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Title details for Shadow Men by James Polchin - Wait list

Shadow Men

The Tangled Story of Murder, Media, and Privilege That Scandalized Jazz Age America

by James Polchin
Malcolm Hillgartner
Audiobook
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On May 16, 1922, a young man's body was found on a desolate road in Westchester County. The victim was penniless ex-sailor Clarence Peters. Walter Ward, the handsome scion of the family that owned the largest chain of bread factories in the country, confessed to the crime as an act of self-defense against a violent gang of "shadow men," blackmailers who extorted their victims' moral weaknesses. From the start, one question defined the investigation: What scandalous secret could lead Ward to murder?
The media fueled a firestorm of speculation. Unscrupulous criminal attorneys, fame-seeking chorus girls, con artists, and misogynistic millionaires harnessed the power of the press to shape public perception. New York governor and future presidential candidate Al Smith and editor of the Daily News Joseph Medill Patterson leveraged the investigation to further professional ambitions. As the bereaved working-class Peters family sought to bring Ward to justice, America watched enraptured.
Capturing the extraordinary twists and turns of the case, Shadow Men conjures the excess and contradictions of the Jazz Age and reveals the true-crime origins of the media-led voyeurism that reverberates through contemporary life. It's a story of privilege and power that lays bare the social inequity that continues to influence our system of justice.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    November 5, 2024

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9798855561357
      • File size: 320676 KB
      • Duration: 11:08:04

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 22, 2024
      Polchin (Indecent Advances) combines a novelist’s gift for narrative and a journalist’s eye for detail in this riveting work of true crime. In 1922, the body of 19-year-old Clarence Peters was found on the side of a road in Westchester County, N.Y. The bullet that killed Peters only pierced his shirt, not his outer garments, leading police to believe that the body had been moved from where the murder occurred. Days afterward, New Rochelle police commissioner Walter Ward came forward to confess, claiming he acted in self-defense. According to Ward’s testimony, he was being blackmailed by Peters’s gang, to whom he’d already paid $30,000, and when Peters pointed a pistol at him during a confrontation, Ward wrested the weapon away, and fired it to save his life. Doubts about his account were widespread, and Polchin packs the narrative with cliffhangers as he takes readers through the case’s often-shocking twists, including the involvement of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had become a devout spiritualist and claimed to be able to commune with Peters’s spirit. It’s an entertaining account of an obscure yet fascinating crime. Agent: Deirdre Mullane, Mullane Literary Assoc.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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