I’m an English nonfiction writer who is, I suppose, best-known for Members Only, my biography of the London strip club owner, theatre impresario, property magnate, and porn baron Paul Raymond, which was adapted into a big-budget movie called The Look of Love. Like many of my books, Members Only strayed into true crime, a genre that has, for all sorts of reasons, been attractive to me as a writer. Probably the most important of those is that it provides the opportunity to tell inherently dramatic stories and to convey a vivid picture of the past, thanks to the wealth of documentation associated with major crimes.
I wrote...
King Con: The Bizarre Adventures of the Jazz Age's Greatest Impostor
"Raymond or Raj Tewanna alias Edgar La Plante alias Chief White Elk, American international swindler, posing as a doctor and Indian chief" was the caption on the 1920s British police file that inspiredKing Con, my most recent book. It tells the stranger-than-fiction story of this handsome, working-class charmer from Rhode Island, who reminds me of a cross between Jay Gatsby and Tom Ripley. In the wake of a lucrative career as a con man and a big-time singer, he reinvented himself as the leader of the Cherokee and travelled to Europe, where he mingled with famous artists in Paris, swindled a couple of Austrian countesses out of the equivalent of $62 million in 2023 currency, and became a darling of the Italian fascist regime.
Now that’s a question that can be answered in a few sentences. Here’s goes…
This is among the finest examples of the true-crime genre. It’s an enthralling, pacey, and ingeniously structured account of the murders committed on both sides of the Atlantic by Dr. Neill Cream, a Scottish-born Canadian whose medical career served as camouflage for his psychopathic misogyny.
Macabre though the subject matter is, Jobb never wallows in that side of things, preferring to use the story as a vehicle for his vivid and insightful portrait of late nineteenth-century society.
The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream takes readers to the late nineteenth century as Scotland Yard follows the trail of a cold-blooded serial killer who was as brazen as the notorious Jack the Ripper and who would finally be brought to justice by detectives employing a new science called forensics.
"When a doctor does go wrong, he is the first of criminals," Sherlock Holmes observed during one of his most baffling investigations. "He has nerve and he has knowledge." In the span of fifteen years, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream poisoned at least ten women in the United States, Britain,…
Like lots of books I’ve ended up loving, I came across this by chance.
It turned out to be an immensely entertaining portrait of a twentieth-century American gambler whose name meant nothing to me until then. Born Alvin Thomas, he ended up being known as Titanic Thompson.
He was a so-called proposition gambler, who challenged wealthy people to all sorts of often bizarre wagers. One of my favourite anecdotes from Kevin Cook’s anecdote-stuffed book involves Titanic betting Al Capone that he could hurl an orange onto the roof of an adjoining multi-story building.
Read Titanic Thompson and you’ll have plenty of what used to be called cocktail party conversation.
Titanic Thompson is the rollicking true story of one of the most charismatic characters in twentieth-century America. Travelling only with his golf clubs, a .45 revolver, and a suitcase full of cash, this is the legendary tale of a man who was married five times to five different girls, all teenagers on their wedding day. He killed five men, though he'd say 'they'd all agree they had it coming to them'. He won and lost millions in a time when being a millionaire still really meant something.
Filled with fascinating facts and famous faces - Harry Houdini, Al Capone, Lee…
The extreme length ofFall and Rise put me off until my agent Matthew Hamilton persuaded me to take the plunge.
Just as he’d promised, I found myself deeply engaged in the lives and ultimate fates of Mitchell Zuckoff’s large cast of real-life characters, whose personalities, back-stories, and ambitions are rendered with impressive immediacy.
Of course we already know the outcome of this tragic story, yet the book possesses remarkable narrative dynamism. Hovering over most of its pages is the unnerving question, “Which of these people will survive?”
'The farewell calls from the planes... the mounting terror of air traffic control... the mothers who knew they were witnessing their loved ones perish... From an author who's spent 5 years reconstructing its horror, never has the story been told with such devastating, human force' Daily Mail
This is a 9/11 book like no other. Masterfully weaving together multiple strands of the events in New York, at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Fall and Rise is a mesmerising, minute-by-minute account of that terrible day.
In the days and months after 9/11, Mitchell Zuckoff, then…
It’s been said that true crime provides a window into the past.
Well, that’s certainly true of Tinseltown, which plunges readers into the early days of the Hollywood studio system. More specifically, William J. Mann’s justly popular book focuses on the unsolved murder of the silent movie-era director William Desmond Taylor.
Besides being an atmospheric and compulsively readable account of his death and its aftermath, the book offers a persuasive reinvestigation of this once-famous crime.
New York Times Bestseller Edgar Award winner for Best Fact Crime The Day of the Locust meets The Devil in the White City and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in this juicy, untold Hollywood story: an addictive true tale of ambition, scandal, intrigue, murder, and the creation of the modern film industry. By 1920, the movies had suddenly become America's new favorite pastime, and one of the nation's largest industries. Never before had a medium possessed such power to influence. Yet Hollywood's glittering ascendency was threatened by a string of headline-grabbing tragedies-including the murder of William Desmond…
It’s become an irritating cliché for dustjacket blurbs on nonfiction books to claim that the book in your hands “reads like a thriller”.
More often than not, I only have to read a couple of dozen pages before realising that the book in question merely reads like theraw material for a thriller. But Howard Blum has the rare, almost alchemical knack of transforming mountains of historical research into nonfiction that really doesfeel like the most exciting of thrillers.
You can see why so many of his books—Dark Invasionamong them—have been optioned by movie producers.
Combining the pulsating drive of Showtime's Homeland with the fascinating historical detail of such of narrative nonfiction bestsellers as Double Cross and In the Garden of Beasts, Dark Invasion is Howard Blum’s gritty, high-energy true-life tale of German espionage and terror on American soil during World War I, and the NYPD Inspector who helped uncover the plot—the basis for the film to be produced by and starring Bradley Cooper.
When a “neutral” United States becomes a trading partner for the Allies early in World War I, the Germans implement a secret plan to strike back. A team of saboteurs—including an…
I’m a former journalist and intelligence officer turned writer, so I seek out authenticity in my reading, especially when it comes to war stories. I look for fiction from people who have been there or know how to listen to those who have, and be their voice. When I write, I always put together a team of veterans and specialists in their fields to challenge my work and make sure I get it right, too!
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan. The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced, it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run the Chinese blockade to deliver it?
Aggressor is the first novel in a gripping action series about a future war in the Pacific, seen through the eyes of soldiers, sailors, civilians, and aviators on all sides. Featuring technologies that are on the drawing board today and could be fielded in the near future, Aggressor is the page-turning military technothriller you have been waiting for!
"Full-throttle action..." Publishers Weekly BookLife April 2023 Editor's Pick.
It is April 1 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced, it can disrupt the balance of power in the region.
But what pilot would be crazy enough to run the Chinese blockade to deliver it?
AGGRESSOR is the first novel in a new series that looks at the conflict that could spark the next World War, through the eyes of soldiers, sailors, civilians and aviators on all sides. Featuring technologies that…
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