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Tony Miksak

WORDS ON BOOKS by Tony Miksak for KZYX&Z-FM, 90.7 Philo CA
Airs Sunday, October 21, 2007 at 10:55 am & Wednesday, Oct 24 at 1 pm

Title: The Devil Made Them Do It

(MUSIC UP) This is Tony Miksak with a few Words on Books.

I'm alone in my study as the Fall light fails, absorbing "The Devil's Gentleman" by crime researcher Harold Schechter. The story involves "Privilege, Poison, and The Trial That Ushered in the Twentieth Century" including but not limited to New York City, poison, love affairs, mistresses, all that lurid stuff we've come to know and perhaps not love.

It's time to take a break. I rip open a can of vegetarian chile and turn on the news. Deborah Kerr has died. Joey Bishop has succumbed. Benazhir Bhutto has been car bombed. Super Bug is killing high school students.

Yikes, it IS dark in here.

By the way, "The Devil's Gentleman" is a tremendous brick of a book, a great read, truly absorbing, heavily researched, full of color. It comes running at you in short sections in the style of classic thrillers. All night long the book knocks you on the head and drags you unprotesting into the next chapter, and the next.

Schechter specializes in this kind of thing. His previous books include "Fiend" "Bestial" "Deviant" "Deranged" "The Serial Killer Files" and "The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers" plus mysteries featuring Edgar Allan Poe. I wonder how well he sleeps.

He knows where the bodies, the arsenic, the yachts and the opium dens are buried and he certainly knows how to tell a story. If you don't read ahead (or peek at the author's Notes) you will be floored by the surprising final outcome.

The real-life characters here – suspected murderer Roland Molineux, his Civil War hero father, his wife Blanche, his wife's lover Henry Barnet (poisoned), Harry Cornish, athletic director of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club (also poisoned), lawyers, cops, witnesses – and many others – are vividly brought back to life and placed in the context of their times.

The times are the late 1890's, early heyday of tabloid journalism. Pulitzer's World competed with Hearst's Journal and both papers competed with the police to find and publish every bit of news, every rumor and every innuendo.

Once the papers got hold of the story it went on for years, front page news. As Schechter puts it, the papers' "recasting of the... case as a cheesy whodunit was a pioneering instance of a phenomenon that would define the coming century, when the boundary between news and entertainment became increasingly blurred."

Hearst ran "graphic stories" or comic strips illustrating the fate of "the first victim of the poisoner," and "not to be outdone, Pulitzer's paper presented a summary of the case in the form of a stage play... with the kind of cliff-hanging conclusion that, a few decades later, would become a staple of Saturday matinee movie serials."

And President McKinley was assassinated, and Hearst helped start the Spanish American War, but that's another story.

It's my duty as a reviewer to point out that no matter how heavily researched and annotated (the book runs to 89 chapters and hundreds of annotations) there are things here surely the author simply guessed.

How could he know that Molineux "extracting a big Havana from the inside pocket of his double-breasted coat... bit off one end and lit the other with a phosphorous match. But after only a few puffs, he plucked the cigar from his mouth and hurled it onto the stone floor.

"Then, seating himself on the edge of the bottom cot, he leaned forward, propped his elbows on his knees, and buried his face in his hands."

(MUSIC UP) I don't know how he could know that. But "The Devil's Gentleman" is a great read, anyway.

(MUSIC) As always, transcripts of Words on Books are available through the KZYX web site (and here: http://www.gallerybooks.com/bkm/index.html).

Notes:

"The Devil's Gentleman: Privilege, Poison, and the Trial That Ushered in the Twentieth Century" by Harold Schechter. Ballantine Books hardcover $27.95. ISBN 9780345476791.

Tony Miksak
Words on Books: http://www.gallerybooks.com/bkm/index.html
personal home page: http://amiksak.googlepages.com/home
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