The Girls of Murder City by Douglas Perry
The Girls of Murder City: Fame Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago by Douglas Perry
paperback 304 pages
published by Penguin July 2011 (originally published 2010)
ISBN-13: 9780143119227
This book was an Unputdownables Early Reader Group choice.
Type: {Impress Your Friends Read: notable; prize-winner or all around intelligent crowd conversation piece.}
Rating: {Me Likey: Enjoyable! Particularly for fans of this genre.}
Why You’re Reading It:
- You love history.
- 1920′s Chicago, prohibition, jazz-age really gets you going.
- You love the play Chicago.
- You’re a true crime junkie.
What I Thought:
Whoa nelly! I love anything having to do with the jazz and art deco age — the 1920′s/ 1930′s are my bag, baby. Especially if it has anything to do with Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, or Paris during that time. But wow – what a completely different time in the way of what was acceptable and what wasn’t. Murder was nothing new — not even in nice areas like the old Hyde Park of Chicago, and murders by women were actually fashionable; imagine! What started as a possible wave of feminism (women starting to stick up for themselves after decades/centuries of being their husband’s property) took a new turn as women started popping off husbands and lovers. Many of these were somewhat crazy – but in 1920′s Chicago womanhood was still synonymous with virtue. And if virtue could kill, then the man had it coming. On top of it all, juries were made up of men only, so if a woman came in on trial and she was beautiful… fah-get-abboud-it; all the evidence went out the window.
Throughout Douglas Perry’s The Girls of Murder City we follow Maurine Watkins, new reporter who wanted to get some experience writing before she started her real career (which would prove to be playwriting, maybe you’ve heard of the musical Chicago?). She covered the crime beat in the early twenties and was a keen observer of the absurdities that surrounded these women as they became celebrities through the publicity given to them while awaiting their trials in Cook County Jail. From her experiences she penned the now famous Chicago as a satirical look at what happened with the infamous Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner (who became Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly respectively in the stage version). Watkins pulled not only the story lines, but actual quotes straight from her articles and put them into her script.
This thought provoking, very detailed account of the stories of the woman of Cook County Jail and the reporters who covered them, conjures up some questions about if and how much things have really changed. These trials were the inception of criminals becoming celebrities; a conundrum still relevant today. And one has to wonder if women are still considered virtuous with their style, beauty, and personal lives taken into account when charged for a crime. Regardless of how it relates to the murder trials of the 21st century, it will make the reader hurry to Netflix to add Chicago t0 their queue!
Those of you posting your Early Readers Group review: If there are spoilers in your review, please make sure to mark, Spoiler Alert!, or something to that effect, at the top of your review. Thanks!
Here’s my review: I’m a big musical fan (I can often be found belting out various Broadway tunes) and I love quirky history non-fiction books. I like books that focus in on some minute part of history that I’ve never known about before. The Girls of Murder City had been on my TBR list for awhile so when I got an opportunity to read the book through Unputdownables Early Reader group, I was ecstatic. This book tells the true story behind some of the women that inspired the musical, Chicago. For you all not in the Broadway know, Chicago is the story of two gorgeous women convicted of murder during the Jazz Age in well, Chicago (surprise, surprise).
First off, I didn’t realize that Chicago was based off of any true story so it was cool to learn that. The true story of the women is incredibly compelling. You have very differing cases between the women blessed with looks (many of them were let off) and the women who didn’t have the looks to fall back on. The Girls of Murder City is also a story about the journalism during the 1920s, the height of the newspaper wars. You have newspapers covering these salacious stories of women killing people, most often their husbands or boyfriends being covered in a variety of ways by the competing newspapers out for the best and most gripping stories. The newspapers in Chicago fought against each other to provide the best (or at least most scandalous) coverage of these trials. The newspapers had the power to either glorify or condemn these women. In an age where newspapers are slowly losing their grip on their readership, it was sort of amazing to see this contrast of how it was back in the 1920s.
The book also goes into a little bit of detail about how the musical came to be. Maurine Watkins, a young woman, became a reporter for one of the Chicago papers. While women reporters were uncommon, the women reporters who covered hard news like murders were even more uncommon. Maurine covers these murdererous women and almost creates sort of stories rather than hard news articles about these women. She eventually goes on to write a full play inspired by the women. Eventually her play is sold to Bob Fosse (Broadway extraordinaire) and Chicago became the musical that it is today.
Perry does a wonderful job of bringing this little piece of history to life. The way that he writes the story really pulls you in. It’s so interesting to see how sucked in the public got through these newspaper articles and how the papers tried to one-up each other over each story about the murdering women.
Bottom line: This is a great non-fiction book and should be widely read!
My Review:
4 out of 5 stars
My review: Have you seen the awesomeness that is the movie/play Chicago? Well this is the story of the women that inspired the story! They were insta-celebrities and all that they had to do was knock off a few annoying men! This book is brief history of some of the first well-known female murderers of the 20′s, and the female reporter that covered some of their stories.
Back in the 20′s, when gangsters were feared yet adored, it was thought that women were incapable of murder. Unless a man made the do it! The thought that the weaker sex could be vicious enough to pop a cap in someone or stab someone was unthinkable! Then one day it was noticed that WOMEN were starting to do more violent crimes…GASP…getting arrested for killing their spouses or boyfriends left and right! (Not really but it seemed that way to some) What was this unusual turn of events? Everyone was intrigued and needed to know what was happening..thus newspapers flocked to the prisons to interview these lawless ladies and get their stories first!
Enter Maurine Watkins, the woman that got the biggest scoop of them all and wrote the musical Chicago. She pushed through the boundaries and got the hard hitting stories that were usually reserved for men. Her employers thought her soft and feminine ways would get her in the good graces of the female criminals so she was put on their cases!
This was a very interesting book to crack open and dive into! I enjoyed this little dose of history! The Jazz Age is a very chaotic and thrilling time in American culture! So many things were happening all at once! Women’s roles in modern life were changing. Racial tensions were mounting. Prohibition was creating all sorts of troubles and criminals. This book was entertaining, thought provoking, and wonderful!
Not my usual cup of tea but still very delicious nonetheless! I recommend it for the history buff, true crime buff, and anyone in between!
Also posted on my blog:
http://mustreadfaster.blogspot.com/2011/08/review-girls-of-murder-city.html
Posted review on Barnes and Noble and Goodreads.com
My review:
I’m not sure when I learned that the musical CHICAGO was fact-based, but it was when I read Douglas Perry’s The Girls of Murder City that I discovered just how “ripped from the headlines” – of 1924 – it really is. By the way, the word “Chicago” in the book’s subtitle really is properly offset by quotation marks or a change in font, because it refers to Chicago the show, not Chicago the city; while the “merry murderesses of the Cook County Jail” certainly did captivate the city, I’m not sure how truly inspiring they were. Having said that, Perry’s book is also concerned with another woman – reporter Maurine Watkins, who indeed was inspired to base her first stage play on two of the sensational murder trials she covered for the Chicago Tribune. I think she was pretty inspiring, to be honest.
Perry relies on both contemporary accounts and later works in his exhaustive research for The Girls of Murder City, but the last adjective that describes this work of narrative nonfiction is “dry.” Its primary subject is the consecutive murder trials of “Beautiful Beulah” Annan and “Stylish Belva” Gaertner – the models for Chicago’s Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly – both in court during the spring of 1924 to defend against charges of shooting and killing men who were not their husbands. Both cases were salacious and scandalous, and Chicago’s many newspapers fed the public appetite for news about the glamorous defendants. Women were rarely convicted of murder by Chicago’s all-male juries – especially if they were good-looking women – but following a couple of recent guilty verdicts, there was more at stake for Beulah and Belva.
Within this framework, Perry also delves into the stories of several other Chicago murderesses of the time, the reporters – mostly women, including Watkins – who told those stories to the public, the way things operated and the challenges faced by women at the newspapers where those reporters worked, and the unrestrained climate of Prohibition-era Chicago, where underground jazz clubs flourished and illegal liquor flowed freely. (If you ask me, Prohibition is an object lesson in irony.) He’s got great material to work with, and he crafts it into a page-turner with a firm sense of its time and place. The pace is brisk, and the writing is vivid and occasionally breathless, but Perry succeeds in putting the reader right in the midst of events, including Watkins’ application of her satirical eye to shape them into a hit, prize-winning stage comedy (the musical adaptation came years later).
The environment described in The Girls of Murder City seems to be the birthplace of the celebrity-obsessed, fame-for-its-own-sake mindset we know all too well these days, and it’s fascinating in much the same way. Despite being almost a century old, the story here has a sense of immediacy and a contemporary feel, and its blend of true crime and modern history absolutely held my attention.
I’ve also posted this review on BN.com and LibraryThing, and I’ll be posting it on my own blog next week – I’ll give you the link then.
I posted the review on my blog today: http://www.3rsblog.com/2011/08/book-talk-girls-of-murder-city-by.html
The title of this engaging historical account explains what the book is about but it does not let you in on all the secrets and nuances that happened during this time period. The author has obviously done extensive research to let us in to this exciting and puzzling time in Chicago history. The book focuses on “the MANY murderous girls”, the newspapers and reporters take on all the deadly goings on, and THE second city, Chicago. There were so many love or lust driven killings in the Chicago area by women of all ages in just a short few years. As readers, we were able to experience jail time, court appearances, reporter in jail interviews of the murderous girls, and so much more. We are given an up-close and personal look at the lives and minds of two of the most intriguing murderous girls, “Stylish Belva” Gaertner and “Beautiful Beulah” Annan. The stories of these two ladies are what inspired Maurine Watkins to create the story of the Broadway production, Chicago. The author explains, “She (Maurine Watkins, reporter extraordinaire) wanted to create a deeply cynical satire of the celebrity mania that she saw as the dominant feature of twentieth-century urban life.” Maurine Watkins was another star of this historical book. We learned so much through her “writings” as police reporter for the Chicago Tribune about the murderous ladies and the writer herself. We were also given glimpses into other female news reporters and “sob sisters” of the era. It was amazing to realize that the media of the 1920s is so much the same as our media outlets today. They were able to “sway” their readers just as our media tries to “sway” us today.
I thought this was just a fabulous read. It was a fascinating and in-depth look at Chicago and its 1920s lively history. It is a grand book for history buffs, true crime enthusiasts, and any reader in between who loves a good, juicy story.
This book earned 4 1/2 out of 5 stars.
This book was provided by Penguin Publishing and was an “Unputdownables Early Reader Group” choice.
Review posted on Barnes and Noble and Goodreads.com
Moving put me a little behind on my reading, but I’m finishing the book now, and will be back a little later today to post my review.
Alright, finally back to post my review. Here it is –
The Girls of Murder City is a twofold history, telling both the story of the infamous girl gunners who captured Chicago’s attention in the 1920s and of the intrepid girl reporter who covered their trials and turned her experiences into the Broadway phenomenon Chicago. In presenting the sensation that was Chicago’s lady murderesses, Perry focuses his attention on two in particular that captivated the citizens of Chicago and stood out on Cook County’s Murderess Row — “Beautiful Beulah” Annan and Belva Gaertner. Belva stood accused of murdering a man purported to have been her lover in a drunken spat in a parked car in the dead of night; Beulah was accused of shooting a man thought to be her lover in her home when he threatened to leave her. If either of those stories sounds familiar, then it’s probably because these twin crimes and their subsequent trials served as the basis for Maurine Watkins’s wildly successful play Chicago. Perry introduces us to Maurine as she attempts to become a reporter for the Chicago Tribune on its police beat (and actually succeeds in doing so). Her first major assignment involves Belva Gaertner’s case, and she becomes the main reporter following the trial of Beulah Annan as well. Maurine’s journalism contributed to the Tribune’s reputation as a hanging paper, but more importantly it opened her eyes to the sensationalism and circus atmosphere of the criminal system in Chicago, in which criminals were becoming instant celebrities.
Alternating between Maurine’s scathing journalistic indictments of the two murderesses in the Tribune and the circus acts that were Belva and Beulah’s imprisonment and trials, Douglas Perry presents us with a wonderful social history of crime and sensationalism in the Jazz Age. It has the easy readability and draw of other crime-related social histories like Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City or Paul Collins’s The Murder of the Century. The 2002 movie version of Chicago is one of my absolute favorite movies, and there were so many times where I could picture the action of Perry’s narrative playing out just like I could picture the movie playing in my head (“They both reached for the gun!”). By the end of the book, I was hooked on the topic and wanted nothing more than to dust off my DVD of Chicago and pop it in to watch.
And here’s some linkage for the various places I’ve posted my review:
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/180351817
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/review/R3SVCE8HCB0Z08/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B004KAB4QA&nodeID=&tag=&linkCode=
B&N: (I can’t figure out how to get a link, but I posted as crazylilcuban.)
My Tumblr: http://crazylilcuban.tumblr.com/post/8500983315/girlsofmurdercity
Grrr …. I wasn’t interested in this book but now I’ve read your review, I want to read it !!
Of course, no french translation is yet available but I hope it’ll be the case one day or that I’ll be enough motivated to read the book in English. Thanks (?!! :p) for this interesting review !
Hmm… my comment still says waiting moderation. Just wanted to make sure there aren’t any problems with it (in case you need me to repost it).
Rather, it’s *awaiting moderation. Could that be because it’s so long, or because of the links in it?
Yes, any comment with more than one link has to be approved to make sure it’s not spam. It’s approved and up now – thanks!
I just finished this a couple of days ago. Besides what everyone has already said….what I liked about it, what was different, was that it focused on Maurine Watkins’ view. I have read other books that sort of stand back and view the whole crazed woman murderess era from above, but it always left me wondering what the reporters actually covering the story really thought and how the cynical craze affected them. The public’s hunger for the constant updates and salacious details sort of turns my stomach, but it isn’t really any different from the media frenzy that we deal with now. THAT, really turns my stomach, we aren’t any different and haven’t evolved at all. We still clamor for what Casey Anthony had for breakfast, who is going to publish her book or what Tiger is doing now that he isn’t in the top 20…sad really, more than sad.
Anywho, the angle that Perry took was really appreciated by this reader.
I haven’t read any of the other books on this — so I have nothing to compare it to — but I agree with you. It was more interesting to see if through her eyes in particular (considering she seemed to have a pretty down-to-earth viewpoint of what was going on).
It really did make me think of Casey Anthony, of course, as well as the rest of the train wrecks we glamorize. What is it about us humans??? I do get it (I’m interested too) but it’s amazing how much of a business this has turned into, and it was interesting to hear about the beginnings of that in the media world.
Train wrecks is the perfect phrase. Reading this, I felt better because I can see that our fascination with the train wrecks is nothing new. At the same time though, it makes me feel bad that we haven’t evolved as much as we think or hoped. There is this image in my head of all us being these morbid hungry vultures, feeding off of the miseries, missteps, and mayhem of others. It isn’t pretty, yet find even myself watching Dateline, 48 Hours and the Investigation Discovery Channel all the time. Guess that I haven’t evolved much either;)
Haha, I agree with everything you said. And let’s just blame it all on the media shall we? That’ll make us feel better too.