The Murder of the Century

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What to expect

In Long Island, a farmer found a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discovered a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumbled upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime were turning up all over New York, but the police were baffled: there were no witnesses, no motives, no suspects. The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era’s most perplexing murder. Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the case became a publicity circus. Re-creations of the murder were staged in Times Square, armed reporters lurked in the streets of Hell’s Kitchen in pursuit of suspects, and an unlikely trio—an anxious cop, a cub reporter, and an eccentric professor—all raced to solve the crime. What emerged was a sensational love triangle and an even more sensational trial: an unprecedented capital case hinging on circumstantial evidence around a victim that the police couldn’t identify with certainty, and that the defense claimed wasn’t even dead.

The Murder of the Century is a rollicking tale—a rich evocation of America during the Gilded Age and a colorful re-creation of the tabloid wars that have dominated media to this day.

Critics Review

  • “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

  • “[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

  • “[A] richly detailed book that reads like a
    novel and yet maintains a strict fidelity to facts. The Murder of the Century isn’t a case of history with a moral. It’s
    simply a fantastic factual yarn, and a reminder that abhorrent violence is
    nothing new under the sun.”

    Oregonian (Portland, OR)

  • “An in-depth account of the exponential growth
    of lurid news and the public’s (continuing) insatiable appetite for it.”

    Publishers Weekly

  • “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 siècle yellow journalism.”

    Kirkus Reviews

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