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 town’s unofficial motto was “We Bathe the World.” But to the residents of Hot Springs, it had bragging rights as the wildest “sin city” on the planet. In The Vapors, author David Hill tells the all-but-forgotten story of how the Arkansas resort became one of America’s early playgrounds for the rich and famous – and for millions of others who wanted to hobnob with the one percent.
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With battalions of biographies and historical studies of Winston Churchill already in the field, British historian Richard Toye has opted for a fresh take and zeros in on one aspect of his life and career – how he made and shaped the news. “As an instinctive showman, and one of the first politicians to be a true global celebrity, he exploited the media … to spectacular effect,” Toye notes in this meticulously researched and engaging study of a life lived in the public eye.
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A century ago this month, Charles Ponzi’s get-rich-quick scam collapsed in Boston, wiping out millions of dollars collected from eager investors. He was not the first con artist to use the rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul swindle. But his audacious fraud gave it a new name.
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In 1914, in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, the King’s representative and a corrupt politician were locked in a constitutional crisis. Lieutenant Governor Josiah Wood was adamant that James Kidd Flemming must resign; the province’s premier, however, refused to budge. Who would win this showdown between the Crown and the executive?
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Twenty-seven people who died in November 1929 when a 7.2-magnitude undersea earthquake unleashed towering tsunamis on the isolated Burin Peninsula, shattering houses and fishing gear and wiping out livelihoods. It was the first of two disasters to befall the hardscrabble region. The other was human-made – mines established in the community of St. Lawrence to extract the mineral fluorspar, which offered jobs and hope to unemployed fishermen. Radiation and dust slowly killed hundreds of them. “It started with an earthquake,” acclaimed author Linden MacIntyre writes of this twin disaster. “It ended with a plague.”
Follow this link to the Canada’s History magazine website
When Madeline Sturla shot Charley Stiles to death in Chicago’s Palmer House Hotel in 1882, it looked like an open-and-shut case. But in a Gilded Age #MeToo moment, her abusive lover would also be on trial. And so would the city’s shameful tolerance for gambling and prostitution—the vices that ultimately led her to confront Stiles with a loaded gun.
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John Ruff’s death in 1842 on an island off the Nova Scotia coast was ruled an accident – until his eleven-year-old son accused his older brothers of murder. But Benjamin Ruff had other stories to tell, of seeing the devil lurking on their remote farm. The strange-but-true story of a murder trial that hinged on a child’s claims of satanic visitations.
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When U.S. Coast Guard cutters shelled and sank the booze-laden Canadian schooner I’m Alone in the Gulf of Mexico in March 1929, one of its crewmen perished. Meet Captain Jack Randell, the scrappy smuggler whose rumrunning exploits turned deadly – and sparked an international incident.
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The deportation, more than 250 years ago, of French-speaking Acadian settlers from present-day Eastern Canada was a humanitarian disaster, with thousands dying in shipwrecks or succumbing to hunger and disease. The descendants of those who survived would re-establish Acadian communities in eastern Canada and find a new home in Louisiana and eastern Texas, where they established today’s vibrant Cajun culture.
Nova Scotia author and journalist Tyler LeBlanc learned about the expulsions of the 1750s in school, but he never suspected his own family had been caught up in this dark episode of history. His rediscovery of his Acadian roots culminated in his first book, Acadian Driftwood: One Family and the Great Expulsion (Goose Lane Editions). It’s a story of loss and survival that vividly recreates the horrors of the expulsion and meticulously traces the life-and-death struggles of his ancestors.
Read my interview with Tyler in the Southern Review of Books.
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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