An unputdownable true crime story set in the pulp-fiction obsessed world of 1930s America.
On Easter Sunday 1937, Bob Irwin – a handsome, failing sculptor with a history of depression and psychopathic episodes – commited a grisly triple murder. Creeping back to the flat of his ex-landlady in a swish New York borough, Irwin killed her, her lodger, and her stunning daughter Ronnie with an ice-pick, an apparently motiveless homicide that would shock the entire country.
Firmly in 'you couldn't make it up' territory, and crafted like a Chandler novel, THE MAD SCULPTOR thrillingly relates Irwin's crime, flight, and capture, his trial and its aftermath, whilst painting a warts-and-all portrait of 1930s America.
Head of Zeus * True Crime
27 Feb 2014 * 384pp * £6.99 * 9781781853085
REVIEWS
'Reads like fiction but it's chillingly real.'
The Philadelphia Inquirer
'Top-drawer true-crime.'
Booklist
'A rich historical tapestry [with] a novelistic sense of character, pacing and suspense.'
Publishers Weekly
Author
Harold Schechter is a professor of American literature. He is the co-author of THE A TO Z ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SERIAL KILLERS. He is also the author of a series of acclaimed historical novels featuring Edgar Allan Poe.
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