Ode to Dusty Archives

Plus: 2003 Larson back on the List?

I don’t mean to lead with something super earnest, but my astute marketing manager at HarperCollins mentioned in passing that September is Library Card Sign-Up Month, so I’m going to tell you about the libraries that were essential to my research for BLOOD & INK. Stay with me—I swear it’s not as snoozy as it sounds.

Let’s start with the New Brunswick Free Public Library. I became a habitué of this 119-year-old building (see above)—funded by Andrew Carnegie—in the summer and fall of 2019, returning again and again to its charmingly cluttered basement archive to scan every last page of the library’s Hall-Mills Murder Case Collection, with an iPhone app that converts photos to PDFs. The collection consists of statements and depositions from 1922; transcripts of the 1922 grand jury proceedings; and statements and depositions from 1926—several thousand pages in all, with firsthand recollections and dialogue from dozens and dozens of witnesses, including my main characters. These documents miraculously surfaced in the winter of 2019, about six months after I started working on the book—can you believe it? There’s a delicious story about how this long-lost treasure ended up in the library’s possession, which you can read about in my source notes, but let’s just say it was nothing short of fate that the records materialized when they did. BLOOD & INK would not have made it without them. Seriously.

Also vital was Rutgers University’s Alexander Library (where a much younger me spent many evenings researching English literature papers as a Rutgers undergrad). The library’s Special Collections and University Archives was the first stop on my research journey, which began with a deep dive into the “Records relating to Hall-Mills murder case, 1922-1924.” In this trove, I devoured autopsy reports, detective correspondence, those steamy love notes from the murder victims, and much more. The archive’s Stevens Family Letters (where I found correspondence between widower Frances Stevens Hall’s illustrious colonial forefather and several of the Founding Fathers) and its Wallace Conover Files (which contain a former local newspaper editor’s records of the 1926 Hall-Mills trial) were icing on the cake. Plus it was a blast going back to my alma mater as a real grown-up.

Another afternoon was spent gathering documents in the West New York Public Library, where I held a baseball once owned by my audacious tabloid-editor character, Phil Payne, and gazed upon a wheel from a single-engine monoplane that Payne and William Randolph Hearst commissioned for their New York Daily Mirror’s infamous transatlantic stunt flight to Rome.

The Donnelley and Lee Library at Lake Forest College, home to the Joseph Medill Patterson Papers, supplied voluminous correspondence between Payne and Patterson, founder of the New York Daily News. The Bancroft Library at U.C. Berkeley, where the William Randolph Hearst Papers are stored, provided the same between Payne and Hearst, Patterson’s tabloid rival. Check out this decoded telegram in which Payne proposes a column by Mussolini:

Finally, there were a few real gems in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale, which delivered me the correspondence of pioneering tabloid scribe turned Hollywood socialite Bernardine Szold-Fritz, the star of one of the most outrageous scenes in the book, involving an ersatz seance designed to illicit a murder confession. I owe major thanks to several archivists who digitized files like these during a pandemic that precluded in-person research for more than a year. God’s work! You can help me thank them by signing up for a library card.

IN OTHER NEWS…

Here’s a snap of last Sunday’s New York Times Best Seller list. Did anyone else notice THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY in the No. 8 slot for nonfiction? I’m curious where the bump came from. If you have a clue, by all means drop it in the comments.

ELSEWHERE…

• “Life on the Orient Express” — “She is remembered as the incarnation of her most beloved character, the elderly, provincial Miss Marple. In reality, the adventurous, globe-trotting Agatha Christie was the opposite” [Air Mail]

• “The naughty novelist who invented the Hollywood sex scene: While her racy tales of bed-hopping aristocrats scandalised Edwardian Britain, Elinor Glyn's own erotic adventures made her the toast of the film industry as a new book reveals” [Daily Mail]

• “Before Lincoln Issued the Emancipation Proclamation, This Russian Czar Freed 20 Million Serfs” [Smithsonian]

• “What Happened to Anne Boyelyn’s Hearst?” [CrimeReads]

It’s the last summer weekend. Make it count with this yacht rock banger. See you on the other side.