The Murder of the Century
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From the Reviews |
"[Collins’] exploration of the newspaper world, at the very moment when tabloid values were being born, is revealing but also enormously entertaining….Collins has a clear eye, a good sense of telling detail, and a fine narrative ability." --Wall Street Journal
“Riveting….Collins has mined enough newspaper clippings and other archives to artfully recreate the era, the crime and the newspaper wars it touched off.” --New York Times “Wonderfully rich in period detail, salacious facts about the case and infectious wonder at the chutzpah and inventiveness displayed by Pulitzer’s and Hearst’s minions. Both a gripping true-crime narrative and an astonishing portrait of fin de siecle yellow journalism.” --Kirkus Reviews "A dismembered corpse and rival newspapers squabbling for headlines fuel Collins’s intriguing look at the birth of “yellow journalism” in late–19th-century New York. an in-depth account of the exponential growth of lurid news and the public’s (continuing) insatiable appetite for it." --Publishers Weekly |
From the Author |
This is my most popular book, but I had to wait years to write it. I stumbled across this murder case in 2005, and was astounded to find that aside from some references in histories of Hearst and Pulitzer, it'd basically been forgotten. But I'd just landed my contract for The Book of William a week earlier, and as that book stretched into a bigger and bigger project, this one long remained tantalizingly out of reach.
Writing about crime is an immersive experience for a historian -- not only do you have courtroom testimony of people recalling what they were wearing, doing, and saying at any given moment, you also have the case itself being covered by packs of reporters. For some of the scenes in this book, there were basically a dozen people in the room taking note of the expression on someone's face, the quality of the light, even how they're fidgeting. It allows a novelistic level of detail that's very difficult to achieve in any other area of history. |