The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime that Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars by Paul Collins
I listened to this book on the recommendation of someone at Audible, who said I would like it on account of I liked THE POISONER’S HANDBOOK. I did like it, but I can’t say I liked it as much as THE POISONER’S HANDBOOK, or DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY, or the other books it’s said to resemble. True, it is a murder mystery set in New York city in the late 19th century (one of my favorite periods of history), but the ratio of murder to history seemed to lean too far towards “murder”.
The story is based on a true-life murder. Two packages were found, one in the woods (“out in the country” ie. the Bronx) and one in the river. The packets are found to contain parts of a human body. The police and the newspapers gathered their resources to discover the identity of the murdered man, and then of the murderers, in a case that riveted the nation.
Collins talks about the newspapers of the time, and the unique role they played in solving this mystery. This was back in the days when “investigative journalism” was a real thing. The newspapers fed off the murder’s titillation to drive sales, and in return, they provided more shoe-leather investigation work than the police did. I thought this was pretty cool, as it’s a piece of American history that we see referenced obliquely in movies, but not often directly addressed.
The whodunit was mostly solved halfway through the book, although it wasn’t until the end that the author speculated on what had really and truly happened on the night Guldensuppe was murdered. The author dwelt on the murderers’ lives and the details of the murder quite a bit. Fans of true crime will probably love this attention to detail. I got kind of tired of the grisly details.
I’d say that this book is about 35% mystery, 50% true crime, and 15% historical detail. If the proportions had been different, I would have liked it more. It was well written, and well researched.
