Harold Schechter Books In Order

Edgar Allan Poe Books In Order

  1. Nevermore (1999)
  2. The Hum Bug (2001)
  3. The Mask of Red Death (2004)
  4. The Tell-Tale Corpse (2006)

Novels

  1. Outcry (1997)

Collections

Graphic Novels

  1. Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done? (2021)

Non fiction

  1. Film Tricks (1980)
  2. Patterns in Popular Culture (1980)
  3. The Manly Handbook (1982)
  4. Discoveries (1983)
  5. Not-The-A-Team Beauty Book (1984)
  6. Kidvid (1986)
  7. The Bosom Serpent (1988)
  8. American Voices (1988)
  9. Deviant (1989)
  10. Start Collecting Comic Books (1990)
  11. Deranged (1992)
  12. Depraved (1994)
  13. Original Sin (1997)
  14. A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (1997)
  15. The Manly Movie Guide (1997)
  16. Besti*al (1998)
  17. For Reel (2000)
  18. Fiend (2000)
  19. Panzram (2002)
  20. Fatal (2003)
  21. The Serial Killer Files (2003)
  22. The New Gods (2004)
  23. Savage Pastimes (2005)
  24. The Devil’s Gentleman (2007)
  25. The Whole Death Catalog (2009)
  26. Killer Colt (2010)
  27. Psycho USA (2012)
  28. The Mad Sculptor (2014)
  29. Beauty Slain in Bath (2015)
  30. Man-Eater (2015)
  31. Hell’s Princess (2018)
  32. The Brick Slayer (2018)
  33. Little Slaughterhouse on the Prairie (2018)
  34. Panic (2018)
  35. The Pied Piper (2018)
  36. The Pirate (2018)
  37. Rampage (2018)
  38. Ripped from the Headlines! (2020)
  39. Maniac (2021)

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Harold Schechter Books Overview

Nevermore

Historical fact and startling literary invention converge in this stunning novel by ‘America’s principal chronicler of its greatest psychopathic killers’ The Boston Book Review. Praised by Caleb Carr for his ‘brilliantly detailed and above all riveting’ true crime writing, Harold Schechter brings his expertise to a marvelous work of fiction in the tradition of Carr’s own The Alienist. Superbly rendering the 1830s Baltimore of Edgar Allan Poe, Schechter taps into the dark genius of that legendary author and follows a labyrinthine path into the heart of a most heinous crime. He is an aspiring writer, plagued by dreadful ruminations a man whose troubled nights are haunted by dreams of his angelic cousin Virginia. He is Edgar Allan Poe, a literary critic known for his uncompromising standards and scathing pen. His recently published attack on the autobiography of Colonel David Crockett, U.S. congressman and celebrated American hero, has brought the indignant frontiersman unexpected, uninvited to the chamber door of Poe’s private sanctum. Neither man is prepared for where this fateful meeting will take them: on a quest for a killer through the city’s highest and lowest streets and byways. In a modest boarding house, an elderly widow of sad circumstance has been found murdered by an unknown assailant. On the wall above her bed, scrawled in the victim’s blood, is a single, cryptic word. But the meaning of the chilling clue is merely one piece in a complex puzzle that ensnares the writer and the politician in a twisted and deadly game. For the ghastly crimes, each more bizarre than the last, have only just begun. Combining the phantasmagoric voice of Poe’s legendary tales with an historian’s exactness, Harold Schechter hovers between fact and fiction, horror and passion, destiny and doom, while conjuring historical detail with uncanny precision. Published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Poe’s death, Nevermore is both a tour de force of narrative suspense and a dazzling secret history of one of American literature’s unique and enduring figures.

The Hum Bug

A literary genius…
his realm of terror lies in the shadows of imagination. A brilliant killer…
his violence shatters the night streets and his knife’s blade shows no mercy. One will become a legend. And one will meet a dark and grievous end. THE HUMBUG Having proved his deductive brilliance solving Baltimore’s notorious ‘Nevermore Murders,’ Edgar Allan Poe turns his investigative eye to the streets of mid nineteenth century New York City. A young beauty with a shadowy past has been savagely murdered; her hideous wounds mirror a gruesome tableau in P.T. Barnum’s wax exhibit and it is in defense of his own innocence that America’s greatest showman has come to Poe for help. But neither the writer nor the huckster has anticipated the jagged maze that is the soul of a madman…
. Harold Schechter, whose historical fiction ‘keeps the finger of suspicion wandering until the very end’ The New York Times Book Review, adds a wry, pitch perfect, and suspense laced dimension to the fascinating life and times of the literary master of morbid, criminal motivation Edgar Allan Poe.

The Mask of Red Death

Suspense, intrigue, atmosphere, and vivid historical detail combine into a thrilling ride through nineteenth century New York City in The Mask of Red Death. Harold Schechter delivers both a wonderfully accurate portrait of a city in turmoil and an irresistibly appealing depiction of his amateur sleuth Edgar Allan Poe, mirroring the master’s writing style with wit and acumen. It is the sweltering summer of 1845, and the thriving metropolis has fallen victim to a creature of the most inhuman depravity. Found days apart, two girls have been brutally murdered, their throats slashed, viciously scalped, and most shocking of all missing their livers. Edgar Allan Poe, despite what the tenor of his own tales of terror might suggest about his constitution, is just as shaken and revolted by these horrendous crimes as the panic stricken public. Suspicion of the scalper s identity immediately swirls around the most famous redskin in New York, Chief Wolf Bear, one of the human attractions at P.T. Barnum s American Museum. Certain that Chief Wolf Bear is innocent, Poe has deduced that the city is concealing a cannibal somewhere in its teeming mas*ses, one with an ever growing appetite for human prey. Before he can investigate his theory further, Poe stumbles onto the scene of a third gruesome murder. Poe recently met William Wyatt when he agreed to look at a document for Wyatt to determine the authenticity of the purportedly famous handwriting on it. Now Poe finds Wyatt in a pool of blood, his scalp removed. How, Poe muses, are Wyatt and his document connected to the two slain girls?As frenzied emotions over the murders reach a fevered pitch, Kit Carson makes an appearance. The famous scout has been tracking the Liver Eater since the man killed his wife months ago. Together, Carson and Poe make an odd sleuthing team, but their combined wits are formidable. The trail they uncover reveals a dark secret more powerful than anything they could have imagined one that may reach the upper echelons of politics and privilege. From the Hardcover edition.

The Tell-Tale Corpse

Ever since childhood, Edgar Allan Poe has seen things that are not there, heard voices others cannot and felt utterly at home in the realm of human darkness. In Harold Schechter’s intriguing, suspenseful, and delightfully wicked mystery series, Poe makes the perfect hero to unravel cases of the murderous and the macabre. The Tell Tale Corpse begins as Poe pays a visit to his old friend P. T. Barnum, who implores the wordsmith to travel to Boston to secure for Poe s wife an urgent medical cure and to acquire some particularly garish crime scene evidence for Barnum s popular cabinet of curiosities, the so called American Museum. The crime in question is the recent butchery of a beautiful young shopgirl. Once in Boston, Poe makes an immediate deduction: The sensational murder is only one in a string of inexplicable killings the center of a single, shadowy pool of deceit and ghoulish depravity. Several deaths later, Poe finds himself leading a frantic investigation, with the assistance of a highly unusual girl named Louisa May Alcott, who has literary ambitions of her own and whose innocence belies her own fascination with the dark side. As his wife s health falters and a city panics, Poe pursues a strange circle of suspects. He must now see what others cannot: the invisible bonds that tie together seemingly unrelated cases and the truth that lies behind a serial murderer s ghastly disguise. From a cameo by the narcoleptic Henry David Thoreau to a charming portrait of the four Alcott sisters at home in Concord, The Tell Tale Corpse brings to life nineteenth century New York and Boston and a world of intellectuals, charlatans, discoverers, dupes, daguerreotypists, and amateur morticians. As Poe comes closer to unraveling the fiendish riddle, the poet must admit at last that he is up against a fellow genius a genius not of words but of death.

Outcry

Investigating a series of brutal murders, reporter Paul Novak stumbles into the legend of Ed Gein, the ”butcher of Plainfield, Wisconsin,” and follows local lore to the ramshackle home of a bizarre young man.’

Discoveries

Reflecting today’s growing emphasis on multiculturalism, the second edition of this remarkably successful anthology offers twelve additional contributions from the new generation of writers currently revitalizing the short story form, including Amy Tan, Bharati Mukherjee, R.K. Narayan, Stephen Milhauser, Ellen Gilchrist, and Patrick McGrath. Organized around the successive stages of humanity’s most durable myth, the hero’s quest narrative pattern delineated by renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell, this edition offers a summary and explication of Campbell’s analysis of the quest motif, a new biographical introduction to Campbell’s life and work, and a section of concise biographical entries on each of the fifty authors. As in the earlier edition, the quality and quantity of the selections give instructors the freedom to present the stories in whatever order and structure they choose. For those who wish to take advantage of the anthology’s thematic organization, the editors provide questions for discussion and possible writing assignments that do not sacrifice the comprehensive diversity of the selections or their identity as distinctive works of literature open to various interpretations. A highly accessible introduction to the technical aspects of the close analysis of fiction, this text also offers a number of special features: two supplementary tables of contents, one organized by alternate themes, and one by the traditional elements of fiction; an introductory essay defining those technical elements and including a sample analysis of one the stories in the anthology; and a glossary of critical terms.

The Bosom Serpent

In our high tech, consumerist culture, traditional folklore has found itself revived in an eclectic mix of popular works from B movies, TV shows, and superhero comics to pulp novels and supermarket tabloids. With a strong emphasis on narrative and very little reliance on aesthetics, these forms of popular entertainment have often defied analysis. The Bosom Serpent fills this gap by revealing the pervasive similarities between traditional folklore motifs and our contemporary forms of amuseme*nt. By examining a variety of works and genres from classic fairy tales to supermarket tabloids, The Bosom Serpent demonstrates that today’s popular art is no more or less than the sort of unpretentious narrative entertainment human beings have always craved tall tales dressed up to fit the concerns of the time.

Deviant

Known for meticulously researched and brilliantly detailed accounts of horrific true crime legends, Harold Schechter takes readers inside the very heart and mind of true evil. Here is the grisly truth of Ed Gein, the killer whose fiendish fantasies inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ the mild mannered farmhand bound to his dominating mother, driven into a series of gruesome and bizarre acts beyond all imagining. In chilling detail, Deviant explores the incredible career of one of the most twisted madmen in the annals of crime and how he turned a small Wisconsin farmhouse into his own private playground of ghoulishness and blood.

Deranged

LURED FROM THE SAFETY OF HOME INTO THE JAWS OF HELL ‘America’s principal chronicler of its greatest psychopathic killers’ The Boston Book Review, Harold Schechter shatters the myth that violent crime is a modern phenomenon with this seamless true account of unvarnished horror from the early twentieth century. Journey inside the demented mind of Albert Fish pedophile, sad*ist, and cannibal killer and discover that bloodlust knows no time or place…
. On a warm spring day in 1928, a kindly, white haired man appeared at the Budd family home in New York City, and soon persuaded Mr. and Mrs. Budd to let him take their adorable little girl, Grace, on an outing. The Budds never guessed that they had entrusted their child to a monster. After a relentless six year search and nationwide press coverage, the mystery of Grace Budd’s disappearance was solved and a crime of unparalleled gore and revulsion was revealed to a stunned American public. What Albert Fish did to Grace Budd, and perhaps fifteen other young children, caused experts to pronounce him the most Deranged human being they had ever seen.

Depraved

The heinous bloodlust of Dr. H.H. Holmes is notorious but only Harold Schechter’s Depraved tells the complete story of the killer whose evil acts of torture and murder flourished within miles of the Chicago World’s Fair. ‘Destined to be a true crime classic’ Flint Journal, MI, this authoritative account chronicles the methods and madness of a monster who slipped easily into a bright, affluent Midwestern suburb, where no one suspected the dapper, charming Holmes who alternately posed as doctor, druggist, and inventor to snare his prey was the architect of a labyrinthine ‘Castle of Horrors.’ Holmes admitted to twenty seven murders by the time his madhouse of trapdoors, asphyxiation devices, body chutes, and acid vats was exposed. The seminal profile of a homegrown madman in the era of Jack the Ripper, Depraved is also a mesmerizing tale of true detection long before the age of technological wizardry.

Original Sin

Art. Artist Joe Coleman’s Original Sin contains visually stimulating and radically graphic nightmarish images. Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, historian Harold Schechter and art critic/poet John Yau contribute essays to this extremely dark ‘coffin table’ book. Joe’s work is often compared to illuminated manuscripts because of the great detail contained within each piece. His acrylic paintings depict acts of violence, some of which even include gory details of various body parts. Both sexual and revolting, the book contains material that may not be suitable for everyone.

A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers

Bestselling true crime writer Harold Schechter, a leading authority on serial killers, and coauthor David Everitt offer a guided tour through the bizarre and blood chilling world of serial murder. Through hundreds of detailed entries that span the entire spectrum the shocking crimes, the infamous perpetrators, and much more they examine all angles of a gruesome cultural phenomenon that grips our imagination. From Art both by and about serial killers to Zeitgeist how killers past and present embody their times…
from Groupies even the most sad*istic killer can claim devoted fans to Marriage the perfect domestic disguise for demented killers…
from Homebodies psychos who slay in the comfort of their homes to Plumbing how clogged drains have undone the most discreet killer, THE A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers is the ultimate reference for anyone compelled by the personalities and pathologies behind the most disturbing of crimes.

Besti*al

FROM SOCIAL OUTCAST TO NECROPHILE AND MURDERER HIS APPALLING CRIMES STUNNED AN ERA. San Francisco, the 1920s. In an age when nightmares were relegated to the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and distant tales of the Whitechapel murders, a real life monster terrorized America. His acts of butchery have proved him one of history’s fiercest madmen. As an infant, Earle Leonard Nelson possessed the power to unsettle his elders. As a child he was unnaturally obsessed with the Bible; before he reached puberty, he had an insatiable, aberrant sex drive. By his teens, even Earle’s own family had reason to fear him. But no one in the bone chilling winter of 1926 could have predicted that his degeneracy would erupt in a sixteen month frenzy of savage rape, barbaric murder, and unimaginable defilement deeds that would become the hallmarks of one of the most notorious fiends of the twentieth century, whose blood lust would not be equaled until the likes of Henry Lee Lucas, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer. Drawing on the ‘gruesome, awesome, compelling reporting’ Ann Rule that is his trademark, Harold Schechter takes a dark journey into the mind of an unrepentant sad*ist and brilliantly lays bare the myth of innocence that shrouded a bygone era.

Fiend

A MONSTER PREYED UPON THE CHILDREN OF NINETEENTH CENTURY BOSTON. HIS CRIMES WERE APPALLING AND YET HE WAS LITTLE MORE THAN A CHILD HIMSELF. When fourteen year old Jesse Pomeroy was arrested in 1874, a nightmarish reign of terror over an unsuspecting city came to an end. ‘The Boston Boy Fiend‘ was imprisoned at last. But the complex questions sparked by his ghastly crime spree the hows and whys of vicious juvenile crime were as relevant in the so called Age of Innocence as they are today. Jesse Pomeroy was outwardly repellent in appearance, with a gruesome ‘dead’ eye; inside, he was deformed beyond imagining. A sexual sad*ist of disturbing precocity, he satisfied his atrocious appetites by abducting and torturing his child victims. But soon, the teenager’s bloodlust gave way to another obsession: murder. Harold Schechter, whose true crime masterpieces are ‘well documented nightmares for anyone who dares to look’ Peoria Journal Star, brings his acclaimed mix of page turning storytelling, brilliant insight, and fascinating historical documentation to Fiend an unforgettable account from the annals of American crime.

Panzram

A detailed memoir and self analysis by a mass murderer. Panzram was born in 1891 on a Minnesota farm and died in 1930 on the gallows at the U.S. Penitentiary, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Imprisoned for most of his life from the age of twelve and brutally punished, Panzram‘s keen insight into the arbitrary cruelty of his fellow human being is graphically illustrated with a litany of prison abuses, as well as the details of his own sordid, tragic life. Panzram arrives as a gripping warning from America’s past to new prison industrial complex era. The authors add an historical and sociological framework for Panzram‘s words.

Fatal

In an era that produced some of the most vicious female sociopaths in American history, Jane Toppan would become the most notorious of them all. AN ANGEL OF MERCY In 1891, Jane Toppan, a proper New England matron, embarked on a profession as a private duty nurse. Selfless and good natured, she beguiled Boston’s most prominent families. They had no idea what they were welcoming into their homes…
. A DEVIL IN DISGUISE No one knew of Jane’s past: of her mother’s tragic death, of her brutal upbringing in an adoptive home, of her father’s insanity, or of her own suicide attempts. No one could have guessed that during her tenure at a Massachusetts hospital the amiable ‘Jolly Jane’ was morbidly obsessed with autopsies, or that she conducted her own after hours experiments on patients, deriving sexual satisfaction in their slow, agonizing deaths from poison. Self schooled in the art of murder, Jane Toppan was just beginning her career and she would indulge in her true calling victim by victim to become the most prolific domestic fiend of the nineteenth century.

The Serial Killer Files

THE DEFINITIVE DOSSIER ON HISTORY S MOST HEINOUS!Hollywood’s make believe maniacs like Jason, Freddy, and Hannibal Lecter can t hold a candle to real life monsters like John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and scores of others who have terrorized, tortured, and terminated their way across civilization throughout the ages. Now, from the much acclaimed author of Deviant, Deranged, and Depraved, comes the ultimate resource on the serial killer phenomenon. Rigorously researched and packed with the most terrifying, up to date information, this innovative and highly compelling compendium covers every aspect of multiple murderers from psychology to cinema, fetishism to fan clubs, trophies to trading cards. Discover:WHO THEY ARE: Those featured include Ed Gein, the homicidal mama s boy who inspired fiction s most famous Psycho, Norman Bates; Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi, sex crazed killer cousins better known as the Hillside Stranglers; and the Beanes, a fifteenth century cave dwelling clan with an insatiable appetite for human fleshHOW THEY KILL: They shoot, stab, and strangle. Butcher, bludgeon, and burn. Drown, dismember, and devour…
and other methods of massacre too many and monstrous to mention here. WHY THEY DO IT: For pleasure and for profit. For celebrity and for companionship. For the devil and for dinner. For the thrill of it, for the hell of it, and because such men are monsters, who live…
beyond the frontiers of madness. PLUS: in depth case studies, classic killers nicknames, definitions of every kind of deviance and derangement, and much, much more. For more than one hundred profiles of lethal loners and killer couples, Bluebeards and black widows, cannibals and copycats this is an indispensable, spine tingling, eye popping investigation into the dark hearts and mad minds of that twisted breed of human whose crimes are the most frightening…
and fascinating.

The New Gods

Harold Schechter looks at the impossible tales and images of popular art the space odysseys and extraterrestrial civilizations, the caped crusaders and men of steel, and monsters from the ocean floor and finds close connections between religious myth and popular entertainment.

Savage Pastimes

Does violence in movies, on television and in comic strips and cartoons rot our children’s brains and make zombies or worse, criminals of adults at the fringes? In this cogent, well researched book, American pop culture expert Harold Schechter argues that exactly the opposite is true: a basic human need is given an outlet through violent images in popular media.

Moving from an exploration of early broadsheet engravings showing torture and the atrocities of war, to the depictions of crime in ‘penny dreadfuls,’ to scenes of violence in today’s movies and video games, Schechter not only traces the history of disturbing images but details the outrage that has inevitably accompanied them. By the twentieth century, the culture vultures were out in full force, demonizing comic books and setting up a pattern of equating testosterone fueled entertainment with aggression. According to Schechter, nothing could be further from the truth. He also blasts those who bemoan the alleged increased violence in media today, and who conveniently scapegoat popular entertainment for a variety of cultural ills, including increased crime and real life violence. Though American pop culture is far more technologically sophisticated today, Schechter shows that it is far less brutal than the entertainments of previous generations.

Savage Pastimes is a rich, eye opening brief history that will make you rethink your assumptions about what we watch and how it affects us all.

The Devil’s Gentleman

From renowned true crime historian Harold Schechter, whom The Boston Book Review hails as America’s principal chronicler of its greatest psychopathic killers, comes the riveting exploration of a notorious, sensational New York City murder in the 1890s, the fascinating forensic science of an earlier age, and the explosively dramatic trial that became a tabloid sensation at the turn of the century.

Death was by poison and came in the mail: A package of Bromo Seltzer had been anonymously sent to Harry Cornish, the popular athletic director of Manhattan s elite Knickerbocker Athletic Club. Cornish barely survived swallowing a small dose; his cousin Mrs. Katherine Adams died in agony after ingesting the toxic brew. Scandal sheets owned by Hearst and Pulitzer eagerly jumped on this story of fatal high society intrigue, speculating that the devious killer was a chemist, a woman, or an effeminate man. Forensic studies suggested cyanide as the cause of death; handwriting on the deadly package and the vestige of a label glued to the bottle pointed to a handsome, athletic society scamp, Roland Molineux.

The wayward son of a revered Civil War general, Molineux had clashed bitterly with Cornish before. He had even furiously denounced Cornish when penning his resignation from the Knickerbocker Club, a letter that later proved a major clue. Bon vivant Molineux had recently wed the sensuous Blanche Chesebrough, an opera singer whose former lover, Henry Barnet, had also recently died…
after taking medicine sent to him through the mail. Molineux s subsequent indictment for murder led to two explosive trials, a sex infused scandal that shocked the nation, and a lurid print media circus that ended in madness and a proud family s disgrace.
In bold, brilliant strokes, Schechter captures all the colors of the tumultuous legal case, gathering his own evidence and tackling subjects no one dared address at the time all in hopes of answering the tantalizing question: What powerfully dark motives could drive the wealthy scion of an eminent New York family to foul murder?

Schechter vividly portrays the case s fascinating cast of characters, including Julian Hawthorne, son of Nathaniel Hawthorne, a prolific yellow journalist who covered the story, and proud General Edward Leslie Molineux, whose son s ignoble deeds besmirched a dignified national hero s final years. All the while Schechter brings alive Manhattan s Gilded Age: a gaslit world of elegant town houses and hidden bordellos, chic restaurants and shabby opium dens, a city peopled by men and women fighting and losing the battle against urges an upright era had ordered suppressed.

Superbly researched and powerfully written, The Devil s Gentleman is an insightful, gripping work, a true crime historian s crowning achievement.

The Whole Death Catalog

In the tradition of Mary Roach’s bestselling Stiff and Jessica Mitford s classic expos The American Way of Death comes this meticulously researched, refreshingly irreverent, and lavishly illustrated look at death from acclaimed author Harold Schechter. With his trademark fearlessness and bracing sense of humor, Schechter digs deep into a wealth of sources to unearth a treasure trove of surprising facts, amusing anecdotes, practical information, and timeless wisdom about that undiscovered country to which we will all one day travel. Topics include Death anxiety is your fear of death normal or off the scale? You can t take it with you…
or can you? Wacky wills and bizarre bequests The hospice experience going out in comfort and style Deathbed and funeral etiquette how to help the dying and mourn the dead with dignity Death on demand why the right to die movement may be the next big thing Good bye everybody famous last words The embalmer s art all dressed up and nowhere to go Behind the scenes at your local funeral home Alternative burial choices from coral reefs to outer spaceFrom the cold, hard facts of death to lessons in the art of dying well, from what happens in the body s last living moments to what transpires in the ground or in the furnace, from near death experiences to speculation on the afterlife, The Whole Death Catalog leaves no gravestone unturned.

Killer Colt

With such acclaimed works as The Devil’s Gentleman, Harold Schechter has earned renown as the dean of true crime historians. Now, in this gripping account of driving ambition, doomed love, and brutal murder in an iconic American family, Schechter again casts his gaze into the sinister shadows of gaslit nineteenth century New York City. In September 1841, a grisly discovery is made aboard a merchant ship docked in lower Manhattan: Deep in the cargo hold, bound with rope and covered with savage head wounds, lies a man s naked corpse. While a murderer has taken pains to conceal his victim s identity, it takes little time to determine that the dead man is Samuel Adams, proprietor of a local printing firm. And in less time still, witnesses and a bloody trail of clues lead investigators to the doorstep of the enigmatic John Colt. The scion of a prosperous Connecticut family, Colt has defied his parents efforts to mold him into a gentleman preferring to flout authority and pursue excitement. Ironically, it is the ordered science of accountancy that for a time lends him respectability. But now John Colt s ghastly crime and the subsequent sensational murder trial bring infamy to his surname even after it becomes synonymous with his visionary younger brother s groundbreaking invention. The embodiment of American success, Sam Colt has risen from poor huckster to industrious inventor. His greatest achievement, the revolver, will bring him untold millions even as it transforms the American West. In John s hour of need, Sam rushes to his brother s side perhaps because of the secret they share. In Gilded Age New York, a city awash with treacherous schemers, lurid dime museum curiosities, and the tawdry excesses of penny press journalism, the Colt Adams affair inspires tabloid headlines of startling and gruesome hyperbole, which in turn drive legions of thrill seekers to John Colt s trial. The dramatic legal proceedings will fire the imagination of pioneering crime writer Edgar Allan Poe and fuel the righteous outrage of journalist Walt Whitman. Killer Colt interweaves the intriguing stories of brooding, brilliant John and imaginative, enterprising Sam sharp witted and fascinating brothers on vastly divergent journeys, bound by an abiding mutual devotion and a mystery they will conceal to the end. Harold Schechter has mined the darkly macabre vein of a bygone era and brought forth a mother lode of storytelling gold.

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