Features & Reviews
I write the monthly true crime column “Stranger Than Fiction” for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and my work appears in CrimeReads, The Irish Times, the Washington Independent Review of Books, The Globe and Mail, the Chicago Review of Books, the Southern Review of Books and other major publications. Here are my latest articles, columns, and book reviews.
The idea sounds as implausible and foolhardy today as it did more than 150 years ago. Assemble a small army of Irish men at the northern border of the US, conquer Britain’s neighbouring Canadian colonies, then swap them for the real prize – the independence of their long-suffering homeland. What could possibly go wrong?
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What prompted the teenaged sons of two wealthy, respected Chicago families to kidnap and kill a fourteen-year-old neighbor in cold blood on a spring afternoon in 1924? “A sort of pure love of excitement,” Nathan Leopold told his interrogators in a chilling explanation of an inexplicable crime, “the imaginary love of thrills, doing something different.” The murder of Bobby Franks by Leopold and his friend Richard Loeb was dubbed the Crime of the Century – an overused title that fits this Jazz Age tale of murder, wealth and privilege. An interview with Evanston bookseller Nina Barrett, who revisits the case in The Leopold and Loeb Files: An Intimate Look at One of America’s Most Infamous Crimes.
Click here to read the interview
Between 1921 and 1925, two dozen members of the Osage tribe in oil-rich northern Oklahoma were murdered. In Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann meticulously excavates the lost history of the Osage and the oil boom that made them rich – and, in turn, made them targets.
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It’s an elaborate fraud named for Charles Ponzi, who sparked a stock-buying frenzy in 1920s Boston by promising to double investors' money in just three months. By then, Chicago stock promoter Leo Koretz had raked in millions of dollars as investors scrambled for shares in his bogus Panamanian oilfields. Almost a century later, annual losses worldwide from Ponzi schemes are estimated to total $35 billion. Why do people continue to fall for such a notorious scam?
Click here to read my commentary in The Globe and Mail
