Customer Reviews

Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Fans of Lesy's legendary first book Wisconsin Death Trip (1973) will be delighted to discover his latest. Lesy teaches at Hampshire College. He was planning to give his students an assignment, to look at the on-line photo archive of a Chicago newspaper.

Lesy decided that he had better check it out for himself first. He was stunned by what he found. Chicago in the 1920's had an astonishingly high murder rate. The Chicago newspapers of the time went by the editorial mantra that if it bleeds it leads. Lesy found lots of high profile murder cases splattered across the front pages. He decided that this would make a book.

Lesy labored in the decaying microfilm libraries and excavated the material for Murder City. You might think that these would be mostly gangland killings. They are not. There are a few but Lesy had plenty of others to include. A WWI vet kills his sister-in-law for a few bucks. Battered women shoot the men who abused them, etc.

Lesy's choice of photographs is as compelling as his terse and pithy prose. These are not gory scenes but they give us snapshots of the haunted eyes of killers.

Your blood will run cold. Stunning!

If you have any interest in the history of Chicago, the twenties, or just true crime, this is a really interesting book. The author chose several stories of Chicago murders that took place in the early twentieth century - including the tale of the women who inspired the musical "Chicago". There is a good assortment of stories - not just "mob murders' fow which Chicago in the twenties is known.

With reality TV being such a phenomenon these days, I was expecting a book like "Murder City" to come along. A book that takes literary snapshots of moments in the bloodier side of Chicago history. I'm not talking about the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the Dean O'Banion murder, or the killing of Assistant State's Attorney McSwiggin. I'm referring to the average Joes and Janes who lived, killed each other, and died without the same fanfare and media frenzy that accompanied the gangster assassinations of the same period. There are some underworld murders examined here, such as the Hymie Weiss hit, but they don't dominate the book. Each chapter is accompanied by photos of victims, crime scenes, or key players in the drama.

Themes that concern us today are found in these pages: abused women killing their attackers, fraternity hazing gone too far, men murdering the women they love as the ultimate act of control. As I read, I kept thinking, "The clothes change, but basic human nature does not."

I am really enjoying reading "Murder City"...some of the stories are familiar, as I heard of them from my dad and various aunts & uncles who grew up in Chicago in the 1920s. And some are new to me, but no less interesting, especially the one about the Northwestern University student who died during a hazing incident. If anything, reading this book has led me to believe that human beings never really change, that anger, lust, jealousy and more banal things, such as drunkenness, will lead inevitably to "crimes of passion."

In this oddly disturbing book, Michael Lesy conjures a whirlpool of human venality and doubt. Odd because, after all, the basic lawlessness of 1920's Chicago is well documented, at least in broad outlines. The gangland murders, at least, have been given a gauzy aura of unreality by this point, due to too many sentimental movies and sanitized documentaries. To paraphrase a quote from an old time G-Man, outraged at the Hollywood glamorization of Bonnie & Clyde after the 1967 Warren Beatty film: "I saw what they did to people. They were just f--ing animals." In this book, through a lapidary accretion of detail, devoid of the usual "true crime" rhetorical flourishes, Lesy conjures up a howling American heart of darkness. Case studies of Chicago murders of the 1920's are laid out in staccato prose. Defendants and witnesses change their stories three, four, five, a dozen times. The same corpse lying on a slab in the morgue is positively identified as eight different missing persons by ostensibly close family and friends of each. Cops routinely keep suspects awake for 48 hours straight under relentless interrogation, and if that fails to elicit a confession, simply beat the hell out of them. A guy in Arizona falsely claims eyewitness knowledge of a murder, just to get free train fare back to Chicago. Drunken women shoot their husbands and boyfriends during alcoholic blackouts & are cut loose by sympathetic jurors. Juries routinely defy judges' instructions and follow their most primitive instincts in matters of life and death. One begins to wonder how anyone could have been reliably convicted of anything in that era, or perhaps in any era, before the advent of DNA testing.

All of this conjures up a fresh hell of human suffering. The banality of evil is almost palpable in these accounts. The effect is existential and harrowing. It's very difficult to contemplate the miserable, unadulterated reality and brutality of what these people have done, without couching it inside some sort of rhetorical scheme. Good guys/bad guys. Cops/ robbers. Abusive Men/Victimized women. All of that simplistic binary rubbish. Lesy takes that all away, or rather, relentlessly erodes it away with etched prose. Michael Lesy is of course a groundbreaking scholar of the visual culture of photography. His prose really is like a Weegee crime scene photograph, & captures, along with the vintage photographs he disinterred for this book, all of the miserable, sorrowful details of the exit of another human being from this world, right down to the brand of the bourbon bottle on the nightstand. Which is dead too. One is left quite disturbed by the book, but with the sense that this is extremely important work, a very painful kind of honesty.

Professor of literary journalism Michael Lesy presents Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties, is a true crime anthology that lives up to its title -- and then some! Written in attention-grabbing prose for readers from all walks of life, Murder City intersperses its seventeen gritty murder stories with a handful of vintage black-and-white photographs. An excellent addition to true crime shelves and highly recommended reading for true crime buffs and students of Windy City history!

There is nothing so wonderful as Chicago history. And especially the real story behind the musical Chicago.

I think your average citizen was a lot safer when these guys ran things lousy politians got wacked and school kids were safe Good Read

The real stars of this book are the photographs from the defunct "Chicago Daily News." This newspaper was a casualty of declining circulation in the Seventies. It was arguably one of the finer journals in the city, but it was a victim of the television evening news broadcasts that helped eliminate reader interest in newspapers published in the afternoon. "The Chicago Today," the rechristened "Chicago American," succumbed at the same approximate time. "The Daily News" was unique in that it did not print a separate Sunday issue. Saturday's edition was filled with all of the weekend supplements.

These photographs were culled from an exhibit at the Chicago Historical Society and available online from the Library of Congress. One great challenge that Michael Lesy faced was choosing from the thousands of stills in the museum collection and deciding which would be included in the book. Some of the glass plates are damaged while others are as clear as if the photos were developed yesterday.

I do wish that Lesy would have elected to quote from "The Daily News" more often in the text. References to "The Chicago Tribune" predominate. One would think that having relied upon the shutterbugs at "The Daily News" the author would have checked out the articles that accompanied the pictures.

There are also a number of factual errors and omissions in the text. For example, absolutely no mention is made of the disputed allegations that Ben Hecht discovered several incriminating letters of a homoerotic nature that were written by Carl Wanderer and which helped expose his role in plotting his pregnant wife's murder. According to this controversial account, Wanderer confessed his crime after being confronted with the letters. Lesy is not a Chicago native and his lack of familiarity with local history sometimes shows: He repeatedly refers to Municipal Court Judge Edgar Jonas as "Jones;" Lesy marvels that various juries were composed entirely of men, as if this occurred as a result of the selection process, but archaic Illinois jury laws were not revised to permit females to serve as jurors until the late Thirties; he misidentifies the O'Donnell gang of beer runners in describing a murder investigation in Cicero (Chicago had two separate O'Donnell gangs, one based on the South side and another on the West side). There are numerous errors as to the city's geography and political districts and elected offices. Nonetheless, the book is still interesting and fun to read.

How unfortunate it is that Chicagoans do not have the wealth of newspaper choices that their parents and grandparents enjoyed. The monolithic media monopoly does not serve Illinoisians well, but it is an all too familiar complaint that has driven many to the Internet.

The author uses a very choppy writing style, calling things sentences only because they start with a capital letter and end in a period. While this technique of short phrases may be good to give a snapshot of the scene he is trying to set up, it makes it near impossible to follow the details of some of the more interesting and complicated stories he presents. Those stories read more like a grocery list of names with some attributes next to them than a historical narrative. Some of the stories I really enjoyed, but others were so poorly written that I regretted ever purchasing the book. It felt as if some of the stories were quickly slapped together from several newspaper sources, with nothing to tie the information together. I would only recommend this book if purchased at a huge discount.