Smith: Bowery Murder

Gangsters, Broadway divas, crooked politicians, stock market manipulation . . . Bowery Murder is a maelstrom of 1920s murder and media antics as the police (and one intrepid reporter) sort through the evidence, eyewitness statements, and plenty of lies to find the truth behind the shooting of wealthy Wall Street investor and cad Thomas Woodward. The story is told mainly through published newspaper accounts (from conservative stalwarts to gossip sheets) as they lay out the twists and turns of the murder investigation—always in search of the next scoop. Multiple suspects, multiple motives, and multiple confessions build a thrilling mystery.

1929 Review

“At times the story seems a bit attenuated, but the author juggles his suspects, his tell-tale bullets, the discovered revolvers and all that sort of thing deftly and one can overlook a rather remiss attention to news verbosity, used by divers papers to cover up the fact that they don’t know anything about the case. And as a novelty it is more than good enough. It is amusing, puzzling and chatty. It reads along like the stories told by reporters after the third drink of celery tonic as they start bragging to each other about this and that. And if a certain amount of repetition creeps in that must be charged to the defect of following a murder case from day to day in the news with the clippings of a month side by side. Mr. Smith at least has given the detective story another method and the reader will be in his debt for that.”