century.
Pocket, October, 2000
320 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN:
0-671-01448-X
A MONSTER PREYED UPON THE CHILDREN OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY BOSTON. HIS CRIMES WERE APPALLING -- AND YET HE WAS LITTLE MORE THAN A CHILD HIMSELF.
When fourteen-year-old Jesse Pomeroy was arrested in 1874, a nightmarish reign of terror over an unsuspecting city came to an end. "The Boston Boy Fiend" was imprisoned at last. But the complex questions sparked by his ghastly crime spree -- the hows and whys of vicious juvenile crime -- were as relevant in the so-called Age of Innocence as they are today.
Jesse Pomeroy was outwardly repellent in appearance, with a gruesome "dead" eye; inside, he was deformed beyond imagining. A sexual sadist of disturbing precocity, he satisfied his atrocious appetites by abducting and torturing his child victims. But soon, the teenager's bloodlust gave way to another obsession: murder.
Pocket, October, 1998
352 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN: 0-671-02544-9
The heinous bloodlust of Dr. H.H. Holmes is notorious -- but only Harold Schechter's Depraved tells the complete story of the killer whose evil acts of torture and murder flourished within miles of the Chicago World's Fair. "Destined to be a true crime classic" (Flint Journal, MI), this authoritative account chronicles the methods and madness of a monster who slipped easily into a bright, affluent Midwestern suburb, where no one suspected the dapper, charming Holmes -- who alternately posed as doctor, druggist, and inventor to snare his prey -- was the architect of a labyrinthine "Castle of Horrors." Holmes admitted to twenty-seven murders by the time his madhouse of trapdoors, asphyxiation devices, body chutes, and acid vats was exposed. The seminal profile of a homegrown madman in the era of Jack the Ripper, Depraved is also a mesmerizing tale of true detection long before the age of technological wizardry.
Pocket, October, 1998
256 pages
Trade Paperback ISBN:
ISBN: 0-671-02545-7
In this book Schechter turns his keen historian's gaze on real-life serial killer Albert Fish, who killed--and ate--as many as 15 children in New York City in the 20s. Fish resembled a meek, kindly, white-haired grandfather, but was actually an intense sadomasochist whose sexual fetishes included almost everything known to psychiatry. For example, he stuck 29 needles into his pelvic region. Apparently Schechter, while writing his book Deviant about Ed Gein, asked Robert Bloch (author of Psycho), "Why are people so fascinated by Ed Gein?" Bloch answered, "Because they haven't heard about Albert Fish."
Pocket, October, 1998
256 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN: 0-671-02546-5
Deviant is about everyone's favorite ghoul, Ed Gein--whose crimes inspired the writers of Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. Schechter deftly evokes the small-town 1950s Wisconsin setting--not pretty farms and cheese factories, but infertile soil and a bleak, hardscrabble existence. The details of Gein's "death house" are perhaps well known by now, but the murderer's quietly crazy, almost gentle personality comes forth in this book as never before. As Gary Kadet wrote, in The Boston Book Review, "Schechter is a dogged researcher [who backs up] every bizarre detail and curious twist in this and his other books ... More importantly, he nimbly avoids miring his writing and our reading with minutiae or researched overstatement, which means that although he can occasionally be dry, he is never boring."
with David Everitt
Pocket, November, 1997
368 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN: 0-671-02074-9