Many books have done Capone and cronies, but this book has a fresh approach to some of the material. Holmes case in Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City. Many books cover the individual cases more completely than you see them here. Sob sister journalist Maurine Watkins made headlines with their cases, and all that jazz. Many will be familiar with the notorious beautiful jazz age women found in the musical and movie Chicago. He was buddies with a philanderer nearly murdered by a jilted lover (his gardener wasn’t so lucky, he took the bullet). Even Ernest Hemingway is found here, not as journalist (which he indeed was for a while). Ben Hecht, Carl Sandburg, Ring Lardner, Mike Royko and Theodore Dreiser are mentioned.

Many famous journalists worked for Chicago papers over the years, including Goldstein and Mulroy, first Chicago newsmen to receive the Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the infamous Leopold and Loeb thrill kill case. It all looks a little messy by today’s standards but gives a feel for the times. The photos are far more sensational with weeping widows, snarling gangsters and noirish angles of dead mobsters on the pavement. Generally everything looks very crowded and choppy and more difficult to read. I was hopeful that I’d get more of a feel for those well known crimes through his research and that was true to an extent, especially in the early years.įull page headlines are shown and it is interesting to see how the fonts, spacing and photos have changed. He is a contemporary Chicago journalist who says “you won’t find words like “sexpot” and “mope” anywhere in Chicago newspapers today”.

Seidel gathers many famous cases so notorious that they are still well known today, and goes back through Chicago newspapers for research. Chicago has a colorful crime history worthy of multiple books. This is about Second City Sinners by Jon Seidel, not to be confused with Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott, also a good book, but about sisters who ran an infamous brothel in the early 20th century.

Sin in the second city