• The Murder of the Century

  • The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars
  • By: Paul Collins
  • Narrated by: William Dufris
  • Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
  • 3.6 out of 5 stars (1,416 ratings)

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The Murder of the Century  By  cover art

The Murder of the Century

By: Paul Collins
Narrated by: William Dufris
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Editorial reviews

Paul Collins tells the story of the brutal, bloody murder of William Guldensuppe committed by his girlfriend and her lover. Narrator William Dufris gives a delightfully varied and nuanced performance. The book features the voices of a diverse cast of late-19th century New York characters, from Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst to a duck farmer in Woodside to employees of the Murray Hill bathhouse. Together, the characters tell the story of a gruesome crime that fueled a sensationalistic media juggernaut from the moment a group of young boys found a man's mutilated torso floating in the East River in New York City on a summer day in 1897. In Dufris' inventive performance, he expertly adopts the voice of the chillingly blasé murderers; then turns on a dime to describe, in a voice filled with wonder, the new forensic science that went into identifying the body. Dufris engages the listener by sounding as fascinated by the story as the author himself is.

It is vital that Dufris get the performances just right, since Collins has distinguished his book from other histories of the crime by telling the story of the investigation and trial largely through the voices of the people who were actually there. Collins carefully reconstructs their quotes into an intensely detailed narrative, and Dufris individualizes the voice of each witness, including the murder defendants themselves. Especially effective is his portrayal of one of the main defense attorneys in the story, William Howe, whom Dufris imbues with a bold, brash voice that enlivens the "Big Bill" persona that Collins describes. But Dufris is just as adept at capturing the macabre character of the women who, obsessed with the case, filled the sweltering courtroom gallery day after day to show their support for the dashing murder defendant, Martin Thorn. Maggie Frank

Publisher's summary

In Long Island, a farmer found a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discovered a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumbled upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime were turning up all over New York, but the police were baffled: There were no witnesses, no motives, no suspects.

The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era's most perplexing murder. Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the case became a publicity circus. Re-creations of the murder were staged in Times Square, armed reporters lurked in the streets of Hell's Kitchen in pursuit of suspects, and an unlikely trio - an anxious cop, a cub reporter, and an eccentric professor - all raced to solve the crime. What emerged was a sensational love triangle and an even more sensational trial: an unprecedented capital case hinging on circumstantial evidence around a victim that the police couldn't identify with certainty - and that the defense claimed wasn't even dead.

The Murder of the Century is a rollicking tale - a rich evocation of America during the Gilded Age and a colorful re-creation of the tabloid wars that have dominated media to this day.

©2011 Paul Collins (P)2011 AudioGo

Critic reviews

“Wonderfully rich in period detail, salacious facts about the case and infectious wonder at the chutzpah and inventiveness displayed by Pulitzer’s and Hearst’s minions. Both a gripping true-crime narrative and an astonishing portrait of fin de siecle yellow journalism.” ( Kirkus Reviews)
"A dismembered corpse and rival newspapers squabbling for headlines fuel Collins’s intriguing look at the birth of 'yellow journalism' in late 19th-century New York. [A]n in-depth account of the exponential growth of lurid news and the public’s (continuing) insatiable appetite for it." ( Publishers Weekly)

What listeners say about The Murder of the Century

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Don't bother

The topic seemed very interesting, however the execution was slow. I couldn't get through the whole book no matter how hard I tried. It just never got to the point. It was all about trying badly to set the atmosphere. I am amazed at reading other people's description on what a 'fast read' and how exciting it was. I am not sure they listened to the book before they wrote the review.

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3 people found this helpful

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    2 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Confusion in excess

What would have made The Murder of the Century better?

Story doesn't seem to be very well written

Has The Murder of the Century turned you off from other books in this genre?

Yes

What didn’t you like about William Dufris’s performance?

Not much

What character would you cut from The Murder of the Century?

I'm not sure any cuts would help.

Any additional comments?

Had a hard time finishing this audio.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    2 out of 5 stars

Mountain out of a molehill murder

I think Paul Collins needed to figure out just what kind of book he was trying to write. It wasn’t a murder mystery because the culprits were fairly obvious and brought to trial before the book was half done. It didn’t really document the beginning of Yellow Journalism, because we were told the term had been tagged before this incident occurred, and the wars between the various newspapers were already well underway. Although we hear most about the Hearst-Pulitzer rivalry, these two potentially colorful characters remained mostly flat and in the background.

What is left is a somewhat disorganized description of a grisly murder committed by very ordinary people for the most mundane of motives. The police are portrayed as inept, but can be forgiven to some degree because of the intrusion of headline greedy journalists who planted false evidence, invented false leads and “witnesses”, making it a miracle that the truth ever came out at all. I kept wishing for someone to step up and tell everyone to knock it off. In the end I came away irritated at the whole thing – sort of how I feel about tabloid reporting today. I guess I got what I asked for.

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6 people found this helpful

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    2 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

The worst who dunnit it

Starts of strong, but the writing is simplistic, even repetitive. Labored descriptions and it seems to drag on chapter by chapter. I never did care to find out 'who dunnit'. It stopped holding my attention after the fifth chapter.

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4 people found this helpful

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    2 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

It wasn't worth the credit.

Any additional comments?

The story isn't bad overall. Its just a bad attempt at trying to be a nior murder story while just listing facts. It gets confusing and hard to follow with the monotone narrator.

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1 person found this helpful