45 Murderers

A Collection of True Crime Stories

From Hollywood’s Black Dahlia to the Arkansas Bluebeard: an anthology of true-crime profiles by “the grand dame of mystery” (Ed Gorman)

Whether venturing into a blood-spattered farm in Texas, down a lonely mountain road in Alabama, or into the deceptively sunny Ohio suburbs, acclaimed mystery writer Craig Rice lends her hard-boiled style and a wicked irony to this gallery of real-life murders. Among them...

A saintly middle-aged widow bludgeoned to death in her New Jersey home; the headless torsos of two women found floating in the Lake of the Ozarks; a New Year’s fire in Pennsylvania set to cover the traces of a more ghastly crime; a traveling evangelist on a divine mission blown to bits in Berkley; an aspiring starlet tortured, bisected, and dumped in a vacant LA lot; and a New York couple poisoned to death by the mysterious “Veiled Murderess”, a convicted killer who never revealed her motives - or her true identity.

Culled from Rice’s work as a crime reporter, “the stories in 45 Murderers have withstood time” as a century-spanning, cross-country tour of the sinister underbelly of the American Dream (Jeffrey Marks, author of Who Was That Lady?).

©1952 Craig Rice (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing

retro

How interesting. it seems Craig Rice was a pen name for mystery writer Georgiana Craig, who wrote mostly in the 1940s to 50s. She was noted for her sharp wit. I can't think of a better narrator for a period piece like this than Johnny Heller.

The worst

Possibly the worst book on Audible. I’m not even sure it’s actually ABOUT murder. It’s just a Sherlock memoir, if Sherlock was a simple country Paw Paw sitting on the porch of the general store telling you how smart he is.