Known for his tragedies, Jean Racine (1639-1699) wrote a single comedy, Les Plaideurs (The Litigants).  The play tells the story of lovers thwarted by their parents, inevitably to be reconciled in the end after having tricked the older generation into seeing the folly of opposing their children.  In the culminating act, the father, a judge, must rule on the case of a dog, who is accused of stealing and eating a chicken.  The puppies come before the judge, and their “attorney” speaks in their voice, asking the judge to spare the dog so that the pups can avoid the orphanage.  The judge nonetheless condemns the dog to hang, but his conscience is pricked by the pleas of the puppies, making way for the marriage of the young lovers.

The ridiculous appearance of a dog in court, accompanied by puppies who upset the judge by crying and peeing all over the courtroom floor, was the comic highpoint of Racine’s play, but animals in court were a very real phenomenon in France from the 13th to the 18th centuries.  The most common offenders seemed to be domesticated pigs who killed small children.  In 1606, a female dog was killed and burned alongside a M. Guyart for having had illicit relations, as determined by the dog’s testimony.  Such trials are found in records dating from 824 (against French moles) up to 1906, when a Swiss dog was condemned to death for his part in a robbery resulting in death (the men involved were sentenced to life in prison).

The definitive book on the subject remains E.P. Evans’s The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (London, 1951).  While it is hard to imagine imputing criminal intent to the mind of animals, it was somewhat unnerving to come home to find that my own dog had taken this book, and only this book, off my bookshelf to tear apart.

Dubrovnik, credit David Abulafia

Salonika, now known as Thessaloniki, was one of the great Mediterranean cities in which Jews (forming the majority, and still speaking the Spanish of their ancestors expelled from Spain in 1492), Christians and Muslims lived side by side, but increasing nationalism eventually created powerful tensions between the different communities.

In the 1890s radical Macedonian Slavs, who spoke a form of Bulgarian, organised themselves around the ‘Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation’ (IMRO), seeking autonomy for the wide swathe of Ottoman provinces between Salonika and Skopje; but they saw Salonika as the obvious capital, and they were intent on giving these lands a Bulgarian cultural identity. This was intolerable to the Greeks of Salonika, who obliged the Turks with information they picked up about the activities of IMRO.

Before long IMRO decided that the time had come for drastic action. In January 1903 IMRO agents acquired a small grocery shop opposite the Ottoman Bank, staffed by a dour Bulgarian who seemed unwilling to sell the exiguous stock he displayed. At night, though, the shop came to life, as an IMRO team burrowed under the road, placing mines under the handsome edifice of the Ottoman Bank. The tunnellers were almost caught, because they had blocked off one of the city sewers that lay across their path, and the Hotel Colombo, nearby, complained that its plumbing had ceased to work. On 28 April they set off their bombs, demolishing the bank and several neighbouring buildings.

About the author: David Abulafia is Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge University and the author of The Mediterranean in History.

Giveaway is closed.

Would you like an email notification of other drawings? Sign up for our weekly digest in the sidebar.

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.

Giveaway is closed.

Would you like an email notification of other drawings? Sign up for our giveaway email list by clicking here.

1. In March 1864, Abraham Lincoln marked the third anniversary of his inauguration by watching Edwin Booth, John Wilkes Booth’s older brother, perform Shakespeare at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. Lincoln was joined by the First Lady, members of his Cabinet and the Diplomatic Corps for six nights of gala performances by Edwin celebrating the inaugural anniversary.

2. Edwin Booth, the greatest actor of 19th-century America, was an abolitionist, an ardent supporter of Lincoln, and so successful on stage he was the Civil War-equivalent of a millionaire. Not only did Lincoln revere Edwin’s dramatic genius, so did Mark Twain, J. P Morgan, General William Tecumseh Sherman, and Julia Ward Howe, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

3. Junius Brutus Booth, the patriarch of the Booth acting clan, was an international star who acted for European royalty and for U.S. presidents John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Junius was a radical non-conformist like his friend Lord Byron: he practiced Hinduism and vegetarianism, and opposed slavery. All his American children, except for John Wilkes, supported the Union. John’s pro-Southern sympathies were clear to his Northern family as early as 1859, when the young actor bluffed his way into a Virginia militia so he could stand by the gallows when John Brown was hanged in Harper’s Ferry.

4. John Wilkes Booth, unlike his father and brother Edwin, was a player of little talent and no formal training who struggled to make a living in the theater. During his early career in Baltimore and Philadelphia, he was laughed off the stage. He began an ill-fated tour of the South in 1860 by being shot in the buttocks by his manager. In 1864, frustrated after years of comparative commercial and critical failure, John Wilkes quit acting to prospect for oil in western Pennsylvania.

5. The actress Laura Keene, who was starring in “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theatre the night John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln, had been Edwin Booth’s mistress. Five months after his younger brother shot Lincoln, Edwin Booth audaciously staged “Our American Cousin” at the theater he owned on Broadway, the Winter Garden. Laura Keene’s was the only voice raised in protest of this stunt. Not long afterward, the city of New York awarded the perennially popular Edwin with a gold medal for performing “Hamlet” one hundred nights in a row, a feat no actor had attempted before.

About the author: Nora Titone studied history at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. For the past decade she has worked as a historical researcher specializing in nineteenth-century America for a range of academics, authors, and artists. She lives in Chicago. This is her first book.

Giveaway is closed.

Would you like an email notification of other drawings? Sign up for our giveaway email list by clicking here.

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.

Giveaway is closed.

Would you like an email notification of other drawings? Sign up for our giveaway email list by clicking here.

Image courtesy of Bath School Museum.

For over three centuries, up to the early 1700s, there were witch-hunts in Britain. Only in researching Corrag did I truly learn of the immense cruelty with which women – mostly elderly, out-spoken, intelligent or gifted – were treated. From pricking with pins to find ‘the witch’s mark’, to torture, to execution by fire, water or the noose, the suffering was unimaginable. Furthermore, accusations of witchcraft were often based on the smallest coincidence, even a lie. Few were safe; suspicion was rife.

One of the areas of the British Isles which saw the least ‘witch-fever’ was the Scottish Highlands. Perhaps due to its geography, or the Highlanders reliance on traditional medicines and the ones who practiced it, the north-west of Scotland could have been a haven for the wise woman, and her kind. Coupled with the fact that, politically, these parts harboured Jacobites – supporters of the exiled King James, plotters against his usurper, William – I became intrigued with the atmosphere and power that the Highlands must have had at that time. It is easy to romanticise Highland life, especially Jacobitism, but in reality, clan life was impoverished, bloody and hard. That the Highlanders, despite this, could bring such trouble to the Williamite government made the area, for me, all the more fascinating; that they would have tolerated, even revered, the women who were hunted elsewhere increased my wish to learn more.

For me, too, this time in history has an added poignancy: by the mid-1800s, Highland life was virtually destroyed. The Highland Clearances saw the clan system broken down, the Highlanders themselves evicted from their land. Those Jacobite days feel, to me, like the last strong, Highland heartbeat, before their cause, hopes and way of life were lost for good.

About the author: Susan Fletcher is the author of Eve Green, which won the Whitbread Award for First Novel, and Oystercatchers. She lives in the United Kingdom.

Giveaway is closed.

Would you like an email notification of other drawings? Sign up for our giveaway email list by clicking here.

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

Giveaway is closed.

Would you like an email notification of other drawings? Sign up for our giveaway email list by clicking here.

By Douglas Perry

Historical research can be an intimate undertaking for a writer. Reading someone’s diary and personal letters, or even paging through smudged, hand-written police logs, bring home with real power how you’re dealing not just with your imagination, but with actual human beings.

But when researching my new book The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired ‘Chicago’ cold, hard steel also played a significant role in taking me back in time. I’m not talking about guns, though the book’s narrative turns – repeatedly – on the ill-advised use of firearms. Instead, I’m talking about … the Linotype machine.

The Girls of Murder City is about a series of murders by Chicago women in 1924, an epidemic celebrated and driven by the city’s daily papers. I work at a newspaper, but the “hot type” era was long gone before I joined the biz. Needless to say, we work in bits and bytes now, with words flying through the ether to reach their destination. No longer do the windows vibrate at 6 p.m. when the printing press starts up for the early edition. The press no longer needs to be in the same building as the newsroom, so it was removed from the basement years ago in favor of an upgraded facility out in the ’burbs. The newsroom is much like any other office environment, with cubicles and computers and David Brent types wearing khaki.

Back in 1924, it was a very different scene. As a 1960 industrial film about the news business put it, “A newspaper is 10 percent editorial, 90 percent light engineering.” The centerpiece of that 90 percent was the Linotype, which revolutionized the industry in the late-1800s. Basically a typewriter suitable for Godzilla, this machine allowed small teams of men to quickly and accurately set page after page of metal type. Before the Linotype, newspapers were little more than pamphlets, for each page had to be set by hand. The Linotype meant a newspaper now could be as large, and with as many editions each day, as advertising and circulation could make economically feasible.

I got to see one up close – this particular one was manufactured in 1947 – and have it demonstrated for me. It’s an ingenious machine, classic industrial-age innovation, with gears spinning and mechanical arms swinging back and forth. Oh, and a pot of 550-degree molten metal strapped onto the back! Thanks to the Linotype and other 19^th century mechanical marvels, a newsroom in 1924 wasn’t an office at all but a factory – a news factory. Linotype machines clicked away constantly, steam tables hissed, pneumatic tubes popped. It all produced a pounding, inescapable noise that lasted throughout the day and deep into the night.

No wonder reporters stayed away from the newsroom as much as possible, instead spending their days – and even writing up their stories – at the courthouse, the local police station or, of course, the speakeasy.

Douglas Perry, author of The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired ‘Chicago’, is an award-winning writer and editor at The Oregonian in Portland, Ore. Find out more about him and his book at www.douglasperry.net

Giveaway is closed.

Would you like an email notification of other drawings? Sign up for our giveaway email list by clicking here

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.

I was wrong. The Vidocq Society derives its magic from the past, from Vidocq himself, whose mad genius changed us all. E.F. Vidocq was the burly, swashbuckling soldier, highway robber, killer, con-man, ladies man, master of disguise and thief-turned-detective whose unlikely story animates Napoleonic Paris like a red lantern. It is to Vidocq we owe debt for the first state detective agency (forerunner of the Yard and FBI) and the private detective agency, as well as advances in fingerprinting, invisible inks, plaster food casts, and systematic record-keeping of crimes and criminals. His status as “The Father of Forensic Science” is well-documented.

Yet Vidocq is one of those larger-than-life characters who draws contemporary snickers because he is simply “too much.” When I hear such snickers I know am in the presence of a healthy skeptic who may well be right, or, just as likely, a cynic who chooses to be blind to wonders and marvels.

Vidocq’s greatest marvel may be the detective novel. His memoirs, allegedly written by his friend Balzac, were a smash 1830s bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. Though largely fictionalized, they inspired Edgar Allen Poe, in Philadelphia in the 1840s, to write The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the first detective story, in which he introduces C. August Dupin, the first fictional sleuth – a brilliant, shadowy amateur whose story is told by a more conventional assistant and admirer. Vidocq’s influence on Sherlock Holmes’ is clear and acknowledged by Arthur Conan Doyle; it continues from Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin to the cop-buddy teams of today’s movies and thrillers.

The modern noir detective grew stoic and hard-boiled, with tough-guys Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, but the influence of Vidocq on these haunted loners and unbowed modern knights remains all the way to Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch. And thus it ever will be. For modern police work was invented in the 19th Century as the fact-gathering, rational procedure that it thankfully remains. But the excessively rational, predictable man cannot function in an unpredictable world — and especially cannot penetrate evil- without the eccentric, night-stalking sleuths who reads the dark and senseless heart.

This is true in crime fiction and fact. “Facts, even DNA,” says the gaunt, lonely, tobacco-addicted loner Richard Walter, whom Scotland Yard calls “the living Sherlock Holmes,”are meaningless until they are interpreted.”

The dour Victorian-styled Walter, one of the greatest forensic psychologists and criminal profilers in the world, founded the Vidocq Society with celebrated forensic artist Frank Bender – who has put mass murderers behind bars with his psychic artistic visions and boasts of sleeping with more than 300 women– and former FBI agent-turned-private eye William Fleisher.

Fleisher, who once ran U.S. Customs law enforcement in three states, is the only conventional man of the three founders, yet hardly so. He named the Vidocq Society. He has written a classic book on interrogation, but if you ask him about it he pulls a copy of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables out of his desk drawer. Hugo was Vidocq’s friend, too, he says, and based both the criminal Valjean and the detective Javert on Vidocq.

“My favorite scene in all literature is Bishop Myriel’s forgiveness of Valjean for stealing the bishop’s silver. He says, I have bought your soul for goodness, for God.” Each time he reads the scene, the former FBI agent weeps.

“Vidocq’s greatest gift to us was redemption. He was a redeemed man who worked to redeem others. That’s what I want to do with the Vidocq Society. I want to buy souls.”

Michael Capuzzo, author of The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases (Gotham, August 10, 2010), is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Close to Shore and a former feature writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Miami Herald. His stories have appeared in Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and Life. He lives in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

IMAGE: Portrait of Eugéne François Vidocq

By Catherine Delors

The investigation into the Rue Nicaise bombing attack, which is the topic of FOR THE KING, is considered the first modern police investigation. As I researched it in great detail, I was struck by the modernity of the investigators’ thinking.

For instance, their first reflex was to look for the license plate of the cart where the bomb had been detonated, or for any witnesses who might remember the number. Yes, in 1800 Paris, all horse-drawn carts and carriages had license plates, just like modern cars. In this case, however, the license plate had been blown apart by the explosion, and no one had noticed the number.

The investigators made full use of the scientific techniques available to them. Letters from Georges Cadoudal, the famous royalist insurgent who had directed the conspiracy from afar, were identified by handwriting analysis. The gunpowder found in a barrel at the home of one suspect was analyzed and found to be of English manufacture.

But what fascinated me about the investigation was the first clue: the mare pulling the cart where the bomb, the infernal machine, had been brought to the scene. Little remained of the poor animal. But the head and one of the forelegs was intact. And, lo and behold, the hoof had been newly shod! Does it not remind you of a car with a brand-new tire?

It was the perfect clue, of course. All the police had to do was to round up all of the blacksmiths in Paris. Sure enough, one of them remembered three men bringing a little mare to get shod. The blacksmith identified the remains of the animal, and was able to provide a precise description of the three men who had taken her to his smithy. Soon it was posted all over the streets of Paris, with a reward of 2,000 gold louis, an enormous sum. It was only a matter of weeks before the assassins were caught…

Catherine Delors was born and raised in France. She graduated from the University of Paris-Sorbonne School of Law and became the youngest member of the Bar of Paris at the age of twenty-one. Her second novel, For the King, (Dutton Adult) was released July 8, 2010. Catherine is currently writing on a third novel, a prequel to Mistress of the Revolution. She is also researching a fourth one, which shall revolve about Jane Austen and her French connections. To read more about the book and the author, please click here.

IMAGE: Bombing attack at Rue Saint-Nicaise, Paris, 24th December 1800

Congratulations to the following W & M winners of this book:

Eric, Karen, and Carol