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.
From a constitutional blueprint to a more independent foreign policy, Canada has had a profound and surprising impact on Irish affairs. For more than a century, Canadian scholar Philip J. Currie writes in his ground-breaking study of relations between these interconnected Atlantic Rim neighbours, “Canada would be involved in, intrigued by, and frustrated with the politics of Ireland.”
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In Voyage of Mercy, American journalist-turned-historian Stephen Puleo uses USS Jamestown’s delivery of relief supplies to Cork in 1847 as a springboard to explore how America’s response to the Great Famine transformed attitudes and international relations. “This is a story about hope generosity, and soaring goodwill against a backdrop of nearly unfathomable despair,” he writes. “It was as though Americans looked at their own children and felt the pain of Irish parents who were watching their youngsters starve.”
In the May/June 2020 issue. Click here to visit the magazine’s website
In 1903, officials at Leavenworth Prison in Kansas scoffed at William West’s claim to be a first-time offender – his mugshot and body measurements were on file, and they matched. Then they inked his fingertips. How a pair of doppelgängers, an incredible coincidence, and a dash of myth-making helped to ensure fingerprinting would become the gold standard for identifying criminals.
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Casey is a well-researched biography of Frederick Walker “Casey” Baldwin, a partner and confidant of inventor Alexander Graham Bell and a man eulogized upon his death in 1948 as “a legendary figure” and “one of Nova Scotia’s most distinguished adopted sons.” Thanks to author John G. Langley, he now has the acclaim he deserves.
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Con artists, like actors and movie-makers, tell stories and create illusions. That’s why swindlers and their brazen schemes are the perfect fodder for the big screen. The characters are brash and larger than life,the tales are tall, the plots intricate and absorbing, and the audience is never sure who – if anyone – is telling the truth. From The Sting to The Good Liar, a round-up of ten of the best swindler flicks.
Read the full article on CrimeReads.com
He Had It Coming tells the stories of the real-life women who killed their boyfriends and inspired Chicago, a 1926 play destined to become a hit Broadway musical and an Oscar-winner for best picture. Lavishly illustrated with vintage images, it is also the story of how Maurine Watkins, a novice journalist who had been with the Chicago Tribune for only a few weeks when the first murder occurred, reinvented herself as a playwright and created a pop culture phenomenon.
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This is history up-close and personal – vivid, immersive and presented with real-time pacing and urgency. Readers tour the rubble of bombed-out cities alongside Churchill, attend tense cabinet meetings or have a seat at the dinner table as the great man holds court, his endless supply of stories and one-liners flowing in lockstep with the champagne and the brandy.
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“There is no statute of limitations for murder.” Those eight words, an offhand remark by a source to a junior reporter for a Mississippi newspaper, set Jerry Mitchell on a decades-long quest to see justice done in four of the most shocking and infamous murder cases of the civil rights era. Race Against Time is his spellbinding account of how his dogged reporting and relentless pursuit of the truth changed history.
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H.L. Mencken once described lying as “necessary and unavoidable.” Half-truths and harmless fibs tend to make life easier. Dutch writer Roelf Bolt was more interested in the whoppers – the big lies that separate fools from their money and the crackpot theories, miracle cures, hoaxes, and academic frauds that have deluded countless trusting souls. The Encyclopaedia of Liars and Deceivers, his eclectic collection of 150 stories of fakers, forgers, and con artists, is an overlooked true crime classic filled with enough cautionary tales to make anyone as cynical as Mencken.
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The Boston Massacre was a turning point in the march toward the War of Independence. Britain’s military might and colonists’ demands for liberty collided on Boston’s streets, with deadly results. In The Boston Massacre: A Family History, historian Serena Zabin takes a fresh look at this historic milestone by shifting the to the human story that lies beneath this tragic and momentous event, a “forgotten world … hidden in plain sight.” This is big-picture history told on a human scale.
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