Fact Meets Fiction in Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ – CrimeReads / Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
George Stebbins was tearing down a stone wall in the cellar of his home in Northfield, Massachusetts when he uncovered the bones. A skull emerged first, then the spine and the bones of the arms and legs. Did newspaper reports of his discovery in 1842 inspire Edgar Allan Poe’s classic story of depravity, guilt, and a vengeful black cat?
Click here to read more
Murder on Twenty-third Street – Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
New York’s famous nineteenth-century chief of detectives, Thomas Byrnes, called it the city’s “most celebrated, and certainly the most mysterious, murder.” When wealthy businessman Benjamin Nathan was beaten to death in his home in the summer of 1870, there was no shortage of theories, rumors or suspects.
Click here to read more
A Killer Couple: A Review of Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid – Washington Independent Review of Books
Margaret and Richard Whittemore may lack the name recognition of Bonnie and Clyde, but they were to the Roaring Twenties what their notorious successors were to the Depression Era – a dangerous, headline-grabbing outlaw couple. Author Glenn Stout tells their story in Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid, a deep dive into a shadowy world of crooks, ex-cons, and big-time heists that has a lot to say about crime, punishment, and celebrity culture a century ago.
Click here to read the review
The Accidental Spy - Inside History magazine
Henri Le Caron infiltrated the Fenian Brotherhood, the 19th-century Irish-American extremist group that invaded Canada and detonated bombs in British cities. When Irish independence leader Charles Stewart Parnell tried to distance himself from the campaign of violence, the spy decided it was time to come in from the cold.
Click here to order Inside History magazine and read the full article
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Reluctant Author – Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
By 1891, after publishing two novels and a series of short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle was ready to move on. He wanted to be known as a writer of great literature, not sensational mystery stories. “I think of slaying Holmes … and winding him up for good,” he confided to his mother in mid-November. “He takes my mind from better things.” How the Great Detective outwitted his most formidable adversary – his creator.
Click here to read the story
How a Simple Wooden Container Changed the World: Book review – The Scotsman (Edinburgh)
A simple wooden container – shaped like a gabled house, with a glass-paneled latticed roof – made it possible to ship exotic plants between continents and “for good or ill,” author Luke Keogh writes, “helped to transform the world we live in today.” My review of Keogh’s The Wardian Case.
Click here to read the review
Royal Terror: The Untold Story of the 1883 Fenian Plot to Kill the Future King, George V – Inside History magazine
Detective Nicholas Power was investigating a burglary in the fall of 1883 when he dropped by a hotel in the Canadian port city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and learned of two suspicious American visitors who “slept late into the day and were out late at night.” Searching their room, he made a shocking discovery – suitcases packed with 100 pounds of dynamite and mechanisms for making a crude time bomb. If detonated, it was enough explosives to level the hotel and every other building on the block.
Fenian agents James Holmes and William Bracken had come to Halifax to sink HMS Canada, a British warship lying at anchor, killing as many of its crew as possible – including, they hoped, an eighteen-year-old midshipman. He was Prince George of Wales, Queen Victoria’s grandson, who would one day ascend to the throne as George V. For the first time, the terrorists behind a bloody bombing campaign to free Ireland from British rule had tried to assassinate a member of the Royal Family. The untold story of a foiled assassination attempt that could have changed the course of history.
Click here to order Inside History magazine and read the full article
The Crimes of the Mysterious Mr. Smith – CrimeReads
In the early 1800s Henry More Smith charmed, stole and burgled his way across the British North American colonies of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick before extending his operations into the United States. Thrown in jail, he escaped. Convicted, he cheated the hangman. The possibly true and all-but-forgotten story of a one-man crime wave.
Click here to read the full story
‘The squealer must die’: A Review of A Brotherhood Betrayed – Washington Independent Review of Books
Abe Reles was the ruthless leader of Murder Inc., a group of contract killers the Mob used to eliminate informers, witnesses, defiant gangsters within its ranks, and anyone else who threatened its operations. But on the eve of World War II, the hunter became the hunted. A Brotherhood Betrayed is the story of the bloody birth of organized crime in the United States and how the testimony of a single turncoat exposed the Mob’s operations and sent four gangland kingpins to the electric chair.
Click here to read the review