If you have time, tune in tomorrow Saturday, October 23rd when I talk to host Nelson Price of Hoosier History Live about my new book America’s Femme Fatale: The Story of Serial Killer Belle Gunness. The show airs live from noon to 1 p.m. ET each Saturday on WICR 88.7 FM in Indianapolis. Or you can stream audio live from anywhere during the show.
Anthony Horowitz is plotting a murder.
That’s typical. After all, Horowitz has authored more than 40 mystery novels including several James Bond novels commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate. Oh, and did we mention he’s also screenwriter, adapting mysteries such as Midsomer Murders into a long running English television series.
That’s a lot of homicides and this week he’s adding a few more to the tally with the release of A Line to Kill, the third in his Hawthorne and Horowitz series–think former police detective Hawthorne as Sherlock Holmes with Horowitz writing himself into the role of the bumbling Watson.
Little wonder he’s always thinking of murders particularly when taking his dog for long walks, something he does several times a day.
Unfortunately, the murder under consideration right now is mine.
“I start with a bullseye,” he says explaining how he produces his plots. “That’s the murder.”
It turns out I’m the bullseye.
“Think about it, you say you’re in the U.S. and I say I’m in England, but we really don’t know where either of us really is,” says Horowitz during a Zoom call.
In other words, at any minute Horowitz could appear behind me while I’m thinking he’s an ocean away.
“But why would you want to kill me or why would I want to kill you?” he muses noting that takes him to the next step in his writing process—motive. “The secret for me is the motive. It needs to be original, beautiful, striking, and something out of the usual.”
“Maybe you think I’m going to write a critical review of your book,” I respond, foolishly offering a reason for the crime.
Murder is definitely Horowitz’s business and obsession but when he was ten and living at a boarding school, it was a way to survive.
“Are those English boarding schools really as bad as everyone says?” I ask.
“They were back then, now they’re stricter laws,” he says. “At the time it was a horrendously damaging place.”
To escape the harshness Horowitz delved deep into reading and began to spin yarns to keep his school mates entertained—many of which were about heroic kids escaping from the school. From there, he says, it wasn’t a big jump to write his tales down.
A Line to Kill takes place during a literary festival on Alderney, one of the Channel Islands off the coast of England. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Horowitz discovered the island when he attended a literary gathering there.
“It’s a beautiful small island with an awful past,” he says, noting that the Germans controlled it during World War II and built prisoner of war camps. For the fictional Horowitz, it’s a bloody place because of the many murders that occur while he and Hawthorne are staying there.
As for me, not to worry. Horowitz was in England while we were Zooming and I definitely recommend reading his book.
A Norwegian farm girl, her family so poor, they often went hungry, is seduced by a rich landowner’s son. But despite her dreams, he has no plans to make her his wife. Abandoned, she sees only one path forward or she’ll sink into the black hole of her family’s poverty. But her first goal is revenge and after the landowner’s son dies a horrid death amidst whispers of poison, she boards a boat and sails to America. Norway’s gain is America’s loss.
Her name changed through the years but after the mysterious deaths of two husbands, numerous men, women, and children, she goes down in his as Belle Gunness. An entrepreneur whose business was murder, Gunness felt no qualms seducing men for their money and dispatching them with her axe—filling her farmland with her victims.
As her crimes were about to be discovered, her solid brick home burnt to the ground and workers battling the smoke and flames discovered the bodies of her three children and a woman without a head. Was it Belle or did she get away with one more murder, absconding with close to a million dollars. It’s a question the world has been asking since 1908.
America’s Femme Fatale: The Story of Serial Killer Belle Gunness (Indiana University Press/Red Lightning Oct. 4, 2021; $20).
What people are saying about America’s Femme Fatale.
Ammeson uses astute research and punchy prose to chronicle Belle’s transformation from destitute farm girl to one of history’s most egregious female serial killers. . . . Compact and captivating, this salacious tale of murderous greed during the early twentieth century will be devoured quickly by true-crime fans.– Michelle Ross ― BOOKLIST / Amer Library Assn
It’s a mesmerizing cautionary tale I had to keep reading despite the late-night hour. . . . Ammeson writes narrative nonfiction with a sense of drama to propel us along the unbelievable.– Rita Kohn ― NUVO
America’s Femme Fatale is the detailed story of Belle Gunness, one of the nation’s most prolific mass murderers. Ammeson recounts the horrific events with dry wit and corrects many errors found in previous accounts. Gunness stands out in an infamous crowd because she was a woman; she killed men, women and children rather than choosing from among one narrow section of victimology; and her murders seem to have been rooted in greed rather than lust, the serial killer’s usual motive.– Keven McQueen, author of Murderous Acts: 100 Years of Crime in the Midwest
Jane Ammeson will be on Hoosier History Live talking to the show’s host Nelson Price about Belle Gunness. The show airs live from noon to 1 p.m. ET each Saturday on WICR 88.7 FM in Indianapolis. Or stream audio live from anywhere during the show. For those who miss the show, it’ll be available by podcast as well.
“There are certain women who, though perhaps not born rich, are born to be rich,” author Truman Capote wrote about the beautiful, well-dressed, and style-setting women he called his “swans.”
The ultimate arm candy for the wealthiest and most powerful of men, these women of the mid-20th century were trophy wives before the term existed. And they counted Capote, the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and creator of the true crime genre with In Cold Blood, his chilling recounting of the brutal murders of a Kansas family, as their best friend.
In Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era, New York Times best-selling author Laurence Leamer takes us back to a time and a world where jet-setting, making the best-dressed list, attending and giving A-plus list parties, and dining at the most wonderful places whether in New York, Paris, London, or wherever your yacht happened to be moored were what these exalted women excelled at.
Obtaining their lifestyles depended upon a confluence of beauty, wit, moxie, and marrying and knowing when to discard husbands as they worked their way up and up. At times, divorce papers were barely signed before the next wedding was held.
“You have to enter into their lives,” says Leamer, explaining how he so succinctly captured the personalities of the swans: Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli, Slim Hayward, Pamela Churchill, C.Z. Guest and Lee Radziwill who constantly seethed because of the attention her older sister, Jackie Kennedy, always received.
“Even though,” Leamer points out, “unlike Jackie she didn’t want to do the hard work that it takes to achieve something.”
These women knew how to climb to higher heights. Gloria Guinness had transitioned from a childhood of constant motion in Mexico and marriage at age 20 to a man 27 years older to marrying a German aristocrat and a romantic involvement with a top Nazi during World War II. Her third marriage was to the grandson of an Egyptian King and her last, the biggest prize, was to a scion of the Guinness beer family who was also a member of Parliament. Other wins were modeling for big time designers and the best of the fashion magazines as well as being on the International Best Dressed List for several years.
But ultimately, she wasn’t happy says Leamer who believes she committed suicide.
There was also Barbara “Babe” Paley whose mother raised her three daughters to marry money. Paley, who had been badly injured in an automobile accident when young, spent her life in considerable pain. Her husband expected perfection in all things and so she never slept in the same bedroom, so she could the loss of her front teeth.
But being the best wasn’t always the answer to happy life. The swans may have had uber-wealthy husbands, but they didn’t have good husbands. Frequently husbands and wives were flagrantly promiscuous, and the swans often led separate lives not only from their spouses but also their children.
“For them, to be a mom was to be hands-off,” says Leamer. “And the children often paid a price. They didn’t necessary learn to do anything because they were going to inherit a lot of money.”
Ornamental to the max, these were women who did nothing but did it extremely well. And Capote, despite his great literary successes, spent a lot of time doing nothing with them. He listened to their secrets and ultimately decided to write a book revealing what he had heard. When an article he penned revealed some of those stories, the swans all turned against him, and he was exiled from the society he craved.
“I went to a family wedding recently,” says Leamer noting the warmth and connectiveness that everyone had. “These women and Capote never had this.”
It’s such a cliché to say money doesn’t buy happiness. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. And it certainly is delicious to read about the lives of women who many thought had it all even though they didn’t.
Online Book Event
Join Laurence Leamer in an online event hosted by the American Writer’s Museum in Chicago when he reads from and discusses his new book.”
When: October 13 at 6:30 p.m.
How to Join In: This program will be hosted online via Zoom. To register, visit americanwritersmuseum.org/program-calendar/laurence-leamer-capotes-women/
Don’t miss Walter Mosley, Richard Osman, and more of your favorite mystery authors at a FREE virtual event tomorrow, October 13th! Starting at 11:00 AM ET, log in to the Mystery / Thriller Community Hub to access sessions, engage in Community Conversations, and explore the books being featured during the event. Kicks of at 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM ET Award-winning authors Walter Mosley (Blood Grove) and Kellye Garrett (Like a Sister) join moderator Gabino Iglesias (The Devil Takes You Home) for a ground-breaking conversation about crime, justice, and the search for truth. Test your mystery knowledge at The Immersive Q&A Experience at 2:00 PM ET. Think you’ve got what it takes to make it through this interactive and immersive experience? Join your fellow mystery / thriller aficionados in an interactive guessing game for a chance to win prizes! This event is FREE for members of the Edelweiss Mystery / Thriller Community. Click here to become a member and access sessions on October 13th. |
Imagine walking through a door and into another life. That’s what happens to striving Chicago artist Kelly Holter on her 29th birthday. Suddenly she’s back in her hometown in Michigan, married to a man she barely knew in high school.
She’s completely disoriented, because suddenly she has memories from both of her lives, and she needs to make sense of why this switch happened and whether it can be reversed.
A speculative thriller exploring cutting-edge technology, “The Other Me” is the debut novel of Sarah Zachrich Jeng, a web developer originally from Michigan who now lives in Florida. The following is a Q&A with Jeng and Times correspondent Jane Ammeson.
Can you tell our readers where the idea for your book came from?
The idea came to me while I was thinking about wish fulfillment and the classic “guy meets girl, guy loses girl, guy moves mountains to get girl” narrative. These kinds of stories are often told from the man’s point of view, framed as romantic and wholly positive. I wanted to look at it through a slightly darker lens and from the woman’s perspective, so I used a sci-fi trope that completely takes away Kelly’s choice in the matter. Whatever happened to make her fall in love with Eric, her husband, it has already happened in this new life she finds herself living.
What kind of research did you do for this book?
I researched the art world and women artists through both the 20th and 21st centuries to get an idea of what qualifications and training they would need and what a woman artist just starting her career would be up against. Kelly is not from a privileged background, so I had to give her a scholarship to art school, which in real life probably wouldn’t come close to paying her way through. However, I wanted there to be some tension between her drive to create and the necessity of making a living, so I took a bit of creative license.
I have some experience of startup culture, but things are always changing, so I read up on that. Much of what made it into the book is exaggerated, but some, unfortunately, is not. I also did research on the capabilities of artificial intelligence, as well as some armchair physics. The tech depicted in the book isn’t possible (at least not that we know of!) but I wanted to have enough background knowledge to let readers suspend disbelief. I was less interested in completely accurate science than exploring themes of identity, fate, and choice, and I hope any physicists or AI experts among my readers will forgive me!
It must have been complex trying to keep straight what happened, what didn’t happen, the new life, the old life — how did you do that?
Spreadsheets, lists, and an ugly hand-drawn diagram or two. I had timelines written out, as well as lists of small changes in Kelly’s life and the ripple effects they might cause. I really didn’t know what I was getting into when I started, and it’ll probably be a while before I write a book like this again! (Famous last words.)
No matter if I’m eating by myself or cooking for friends and family, I want to enjoy a good meal. And when time is short or I don’t want to fuss, The “I Love My Instant Pot Cooking for One” Recipe Book authorized by Instant Pot is a great book to turn to. Written by Lisa Childs, author of the blog TriedTestedandTrue.com, there are 175 recipes and lots of great color photos. Childs, who has been developing recipes for Instant Pot since 2016, provides accurate details so that even if you’re not familiar with using an Instant Pot, she makes how to do so easily understandable.
Childs’ Instant Pot recipes, designed for one person, are perfect when cooking just for yourself but can easily be shared by two with the addition of a side dish—say corn on the cob or freshly sliced tomatoes.
The following recipes are from The “I Love My Instant Pot Cooking for One.”
Easy Teriyaki Chicken Thighs and Rice
Tender chicken thighs and white rice cook together in the Instant Pot® with premade teriyaki sauce for the simplest, easiest one-pot meal. With only a few ingredients, anyone can make a delicious and quick meal at home.
• Hands-On Time: 5 minutes
• Cook Time: 20 minutes
Serves 1
To the Instant Pot®, add chicken and pour teriyaki sauce over the top. Place the trivet on top of chicken.
In a 6″ cake pan, combine rice and water. Place uncovered pan on trivet.
Close the lid; turn the knob to Sealing.
Press Manual or Pressure Cook button and adjust time to 10 minutes.
When the timer beeps, allow 5 minutes to naturally release the pressure, then remove the lid. Press Sauté button and adjust to High.
Carefully remove pan from the Instant Pot® and fluff rice with a fork. Place chicken (leave teriyaki sauce in Instant Pot) on top of rice and set aside. Cover to keep warm.
Cook down remaining teriyaki sauce about 5 minutes until reduced and thickened. Pour over chicken and rice, then top with sesame seeds and green onion. Serve.
Per serving
CALORIES: 704; FAT: 12g; PROTEIN: 43g; SODIUM: 5,605mg; | FIBER: 2g; CARBOHYDRATES: 98g; SUGAR: 21g
Bruschetta Chicken
Hands-On Time: 5 minutes
Cook Time: 25 minutes
Serves 1
Chicken
Bruschetta
Pour water into Instant Pot® and add the trivet.
Place chicken on the trivet, then season with salt, black pepper, and Italian seasoning.
Close the lid; turn the knob to Sealing.
Press Manual or Pressure Cook button and adjust time to 15 minutes.
While the chicken is cooking, prepare Bruschetta. In a small bowl, mix together all Bruschetta ingredients. Let chill in refrigerator until ready to serve.
When the timer beeps, allow 5 minutes to naturally release the pressure, then remove the lid. Place mozzarella slices on top of chicken and replace the lid. Let sit 5 minutes with lid on to allow the cheese to melt slightly.
Remove to a serving plate and top with Bruschetta. Serve immediately.
Per Serving
CALORIES: 472; FAT: 22g; PROTEIN: 60g; SODIUM: 1,020mg; FIBER: 1g; CARBOHYDRATES: 8g; SUGAR: 4g
Eight schools in just as many years, parents divorcing, new step-parents, more divorces, more new homes, overwhelming shyness, red-faced when emotional and almost always feeling out of place. It doesn’t sound like the prerequisites for Kirk Herbstreit’s stellar career as a sportscaster and star of College GameDay.
But Herbstreit always had football and no matter what school he landed in, he made the team, and he was a star. It might not have been enough—not with a stepmother who didn’t mind entertaining male guests in front of her stepson when his father was out of town, a barely tolerable stepfather, and constantly saying goodbye to friends, attempting to make new ones, and trying to hide out in the back row of the classroom in his newest school. But what else could a kid like Herbstreit learn to do but stuff his feelings deep inside and throw the ball. It worked.
For a while.
Herbstreit was playing for Ohio State University just as his father had. But things weren’t going well. He didn’t quite fit in with the program. Suddenly he wasn’t a star. He was barely on the team.
In other words, it wasn’t working.
“I’ve always been the guy who tried to say the right thing, to tell people what I thought they wanted to her,” says Herbstreit in his new autobiography, Out of the Pocket: Football, Fatherhood, and College GameDay Saturdays written with longtime ESPN reporter Gene Wojciechowski. “I’m a shy guy, the one who holds things in—it’s my way. I’m an introvert by nature.”
On the phone Herbstreit seems like the kind of guy you could talk to for hours. He’s friendly, he’s chatty, he listens, he doesn’t need to dominate the conversation, he’s open about his feelings, and he cries at sentimental movies.
So what happened to the stuffing feelings thing?
“I’ve come a long way from what I was,” says Herbstreit. “I just evolved.”
But it was more than that. He took a huge step. It seems there’s was this funky looking OSU team doctor.
“He had this look to him,” Herbstreit recalls about the team’s therapist. It’s not an unusual comment about psychiatrists.
“It was 1990, forget 2021,” says Herbstreit about deciding to talk to a mental health professional. “I remember going into his office looking over both my shoulders, like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. I was very standoffish, giving the answers he might want to hear. I was just giving him canned answers, then he started talking to me about my background, saying tell me about your mom, your dad, and I suddenly started talking about what I’d been through. He was the first person I really talked to about all this. He became my confident, my guy. I was skipping when I went into his office. When the season ended, I went up to get three different awards, the last time I went up was to get the most valuable player, I just got it out, I said there’s this guy, it was such a credibly positive experience. It was a game changer.”
Herbstreit was the youngest of three siblings, John and Teri, who after their parents’ divorce lived with their mother, a struggling car sales person. When she didn’t sell a car, they didn’t eat. They often scrounged for food. Their father? Missing in action. But to give him his due, he may have taken one too many hard blows to the head while playing football for Ohio State. It changed him, Herbstreit’s mother claimed. Whatever the cause, his father was remote and withdrew from his kids’ life for long periods after the divorce. He married a woman who kicked John out of the house. Teri took over a big part of parenting her younger brother, giving up a big chunk of what should have been her fun years.
But Herbstreit revered his father, no matter what. When the family still lived together, he would go down to the basement and lovingly unpack his father’s football momentous from his days as a player and then coach at OSU. And there was his dad’s Captain’s Mug—the ultimate trophy.
And in Herbstreit’s last year at Ohio, he would get his own OSU Captain’s Mug.
How often does that happen?
“In 130 years in football it’s happened three times,” says Herbstreit, who after a pause adds, “some kids go through divorce angry, I never had that, I just wanted my dad. He was my hero—he was Zeus, he was Superman, when I finally got voted captain, the first person I wanted to call was my dad.”
But his father had a hard time listening. It taught Herbstreit, the father of four sons, how important it was to listen to his kids.
After his senior year, Herbstreit was offered a totally awesome job as a medical supply sales rep—six figures, a company car, and 401k plan. But he wanted to be a sports talk show host and he also had an offer doing just that. It paid $12,000 with no benefits. Seems like an easy decision. It was. Herbstreit took the radio sports job with WBNS 1460. He worked his way up.
And then he got the call. A try out for College Game Day. He was a disaster—he was visibly sweating, and his face was bright red. Afterwards the only thing Herbstreit could remember was that he jabbered away but not what he said. Oh and he did remember Lee Corso kindly telling him over and over again to relax. It was bust he thought, knowing he was up against the much better known Mike Adamle who was considered a shoo-in for the job.
But we know how it turned out. Herbstreit has been on College GameDay for more than 30 years.
As long as we’re talking football, does Herbstreit have any comments on Justin Fields, the new Chicago Bears quarterback?
“Congratulations, congratulations, you’ve got a great player, who has a chip on his shoulder and is competitive, the players will love their teammate,” says Herbstreit in what is music to a Bears fan’s ears.
Kenneth Schoon, professor emeritus at Indiana University Northwest, has immersed himself in the history of the Greater Chicago/Northwest Indiana area for decades, writing books starting from the area’s earliest beginnings such as “Calumet Beginnings: Ancient Shorelines and Settlements at the South End of Lake Michigan” and “Swedish Settlements on the South Shore of Lake Michigan.”
In his latest book, “Pullman: The Man, the Company, the Historical Park” (History Press 2021; $21.99), he showcases what once was among the ultimate company town and is now a Chicago neighborhood. George Pullman, whose last name became synonymous with plush railroad sleeper cars, believed that happy workers were productive workers and so developed his town along the western shore of Lake Calumet in the late 1800s.
I thought I knew company towns having grown up in East Chicago, Indiana my friends whose parents worked at Inland Steel lived in Sunnyside in Indiana Harbor. On the East Chicago side there was Marktown built in 1917 by Clayton Mark, for those employed at the company he owned, Mark Manufacturing.
But they’re different Schoon tells me. Both Marktown and Sunnyside were residential neighborhoods. But Pullman was an actual town with its own schools, library, churches, Masonic Hall, businesses, and even a band. Garbage and maintenance was paid for by the company.
In 2015, then President Barack Obama proclaimed Chicago’s Pullman District as a National Monument, encompassing many of its surviving buildings such as the former Pullman Palace Car Works, the Greenstone Church, formerly the Greenstone United Methodist Church, the A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum, workers’ homes, the Pullman Administration Clock Tower Building, Arcade Park, and the Florence Hotel, named after Pullman’s oldest daughter.
Though I vaguely knew about the town of Pullman, it had never been on my radar as a place to visit even though it was less than eleven miles from where I lived.
“The same with me,” says Schoon who remembered going to the Florence Hotel, one of the fanciest structures in town, to eat when young never to return until hired by the Historic Pullman Foundation to write about the history of the town for their brochure.
Today we talk about experiences, but that’s what Pullman was all about back then. His sleeper cars were luxurious, but the brand also meant great service. After the Civil War, he hired recently emancipated African American men, to work as porters becoming the largest employer of Blacks in the U.S. Their jobs were to attend to passengers needs by serving food and drink, shining shoes, tidying up the train, making sure the temperature was just right and that lighting fixtures worked. Black women were hired as maids to take care of women guests on the most expensive cars—babysitting children, helping with their baths, giving manicures, and fixing their hair.
Pullman was no dinky little town. The Arcade Theatre could accommodate 1000 people and Schoon says it was, for a time, the finest theater west of the Hudson River.
With the advent of automobiles and highways, the need for sleeper cars lessened. But luckily many of Pullman’s historic buildings remain including the Florence Hotel which is currently closed for renovations but expected to open within a few years.
“The old stable is now a store,” says Schoon. “The old fire station is still there and of the 600 residential buildings all but three are still standing.”
In an interesting tidbit, Schoon notes that Pullman was originally dry because George Pullman was a Prohibitionist. Luckily for those who wanted to imbibe, Kensington, the town next door had 23 taverns at the time.
Kenneth Schoon will be signing copies of his book during the Labor Day Weekend at the Grand Opening of Pullman National Monument Visitor Center and Pullman State Historic Site Factory. For more information about times and other events, visit www.pullmanil.org
In 1924, Peter Levant’s opened what was one of Whiting’s famous “perch palaces,” a place that served freshly caught perch right from Lake Michigan. They also advertised such menu items as steak, chicken, and, of course, this being The Region, frog legs—mostly likely from nearby Lake George.
Indeed, frog legs were so in demand that Vogel’s—which was just down the street and totally classy—raised their own frogs for legs in the lake. But that’s a different story.
Located at 1247 Calumet Avenue, Levent’s became the home of Juster’s Charcoal Broiled Steaks and then later George Diamond’s. Though my mom liked to cook, my parents were totally into eating out as well and though its been years and years, I remember going with them to George Diamond’s. It was the kind of place where everything was overlarge—the steaks, the salads, the charcoal flames, and even the menus.
That Diamond (yes, there was a George Diamond) even opened a place in Whiting shows the town’s status as a food destination. Indeed, around that time, there were a lot of great restaurants–and I’m sure I’m leaving a lot of places out–Vogel’s, Phil Smidt’s, Margaret’s Geneva House, Al Knapp’s Restaurant and Lounge, and the Roby Café. But Diamond was international. Besides his flagship restaurant at 630 S. Wabash Avenue in Chicago that was said to have cost over $1 million to renovate in a style I call 1950s swank, all red velvet and red upholstery, he had places in Las Vegas, Palm Springs, Antioch, Illinois on a golf course, and Acapulco, Mexico.
What I remember most was the house salad dressing which they bottled and sold on the premises. It was so unique that even now it has a cult-like online following with people searching for the recipe. It wasn’t Russian and it certainly wasn’t French or at least not the orangish French dressing we buy in bottles now. Diamond’s dressing was an almost translucent reddish pink. And if the recipe I found online is close to the original, it’s main ingredient was tomato soup.
There’s nothing left of Diamond’s empire today. Diamond died in 1982 at age 80 and the building housing the Wabash Avenue restaurant went up in flames in 2006. But people still remember that dressing.
George Diamond’s salad dressing
Place undiluted soup, oil, vinegar, sugar, mustard, salt, pepper, onion and garlic in a blender or food processor fitted with a metal blade. Cover and blend or process on high speed until pureed, about 2 minutes. Serve chilled. Store covered leftovers in refrigerator.
I’ll be signing copies of my book Classic Restaurants of The Region at Miles Books. 2819 Jewett Avenue in Highland on Saturday, August 21st from 11:30-3pm. For more information, 219-838-8700.
Hope to see you there.
Shelf Life 