Harold Schechter is a professor of American literature and culture at Queens College, the City University of New York.Among his nonfiction works are The Devil's Gentleman and the historical true-crime classics Fatal, Fiend, Deviant, Deranged, and Depraved.
He also authors a critically acclaimed mystery series featuring Edgar Allan Poe, which includes The Tell-Tale Corpse, The Hum Bug, Nevermore and The Mask of Red Death.
Schechter's new book is Killer Colt: Murder, Disgrace, and the Making of an American Legend.
About a week ago I asked him what he was reading. His reply:
My most recent read was Hampton Sides’ gripping tale of the Martin Luther King assassination, Hellhound on His Trail. I was drawn to the book for several reasons. As a writer of historical true-crime narratives, I'm always interested in seeing how other practitioners work. Sides, whom I've never read before, impressed me as anRead an excerpt from Killer Colt, and learn more about the book and author at Harold Schechter's website.extremely deft stylist with a gift for thumbnail descriptions that bring his settings to vivid life and a flair for turning nouns into expressive verbs (smoke doesn't rise, it “tendrils”)--a technique I admire but have never been able to pull off. He certainly knows how to keep the story moving. The book has a headlong narrative drive and even, despite the devastating inevitability of the central crime, a palpable sense of suspense, an effect he achieves (like James Swanson in his bestselling Manhunt) by alternating the chapters between hunter and prey. The book also provided me with a much richer sense of the shadowy killer, James Earl Ray. I've read a great deal about the Kennedy assassination, a watershed event in my life (as in that of every boomer), and have a pretty good idea of Oswald's character. But I knew very little about Ray who, as Sides conjures him, is indeed essentially unknowable, a weird mix of two-bit lowlife criminal and slippery, shape-shifting assassin out of a cheap spy novel.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
