NONFICTION: CRIME SAGA
The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime that Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars by Paul Collins (Crown)
On a scorching summer day in 1897, four New York City boys hanging about the East River piers pulled a tightly wrapped bundle from the water. They hoped it contained clothing or something of value. Instead its contents turned out to be a headless human torso belonging to a freshly murdered man.
The crime baffled detectives, electrified the press and captivated New Yorkers. Paul Collins engagingly recounts the press’ obsessive pursuit of the story and the trial in which the missing head allowed defense attorney William “Big Bill” Howe (the Johnnie Cochran of his day) to claim that the alleged victim was not dead.
The tale Collins offers up is not a new find. A story this good lived on among old Park Row tales, served as the basis of dime novels and provided fodder for articles and chapters of books.
The murder of William Guldensuppe, a Turkish-bath attendant caught up in a love triangle, played an important role in the hurly-burly world of late 19th-century New York journalism, the birthplace of the modern mass media.
But it’s puzzling that Collins fails to tell the larger story of the tabloid war, as promised in the subtitle. One of the main warring parties is absent.
When it came to crime, the legendary journalistic street brawl of the era was fought almost entirely between Hearst’s New York Evening Journal and Pulitzer’s Evening World. Yet Pulitzer’s sheet, which led the pack with 360,000 readers, is nowhere to be found in Collins’ book. Not only is the Evening World missing from the narrative, but, according to the author’s notes, he did not even consult it. Instead he pits the morning and evening editions of the Journal against the morning World.
Collins’ lopsided account of the press war does not hurt his recounting of the murder. In the end, Collins has crafted a work that won’t disappoint readers in search of a book like Erik Larson’s “The Devil in the White City.” “The Murder of the Century” is entertaining but flawed as a work of history.
