By Kevin Cook

I’m a sportswriter who spent 20 years telling readers of Sports Illustrated, Golf Magazine and other magazines about Tiger, Phil and the rest of today’s top golfers. But the guy who really intrigued me never played on the PGA Tour. Titanic Thompson, who may have been the best golfer of his generation, gambled on his own, motoring from town to town from the Roaring Twenties to the 1970s, betting on golf, poker, dice, pool, horseshoes and games of his own invention. He killed five men, married five women and blazed a trail through the 20th Century.

In the 1920s he rolled into New York City and cleaned out the gamblers who played underground craps games. That was the real-life action behind Damon Runyon’s famous Guys and Dolls stories. Runyon, the best-paid newspaperman in the world, wanted to write Titanic’s life story. But Ti said, “No thanks. Mine ain’t the kind of work publicity helps.” So Runyon fictionalized him. He based his most famous character on Titanic: Sky Masterson, the gambler hero of Guys and Dolls.

Gamblers and other liars have had almost half a century to embellish their tales of the immortal Titanic. Two years ago I set out to separate the legends from the facts. I found plenty of living memory – gamblers who lost to Titanic, and his last wife, who recalls the charming hustler who married her almost 50 years ago.

Who was Titanic? I don’t know if I’ve solved that puzzle, but I gave it my best shot.

About the author: Kevin Cook, whose 2007 book Tommy’s Honor was one of Sports Illustrated’s books of the year, is an award-winning sportswriter. He lives in New York City.

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By Arnie Bernstein

On May 18, 1927 a madman forever changed a small Michigan town. That day, in horrific conflagration of dynamite and blood, Andrew Kehoe set off a cache of explosives concealed in the basement of the local school, killing 38 children and six adults. In an instant, what was to have been a happy last day of school before summer vacation turned into a whirlwind of epic horror. Among the dead was Kehoe, who literally blew himself to bits by setting off a concealed dynamite charge in his car. The next day, on Kehoe’s farm, the remains of his wife was found tied to a hand cart, her skull crushed. At the edge of the farm was a sign reading: Criminals Are Made, Not Born.

When I first stumbled on the Bath story, my reaction was “Wow! What a book this will make!” I had dreams of “my book,” retelling a terrific murder tale à la Capote’s In Cold Blood.

And then I went to Bath.

It changed me. The people of this beautiful place have lived in the shadow of incomprehensible horror for more than eight decades. Their quiet courage made my ambitions of a “great book” a trivial conceit at best. Instead, I realized, that something beyond my understanding brought me to Bath to chronicle a people and place. To paraphrase Lincoln, the brave men, women and, above all, the innocent children and adults who died that day, consecrated the story far above my poor power to add or detract.

In Bath, the face of humanity, profound and deeply moving, taught me much.

About the author: Arnie Bernstein is the author of Bath Massacre: America’s First School Bombing, which was named as 2010 Michigan Notable Book. He lives in Chicago, where he teaches college composition and is working on a new book.

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Image courtesy of Bath School Museum.

By Harold Schechter

In September 1841, a respected New York City printer named Samuel Adams showed up at the office of John Colt, a brilliant young accountant who had hired Adams to produce the latest edition of a popular textbook he had written. Adams had come to collect a debt. The two began arguing over the amount. The altercation ended when Colt killed Adams with a hatchet. He then stuffed the corpse into a crate and attempted to ship it off on a boat scheduled to depart the next morning. Unfortunately for him, a storm rolled in, preventing the ship from leaving port, and the murder came to light.

Partly because of John’s prominence as the brother of Sam Colt, inventor of the six-shooter, his trial in January 1842 was a newspaper sensation. At one point – to counter charges that he had not only planned the murder but committed it with one of his brother’s newfangled weapons – Sam Colt himself was called on to demonstrate his six-shooter, putting on a marksmanship show in the courtroom. And then there was the much-anticipated appearance of Caroline Henshaw, John’s beautiful mistress who had just given birth to an illegitimate child.

Despite the best efforts of his lawyers, John was found guilty. While awaiting execution, he received permission to legitimize his relationship with Caroline. On the afternoon of November 18, 1842 – just before he was scheduled to go to the gallows – he and his mistress were wed in his cell. Afterwards the couple was permitted an hour’s conjugal visit alone. When the sheriff returned to fetch John and lead him to the scaffold, he found the condemned man lying dead, a knife protruding from his chest.

Shortly after these dramatic events, John’s widow Caroline and her newborn son departed for Europe. During the next several years, she was supported by regular payments from Sam Colt. In letters to acquaintances, Sam consistently put quotation marks around the word “nephew” when referring to Caroline’s son.

There was nothing accidental about the punctuation. It was Sam’s winking way of admitting a fact that would not become public for another twenty years. It appears that, during a business trip to Europe in 1835, Sam had met and impulsively married a poor but strikingly beautiful sixteen-year-old named Caroline. The startling truth – finally revealed after the death of the famed gun-maker – was that John’s mistress Caroline Henshaw and Sam’s first wife were the same person. Since bringing her back from Europe, Sam had managed to keep their marriage hidden from the world. In early 1841, eager to divest himself of a wife who could not advance his social ambitions, he had passed the docile Caroline on to his older brother, who took her as a lover, then wed her right before his own death.

About the author: Harold Schechter is Professor of American literature and culture at Queens College, CUNY. He has published more than thirty books and is the editor of the Library of America volume, True Crime: An American Anthology. www.haroldschechter.com

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By Michael Capuzzo

The world’s greatest detectives do their secret work in a grand, wood-paneled Victorian dining room in the shadow of Independence Hall. They meet monthly in Philadelphia from around the world, Scotland Yard and Interpol agents, FBI, NYPD, Egyptian army captains, mafia-busters, Al Qaeda hunters, investigators of the JFK and RFK assassinations, the finest collection of forensic specialists ever assembled — CSI to the tenth power, and real.

After a four-course white-tablecloth lunch, the fifth course is a murder. The bloodied victim appears on a power-point screen, and the room falls hushed. Each month it is a daunting case that has gone cold for years, a sad tale of embarrassed cops, suffering families, and unrepentant killers too smart for the system. Until now.

They are the Vidocq Society, the private club of pro bono crime-fighting avengers who assist police and families because the world has gone mad and somebody has to do something. For twenty years they have worked quietly as both armchair detectives and field agents redeeming the suffering and routing fugitive killers, putting them behind bars.

In a shadowy corner a bronze bust, the visage wide and arrogant, of the 19th Century detective Eugene Francois watches the proceedings.

I spent seven years reporting their story for the nonfiction book, The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases. I was stunned at the passion for justice that animated these 82 men and women – one for each year of Vidocq’s life. I saw them laboring in the present for a better future and thought I had captured the story.