The Devil's Gentleman

Harold Schechter is a professor of American literature and culture at Queens College, CUNY. He is also a recognized authority on the history of serial killers and true crime known as “America’s principal chronicler of its greatest psychopathic killers.”  In this new and exquisitely constructed work of creative nonfiction, Schechter tells the riveting sordid story of Roland Molineux, one of our nation’s first known serial killers, and the crude forensic science and highly sensational trial that captured the public imagination at the turn of the last century.  For true crime fans of one of my other recent favorite works of creative nonfiction, Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness that Changed America (2004), this book is a must read.
 
At the heart of most calculated murders is a tale of love.  It may be love gone stale or terribly awry; it can be true love unrequited, or even unknown; or it can be true love twisted into deceit, revenge, rage, or perverted into any one of many kinds of sexual and psychological abuse, depravity, rape, incest, or violence.  In fact, one of the most dangerous and at-risk activities that a human being can engage in is to fall in love, for the emotional vulnerability and raw passions that draw us into such liaisons are also the same vulnerabilities and passions that exhibit what relational communication scholars these days term “the dark side.”  So it was that Roland Molineux, wealthy and privileged son of a famous Union Army General and hero of the Civil War, found himself in love with Blanche Chesebrough, an opera singer and high-society Manhattanite who understood exactly how to translate men’s interests in her, er, company, into a life she had before only dreamed of. But Molineux was not her only suitor, nor even first in line.  That primary honor fell to Henry Barnet, who had recently died after ingesting medicine bought through the mail, a scenario that would be repeated with another of Blanche’s suitors, Harry Cornish, the athletic director of the elite Knickerbocker Athletic Club, where Molineux was a member and with whom Molineux had also clashed.  Cornish barely survived the experience, but his cousin, Katherine Adams, who had been with Cornish at the time they ingested the same packets of tainted Bromo Seltzer, was not so fortunate.  
 
The deaths and near death of high society Manhattanites fueled speculation in competing newspapers owned by Hearst and Pulitzer, and the method of the poisoning led both papers to suggest the villain must be a chemist, a woman, or “an effeminate man.” As the yellow journalism case against Molineux grew bolder, so too did the police work that ultimately netted him.  Nor would netting him this time ultimately lead to a verdict of guilt.  Thus began one of the longest and most sensational trials in American history...

Highly recommended.  Read it aloud with an occasional pause for libation appropriate to the period.

 

Return to Main Book Reviews Page

Ethnographies

Creative Nonfiction

Fiction

---