The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars Paperback – April 24, 2012

If you had imagined that a tabloid newspaper couldn't possibly sink lower than the News of the World has done in recent years -- tapping the phones of British citizens and others -- it's time to pick up and read the lively and wildly-entertaining saga of a nasty 1897 murder case in New York City. "The public likes entertainment better than it likes information" wasn't a comment by a contemporary tabloid publisher today, but one uttered over a century ago by William Randolph Hearst as he prodded his reporters on the New York Journal to outgun and outmanoeuver their rivals at Pulitzer's World, particularly as the rival tabloids fought each other for an edge in any story involving gruesome or bizarre murders.In The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime that Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars, Paul Collins (author of Sixpence House and the more recent The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World, about Shakespeare's First Folio), the author explores with glee and gusto the no-holds barred world of newspapering in the 1890s in a narrative that is built around the murder and dismemberment of William Guldensuppe, a German-born masseur. From the moment that the man's torso washes up on the southern tip of Manhattan on a hot summer weekend, the newspapers are on the case, turning it into a public spectacle. As the victim is identified, Hearst rents out the prime suspect's apartment after she lets her lease lapse -- his reporters allow the police in to investigate but block other reporters. Reporters cut telephone wires (except their own), hire passenger pigeons to carry sketches from the courtroom to the pressroom and even try to undertake a citizen's arrest of a possible suspect in the crime. "Really," the Herald's publisher had mused during the throes of that scandal, "the newspapers are becoming the only efficient police, the only efficient judges that we have."This focus on the early tabloid wars in the booming late 19th century Manhattan is the really fascinating part of this book, juxtaposed against the details of rudimentary forensic science, a murder conspiracy and life for "ordinary" New Yorkers at the turn of the century. One of the fascinating elements is the way that Collins hones in on the tiny details: when the man sentenced to die for the crime is taken off to Sing-Sing to await electrocution, he is able to watch the scenery on the smoker train along the Hudson; the community of Woodside in Queens revolved around the hub of a hay feed and general store and was so rural that ducks swam in the ponds. One of those ducks would play a crucial, if slapstick role in the investigation, and so hard up was one newspaper for stories that it would end up writing a profile of the critter. ("It is an ordinary duck," their correspondent informed readers...) His depiction of the "Wrecking Crew" -- a mass of journalists on bicycles whose goal was to outride the competition and hamper them by any possible means -- left me laughing so hard I ended up with hiccups.This is a great book to read for summer, combining a true-crime mystery safely in the past with enough color about New York in the 1890s and the birth of "journalism as entertainment" of the kind that endures to this day to make it of broader interest. Those who might be tempted to mutter "but who cares?" about a century-old tale of reckless journalism might remember that only months later, Hearst would take great pride in the disproportionate role he played in pushing the United States into the Spanish-American War. From crime as entertainment, it was an easy step to war as entertainment.Collins doesn't play up any explicit parallels or try to draw any morals, which is just fine -- that fun is left to the reader. His writing style is crisp and lively, doing justice to the larger-than-life characters that inhabit these pages. I found this both fascinating and fun -- a great book that can either be read for the historical tale it tells or looked at as one of the steps that led the tabloid world in the direction of headlines like the famous "Headless Body in Topless Bar" -- and the misadventures of the late and somewhat lamented News of the World. Highly recommended; 4.5 stars, rounded up.

Paul Collins' work, "The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime that Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars" is perhaps the longest title ever written for a book. As such, it might indeed be a succession of headlines and subheads for the original newspapers whose histories unfold in the book. "The Murder of the Century" is the story of a complicated crime where the "corpus dilecti" is found in dissected body parts spread around late 19th century Manhattan. It is also the story of the development of tabloid news sources of major dailies and the avaricious scramble for readers that led news agencies to develop reporter/photograph squads with orders to "make the news if you can't find it". Now, THAT has the odor of yellow journalism that didn't think twice about starting a war involving the U.S."The Murder of the Century" is a fascinating read for those of us who are interested in mass media, its derivations and final products not to mention its possible effects on "the masses." This book is also a colorful portrayal of that world and life as it was lived in 19th Century America.The book also portrays the major players (and, newspaper-selected alleged participants in the crime). In that way we get to see the crime from half a dozen different points of view.Finally, "The Murder of the Century" is a fast read, a beach book that plunges one into a tarnished tale of the gilded age and its appetites. Sometimes, too, the book teaches you how we got some of the attitudes we see around us today. Mr. Collins has introduced enough celebrities of the day for his book "The Murder of the Century" to smack of some of the traditions of tabloid news.

When I was reading this on my Kindle, my sense of pacing was thrown completely off, as a large percentage of the book is sources and references. So when the trial was over and we were wrapping up loose ends of prominent players, there was still a good 25% of the book left, and so I was waiting for... something. Only to turn the page and find that it was, in fact, over.I'm a huge fan of Erik Larsen, and so I was looking forward to getting into this book. I love to read historical non-fiction, and if it's about an event or person I've never even heard of, all the better. Mr. Collins did an alright job of interspersing some small historical tidbits of interest, but it's not as interesting as Erik Larsen, where with the latter, almost every page you're like "Oh wow, I didn't know that!" or "That's where that expression comes from!" etc. In "Murder of the Century", the little bits of color that are added are pretty localized to the area and time, and they're not that interesting or mentioned in such a way, with enough context, to make them interesting.In any case though, it's an interesting read. As I mentioned above, because of the large chunk of references at the end of the book, I thought there was a lot more to the story than there was. In addition, the murder, the trial.. it's just really not that suspenseful. I expected a big twist or shocking moment. There was just nothing. I feel like I learned more about NYC in this time frame by my own wandering around wikipedia while I was reading this book.It's a good book, but only 'good.'

I enjoyed learning about life in New York City during the final years of the 19th Century.

I absolutely loved this book. First off, it's a great mystery. Second, it's an incredibly interesting tale of the tabloid wars that gripped New York at the turn of the twentieth century. Paul Collins is a great writer and he documents, with quite a bit of humour, the incredible lengths that William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer and others went to in order to get, and even more incredibly, to "make" their stories. I think readers will be shocked at how much the press actually contributed to solving mysteries, as much as to creating their own. And let's not forget their attempts to actually undermine investigations in order to win readers! And they are seemingly not punished for it! But what really stands out is that 110 years later newspaper publishers would be scandalized if such activities came to light in their reporting. The recent phone-hacking scandal is a good case in point. Yet, Collins shows us that, not only was this not the case during the Gilded Age, but Hearst and others made their careers doing just this kind of thing and worse, much worse. And it was all considered part of the job. I definitely give this book five stars. It was enlightening, it was thrilling, and it was definitely entertaining.

Looking forward to hearing the book