Regional Murder Series

    I have offered a number of posts about books published in a series and you will find ones relating to, Roads, Trails, Rivers, Lakes, Highways and even Customs and Folkways.  "Murder" seems like an odd choice as a subject for an entire series, but between 1944 and 1948 Duell, Sloan & Pearce published nine volumes relating to homicides which were committed in cities scattered throughout the United States.
   The books listed below are all works of nonfiction and the over sixty murder cases contained within them were typically written by reporters and journalists. They will be of interest to murder mystery fans and other readers who prefer "true crime." They are listed in alphabetical order by the city in which the murders took place.
   One of the murderers profiled below was a doctor who had a practice in London on Dundas Street and killed a woman there.

1. Boston Murders
     This was the ninth (the last one published.) 
Contents, p. [5] ; Maria met a gentleman: The Bickford case, 1845, by Marjorie Carleton.--Twelve parts of a lady: The Chester S. Jordan case, 1908, by Paul Whelton.--He fought to kill: The Kid Carter case, 1913, by W.G. Schofield.--A man of too much distinction: The Harry Manster case, 1918, by Timothy Fuller.--The haunted man: The Kearney case, 1924, by Lawrence Dame.--The Brown Derby murder: The Corey-Price case, 1925, by J.A. Kelley.--Who killed Fastasia?: The Joseph Fantasia case, 1927, by John N. Makris.--A calandar of Boston murder trials; A Calendar of Boston Murder Trials, p. 209-220; Bibliography, p. 221-223]

2. Charleston Murders

3. Chicago Murders
   Readers of MM know that I always try to include some CANCON (Canadian content) and this volume has some LONCON (London content). The first story, "The Chicago Career of Dr. Cream" is about Thomas Neill Cream who murdered a woman here in London (click on the link provided at his name.)

4. Cleveland Murders
  For a brief review of the Cleveland Murders and the Charleston Murders see below.

5. Denver Murders

6. Detroit Murders

7. Los Angeles Murders
   One of the authors in this book is Erle Stanley Gardner. "The Rattlesnake Murder" can be read about in this gruesome Wikipedia entry: "Rattlesnake James."

8. New York Murders
   This is the first volume published in the series. 

9. San Francisco Murders
   For a review of San Francisco Murders and Los Angeles Murders see: "Western Mayhem, Plain and Fancy," Russel Crouse, NYT, Aug. 3, 1947.

Many reviews of the books in the series can be found in newspapers and magazines, but academic ones are rare. Here is one for two volumes in the series that is found in: The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 39, No.2, July/August, 1948.

Other sources:
  See this Wikipedia entry for: "Bloodhound Mysteries." The best source is Carol Fitzgerald's, Series Americana: Post Depression-Era Regional Literature, 1938-1980: A Descriptive Bibliography: Including Biographies of the Authors, Illustrators, and Editors.

All of the books can be found on AbeBooks and Amazon. For those who live in London and have access to the Western Libraries, some may be borrowed. Although the Western Libraries do not have any of them, seven of the nine volumes are available at other Ontario university libraries:
Boston Murders  (McMaster, Queen’s, York)
Cleveland Murders (Queen’s)
Denver Murders  (McMaster, Queen’s)
Detroit Murders  (McMaster, Queen’s, Guelph, York)
Los Angeles Murders (Queen’s)
New York Murders (Queen’s)
San Francisco Murders (Queen’s, York)

The Ruins of Detroit

 

   Near the end of the year, I am cleaning out various email compartments and in one of them found a reference to this book: Detroit in Ruins. It is from a decade ago when I learned about the book from this review: “Detroit in Ruins: The Photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre,” Sean O’Hagan, The Observer, Jan. 2, 2011. The subtitle: “In downtown Detroit, the streets are lined with abandoned hotels and swimming pools, ruined movie houses and schools, all evidence of the motor city's painful decline. The photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre capture what remains of a once-great city and hint at the wider story of post-industrial America.” That is one of their photographs above.

There you see another one. The reason I noticed and kept the review is that the photographs in it were beautiful, even though they recorded devastation. As the reviewer notes: This sense of loss is what Marchand and Meffre have captured in image after image, whether of vast downtown vistas where every tower block is boarded-up or ravaged interior landscapes where the baroque stonework, often made from marble imported from Europe, is slowly crumbling and collapsing....They have also captured for posterity the desolate interiors that once made up the city's civic infrastructure: courthouses, churches, schools, dentists, police stations, jails, public libraries and swimming pools, all of which have most of their original fixtures and fittings intact.

You can still read the review and fortunately view some of the photographs, as well. The place to begin is at the Marchand Meffre website. More can be found at the publisher - Steidl. The price of the book is listed at 88 euros, but it is out of print.

If you wish to purchase your own copy, it now will cost you a bit more. Unfortunately it wasn't purchased by a London public library, or by Western.

I wrote about Steidl, "the best printer in the world," in my post about Gasoline Stations. For a fine Canadian printer, see Lumiere Press and Michael Torosian.