James Polchin

Being an account of murders of homosexuals during the period between WWI and the Stonewall riot, with considerable emphasis on how they were covered in the press. The book is very interesting and informative, to a point. However, readers who are not fans of true crime writing surely will eventually find the endless litany of gruesome killings pretty monotonous, and this is not helped by the samey modus operandii, viz., bind and strangle, with occasional pausings to bash a skull or offer up a gunshot. The author does attempt to bring in some tangents, but generally they consist of literary criticism, another genre I'm not too fond of. The book was at its best when it finished off the crime narratives and recounted the breathless tone of the newspaper accounts and, to a lesser extent, the courtroom arguments and reactions of judge and jury. It might be useful to add that this is perhaps the first book I have read which was published in this century which is free from errors typographical, syntactical, grammatical, and there are even no homonym errors. Congratulations to author, editor, and publisher!… (meer)