Five Murders

by Edmund Lester Pearson

Includes "The Man Who Was Too Clever," "The Mystery of Tenants Harbor," "Aboard the 'Glendower'," "The Doctor's Whiskey," "The Firm of Patrick & Jones," and "The End of the Borden Case," plus an appendix.

299 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1928

About the author

Edmund Lester Pearson was an American librarian and author. He was a writer of the "true crime" literary genre. He is best known for his account of the notorious Lizzie Borden murder case.

(wikipedia)

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the murders were just okay in terms of interesting (with the exception of the one that occurred near(ish) my town in 1877), the writing itself is fantastic. Pearson gets snarkier as the book goes on, and the glimpses of the culture of the late 1920s are fascinating. In terms of true crime reporting, it's interesting to see how different it was in a pre-Internet world, but also how much more opinion and conjecture was allowed in the genre. The author's take on Lizzie Borden one year after she died is also fascinating - he's very firmly convinced that she was guilty.

Finally, this book introduced me to the absolute worst old New England name I have ever encountered: Jerothulem. I love weird old semi-Biblical New England names, but that one...Incidentally, a brief Google search indicates that it was relatively popular in the second half of the 19th century.