“Every once in a while a murder is committed that unites in one news story all the sleeping romantic fancies of human nature …. It has love (and illicit love – which is always more fascinating), riches, social prestige, an underworld motif, intrigue and violence.” - Time magazine
Bridge expert Joseph Bowne Elwell in Palm Beach, shortly before he was murdered in June 1920. The New York Times called him “a man of many masks.”
(Banner image above: Sherman Square, near Elwell’s Upper West Side home, in the 1920s.)
This real-life whodunit – told in lavish detail and filled with intriguing characters and wealthy, socially prominent suspects – immerses readers in the high-society glamor of 1920s Manhattan and Palm Beach and answers a century-old question:
Who killed Joe Elwell?
He was the world’s leading expert on the game of bridge, the leisure pursuit of choice for Jazz Age America’s “fashionable society and its emulators.” Joseph Bowne Elwell’s skill as a player and teacher made him a bestselling author – Elwell on Bridge was the bible of the challenging game – and catapulted him into the social swirl of New York, Newport, and Palm Beach. And it made him rich: he tutored and befriended millionaires and celebrities, picked up stock tips from Wall Street insiders at the card table, and made a killing by gambling on high-stakes matches. He lived in a townhouse on the Upper West Side and owned a yacht, cottages in Southampton and Saratoga Springs, and seaside property in Florida. He bought a Kentucky stable to indulge his passion for racing and betting on thoroughbreds. His face was as familiar to patrons of Manhattan’s theatres and nightclubs as it was on the links of his Westchester County country club, in the salons of Newport’s opulent mansions, trackside at Long Island’s Belmont Park, and at Palm Beach’s exclusive resorts. And he was a notorious philanderer, estranged from his wife and linked to a succession of women – heiresses, chorus girls, waitresses, the daughters of rich friends, the socialites he tutored at cards.
On a June morning in 1920, as the forty-seven-year-old sorted through his mail in the reception room of his Manhattan home, someone stood in front of his chair, aimed a .45-caliber pistol at the center of his forehead, and pulled the trigger.
Elwell’s murder remains one of history’s great unsolved crimes, an enduring mystery that reveals how power, corruption, scandal, and privilege defined and shaped an era of loosening morals and jarring social change. Lurid accounts of the crime filled the front pages of newspapers across America as detectives and crime reporters pursued theories and possible motives. Among the suspects were prominent businessmen, socialites, former lovers (along with their jilted boyfriends and husbands), underworld figures, gamblers, and racetrack rivals.
“The great detective-story murder of our times” – Vanity Fair
“The perfect mystery” – The New York Times
MURDER IN THE CARDS tells the incredible true story of a sensational cold case that captures the “anything goes” recklessness of the sin- and gin-soaked Jazz Age. At its heart is an accomplished but flawed victim who gate-crashed New York society and lived a charmed life at full throttle. It’s a story that will transport readers from the sun-drenched resorts of Palm Beach and the racetracks of Kentucky to New York’s rarefied social circles, Manhattan’s frenzied newsrooms, and Broadway’s dazzling nightlife. It recreates a murder probe that turns a spotlight on the forensic techniques, investigative challenges, and press sensationalism of the time. There are enough suspects to fill the drawing room of an English country house, and more than enough motives and theories to tax Sherlock Holmes’s icy logic and Hercule Poirot’s little gray cells.
Socialite Viola Kraus and Long Island millionaire William Pendleton, who were questioned as suspects; Manhattan District Attorney Edward Swann; New York City’s chief medical examiner Dr. Charles Norris.
S.S. Van Dine with actor William Powell, who played the suave and clever amateur sleuth Philo Vance in the movies.
For author and journalist Willard Huntington Wright, the case and its enigmatic victim were an inspiration. He devised a colorful amateur detective who could succeed where police and prosecutors had failed – and launched the golden age of American detective fiction. Philo Vance was the perfect detective for the over-the-top Jazz Age – an erudite, know-it-all dandy, with a table waiting at Manhattan’s most exclusive clubs and restaurants and a razor-sharp mind for solving mysteries. Writing under the pseudonym S.S. Van Dine, Wright published The Benson Murder Case in 1926. The tale of a wealthy New Yorker with a playboy lifestyle who is shot to death in his study, the book’s plot parallels Elwell’s murder with one exception: Wright’s super-sleuth upstages the bumbling police and prosecutors and unmasks the murderer. The novel was the first instalment in a series of a dozen novels featuring Vance that were turned into Hollywood blockbusters and made Wright one of the most successful crime writers of the era. The authors behind the Ellery Queen and Hardy Boys franchises were among a new generation of crime and mystery writers who sought to emulate Wright’s success.
MURDER IN THE CARDS recreates Elwell’s life and death and explores what his case reveals about high society and privilege, justice and crime detection, and journalism and sensationalism in 1920s America. It traces the transformation of an infamous crime into a landmark work of fiction. And it weighs the evidence, assesses suspects and motives, and offers the most plausible explanation of who killed Joe Elwell and why.
My next true crime Book for Algonquin Books (An imprint of Little, Brown And Company) and HarperCollins Canada
Coming in 2027
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The Manhattan skyline in 1920. (All images from the author’s collection)