I'm about halfway through The Devil's Rooming House by M. William Phelps, a true crime book about Amy Archer-Gilligan, a female serial killer in the early 20th Century who murdered inmates for money at her boarding house/nursing home in Windor, Connecticut by poisoning their lemonade with arsenic. Apparently, these actual crimes were used as inspiration for the 1940s Cary Grant movie Arsenic and Old Lace, although there aren't strong parallels between the plot of the movie and the true events (other than poison used as a method of murder).
If you like true crime, you might find this an interesting read, although Phelps isn't as skilled a writer as Erik Larson (of Devil in the White City fame). Like Larson in Devil, Phelps weaves two stories together: the murders of Archer-Gilligan and the deadly heat wave of 1911 in the New England states. However, the "silent killer" trope isn't as consistently sustained or as artfully executed as the white/black--construction/destruction themes Larson uses.
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2 comments:
oh, I do love true crime! There's an LA blogging group who writes about all the true crime in LA's seedy past. One of their websites is www.1947project.com. They chronicle one murder a day. Fascinating reading!
I'll have to check out that site! I'm especially fascinated by true crime stories that take place in the late 1800s or early 20th Century. What have you been reading lately in the genre?
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