Overview

Michael Lesy\'s portrait of a gruesome era could be fiction -- but it\'s not. ""Things began as they usually did: Someone shot someone else."" So begins a chapter of Michael Lesy\'s disturbingly satisfying account of Chicago in the 1920s, the epicenter of murder in America. A city where daily newspapers fell over each other to cover the latest mayhem. A city where professionals and amateurs alike snuffed one another out, and often for the most banal of reasons, such as wanting a Packard twin-six. Men killing men, men killing women, women killing men -- crimes of loot and love. Just as Lesy\'s first book, Wisconsin Death Trip, subverted the accepted notion of the Gay Nineties, so Murder City gives us the dark side of the Jazz Age. Lesy\'s sharp, fearless storytelling makes a compelling case that this collection of criminals may be the progenitors of our modern age.  

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9780393330595

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A magnificent read. -- Dayton Daily News [Has] the archaic strangeness of myth. -- The Atlantic Gripping and horrifying. -- Chicago Tribune

Author Information

Michael Lesy's books include Angel's World and Long Time Coming. In 2006 he was named one of the first United States Artists Fellowship recipients, and in 2013 was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. A professor of literary journalism at Hampshire College; he lives in Massachusetts.

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