Isn’t this a lovely illustration? And an appropriately menacing one. It’s from the books page in the September issue of Vanity Fair, which graciously included BLOOD & INK in a roundup of four true crime titles out this fall. A bit of backstory on the three images in the collage that come from the Hall-Mills saga, starting with the barren tree: that’s the famous crabapple tree under which Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills’s bodies were found on September 16, 1922. The tree was full of life when the killings went down, but as murder tourists descended on the crime scene in the days and weeks to come, it became “denuded of its foliage and many of its branches, through the wantonness of souvenir seekers,” as one of my newspaper-reporter characters so eloquently puts it. You may recognize the center picture from the cover of the book. That’s Jim and Charlotte Mills in the fall of 1926, posing with a copy of Hearst’s New York Daily Mirror, which had just resurrected the case. And on the left, you’ll see Jim Mills praying over his dead wife’s grave when her body was exhumed for a much belated autopsy. You’ll learn more about all of this if you decide to read the book, but for now, enjoy the artwork.
IN OTHER NEWS… An exciting update from my pals George Rush and Joanna Molloy, via George’s Instagram:
That’s a promo poster for THE GREATEST BEER RUN EVER, adapted from the hit book of the same name that Joanna co-authored with John "Chick" Donohue, based on Donohue’s epic story of traveling to Vietnam in 1967 to deliver booze to his buddies fighting in the war. (Hollywood catnip.) The film premieres September 13 at the Toronto International Film Festival, ahead of its September 30 release in theaters and on Apple TV+. A trailer you ask? Here it is:
REVIEWS… Another take on AGENT JOSEPHINE by Damien Lewis—which I still haven’t started but it’s next on my list I swear—this one in the August 15 issue of The New Yorker: “His saga, though it stretches across five hundred pages, is mainly concerned with Baker’s service as a secret agent, and mainly confined to the years shadowed by the Second World War. There’s another sense, too, in which it isn’t her life story: the account is largely told by an assemblage of third parties. Lewis’s bibliography and notes make clear how deeply he has drawn on interviews with veterans, memoirs by agents, the private family archives of a British spymaster, and the wartime files of intelligence bureaus, some of which were not made available to the public until 2020. But Baker maintained a code of silence about the seven years she spent fighting the Nazis and, Lewis writes, ‘went to her grave in 1975 taking many of those secrets with her.’ ”
And in Air Mail, David Aaronovitch sizes up BERLIN by Sinclair McKay: “The disaster/resilience dichotomy is clear from the beginning, in 1918, as red revolutionaries and right-wing Freikorps have shooting battles in the streets, but blocks away the jewelers remain open and customers drink coffee in the teegarten. In the 1920s, hyper-inflation strikes, workers in their crumbling tenements face starvation and progressive politicians are assassinated. Yet Bauhaus produces wonderful designs, the city is full of illumination, cinemas are full to bursting and music and sex are everywhere. A very German nudity decorates the cabarets and the summer lakesides. Then comes Hitler.”
EXCERPTS… “The Stealth Swimmers Whose WWII Scouting Laid the Groundwork for the Navy SEALs,” Adapted from INTO ENEMY WATERS: A World War II Story of the Demolition Divers Who Became the Navy SEALs.” [Smithsonian] “The Incredible Story of the Iceberg That Sank the Titanic,” from SINKABLE: Obsession, the Deep Sea, and the Shipwreck of the Titanic. [Smithsonian]
EXTRAS… “Great Moon Hoax of 1835 convinced the world of extraterrestrial life” [WaPo/Retropolis] “Before Griner, a Russian prosecution put Theodore Roosevelt in a bind” [WaPo/Retropolis] And just for kicks here’s Bryan Ferry gabbing with Vulture about fifty years of Roxy Music.
Book launch is a little under a month away. 😬 Stay tuned for details on some fun BLOOD & INK events I’ve got lined up for the fall. In the meantime…