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.
Arthur Conan Doyle, the newest physician in the English town of Southsea, grew weary of waiting for patients to walk through the door. Fees earned from magazine articles helped to pay the bills, so he wrote. When he decided to try his hand at a detective story, he remembered the deductive feats of Dr. Joseph Bell, his former medical school instructor. And in that instant, an iconic character was born.
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During Louis XIV’s astounding 72 years as king of France, he bathed an equally astounding number of times: twice. London diarist Samuel Pepys was just as water-averse, and took a bath in 1664 only because his wife refused to sleep with him until he did. Canadian academic Peter Ward explores the three-centuries-plus journey from superficial royal wash-ups to our germ-obsessed, squeaky-clean world in The Clean Body: A Modern History, an engrossing book that reveals our ancestors’ dirty secrets and explores how and why we cleaned up our act.
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Steve Inskeep’s immersive tale of frontier adventure, political intrigue, and celebrity culture in antebellum America focuses on the lives-lived-large of Jessie and John Frémont, an ambitious nineteenth-century power couple who almost made it to the White House.
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Arthur Conan Doyle enrolled in medical school in Edinburgh eager to open a practice and support his struggling family. But one of his instructors, a man with a super-human ability to size-up people, changed his life. Meet Joseph Bell, the real-life doctor who inspired a character that transformed detective fiction.
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J.D. Salinger, the celebrated author of The Catcher in the Rye, jealously guarded his privacy and became a caricature of the literary recluse. A decade after his death, an exhibit of his manuscripts, letters, and personal effects at the New York Public Library is pulling back the curtain on this most private of private lives.
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Bessie Louise Pierce, who published a history of Chicago in the 1930s, lamented that it was “preeminently a man’s city” in its early years, dominated by business tycoons and real estate speculators. InThe World of Juliette Kinzie, Chicago author Ann Durkin Keating challenges this narrative, shifting the spotlight from the exploits of a few prominent men to the lesser-known accomplishments of a remarkable woman. Kinzie died in 1870, a year before the Great Fire swept away much of Chicago she had known and had helped to build, making her life a perfect vehicle for exploring the city’s birth and early development.
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It’s no stretch to say he invented the modern world. His incandescent lightbulb conquered darkness. His phonograph filled the air with recorded sound. He harnessed electricity in myriad ways that transformed industry and everyday life. As the nineteenth century waned and the twentieth dawned, the name Thomas Alva Edison symbolized invention, innovation, progress. Pulitzer Prize-winner Edmund Morris has produced an engrossing portrait of one of the world’s most important and influential figures.
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LIZZIE BORDEN’S SECRET, screamed a front-page headline in the Boston Daily Globe’s morning edition for Monday, October 10, 1892. The fourteen-column article that followed rolled out shocking new evidence about the axe murders of Borden’s parents in Fall River, Massachusetts, a crime that transfixed America that year.
There was, however, a problem with the blockbuster story. Hardly a word of it was true.
Welcome to a bizarre tale of fake news in the Gilded Age.
Published in Ellery Queen’s magazine.
Republished in CrimeReads.
In a time of rising intolerance toward minorities and immigrants, Flight of the Highlanders is a much-needed reality check. Ken McGoogan’s chronicle of how impoverished but tenacious Scots built new lives in Canada – and transformed their new country – is a reminder that all of us, regardless of origin or race, want the same things: A better life and a brighter future.
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It’s impossible to read Barnum: An American Life, Robert Wilson’s impressive biography of the infamous nineteenth-century showman, without detecting echoes – and perhaps some of the origins – of today’s political turmoil and voyeuristic popular culture. The bombast and hype, the careless disregard for the truth, the nauseating bravado and self-promotion that was Phineas Taylor Barnum – it all hits close to home in the age when a hate-filled tweet or bogus claim of “fake news” is enough to divert the attention of an already distracted public.
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