Haunted mansion; creepy fall books power list
Greetings from a gloomy October Sunday. What better ambiance is there to curl up with a murder mystery of old? Hopefully some of you are doing just that with BLOOD & INK. Maybe you find yourself transported back to the positively gothic Hall mansion in New Brunswick, New Jersey, jointly inhabited by Edward and Frances Hall—as well as Frances’s oddball brother, Willie Stevens, and the family’s two maids—until the good reverend turned up dead in a field with his choir-singer lover, Eleanor Mills. The photo above is how the mansion looked at the time of the murders in the fall of 1922, prior to its de-Victorianized makeover in 1926, right before the Hall-Mills case came roaring back to life. I’ll take you on a little tour of the home further down. But first, now that the spooky season is upon us, here’s a list of new/recent historical non-fiction that should be on your dark autumn reading list…
AMERICAN DEMON: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America's Jack the Ripper, by Daniel Stashower.
I haven’t cracked open my copy yet, but I devoured Stashower’s THE BEAUTIFUL CIGAR GIRL after studying the Mary Rogers case in graduate school fifteen years ago. In his latest page-turner, according to Patton Oswalt’s New York Times review, Stashower unpacks the tale of “[a]n iconic police investigator on the hunt for a grisly murderer. Put that on a double bill. I’ll go make the popcorn. But, as Stashower’s exploration shows, the reality of this case is far more mundane and messy, and far more fascinating.”
ALL THAT IS WICKED: A Gilded-Age Story of Murder and the Race to Decode the Criminal Mind, by Kate Winkler Dawson
Hot off the presses this Tuesday! I blurbed it, so I’m just gonna let my words on the dust jacket speak for themselves: “Kate Winkler Dawson has produced yet another tour de force that will delight any reader enthralled by crimes of old. With literary flair and page-turning suspense, she paints a portrait of Gilded Age serial killer Edward Ruloff so vivid it will make your skin crawl. But ALL THAT IS WICKED is also a fascinating dissection of the mind, helping us understand how psychopaths can manipulate everyone from victims and journalists to scholars and shrinks."
THE CASE OF THE MURDEROUS DR. CREAM: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer, by Dean Jobb
The paperback of DR. CREAM has been on display at my local bookstore for the past couple of months. I plowed through the hardcover last year. (And I’m not just saying that because Dean gave BLOOD & INK a shining review in the Washington Independent Review of Books.) I’ll let his tweet from the other day do the talking: “Looking for a spooky #Halloween read, complete with a sinister, top-hatted villain? Check out my new book from @AlgonquinBooks & @HarperCollinsCa 'A #truecrime masterpiece that will easily sit alongside The Devil in the White City' —@PublishersWkly”
MURDER AT TEAL’S POND: Hazel Drew and the Mystery That Inspired Twin Peaks, by David Bushman and Mark T. Givens
Do you enjoy riveting murder mysteries from more than a hundred years ago? Are you a fan of David Lynch’s groundbreaking early ‘90s horror soap? Yes to both? This book is for you.
THE POISONOUS SOLICITOR, The True Story of a 1920s Murder Mystery, by Stephen Bates
Here’s another one sitting in the stack of unread hardcovers on my bedside table. But doesn’t this flap copy sound delicious? “On a bleak Tuesday morning in February 1921, 48-year-old Katharine Armstrong died in her bedroom on the first floor of an imposing Edwardian villa overlooking the rolling hills of the isolated borderlands between Wales and England. Within fifteen months … her husband … would be arrested, tried and hanged for poisoning her with arsenic. … With all the ingredients of a classic murder mystery, the case is a near-perfect whodunnit. But who, in fact, did it?”
THE HAUNTING OF ALMA FIELDING: A True Ghost Story, by Kate Summerscale
I’m just gonna shut up and let the book cover sell you, as it did for me when I snatched this one off the shelf earlier this year. And now, back to our tour of the historic Hall home…
This is an image from BLOOD & INK’s photo insert that my friend Brian Smith took back in May. That’s how it looks today, and pretty much how it would’ve looked in 1926, when the authorities re-opened their investigation into Frances and her brothers. The house is now a faculty residence for the dean of Rutgers University’s Douglass Residential College. One morning last October, she allowed me to spend some time inside, so I could experience the setting as the characters in my book would have. Here are the main sitting rooms:
The stairwell:
The conservatory:
And the main foyer:
If those walls could talk! That’s all for now. Happy reading. More soon…