An Encyclopedia of Murder

A Miscellany of Murder

From History and Literature to True Crime and Television, a Killer Selection of Trivia

Executed by The Monday Murder Club

This could be subtitled, “Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Murder But Were Afraid to Ask.” What a great book! You’ll find terrific tidbits on everything from true crime, real serial killers, and your favorite fictional detectives and villains to crimes of Biblical proportions . . . literally. Sometimes you even get to test your knowledge to see how well versed you are on a particularly deadly subject.

Did you know Lizzie Borden didn’t actually give her mother (it was her step-mother) forty whacks? How many years was “Rockford Files” on TV? Who played Ted Bundy in the TV movie, “The Deliberate Stranger?” What former Seattle police officer now writes true crime books? You’ll find answers to these and thousands of other questions in A Miscellany of Murder.

The information in this book was compiled by a group of writers who called themselves the Monday Murder Club. Andy McAleer, Paula Munier, Stephen D. Rogers, James Shannon and Mo Walsh get together every week. They pass around copies of their material, read the pieces aloud, and then critique them in writing and orally. Obviously they’re like most of us, true fans of murder in any element. They’ve collected enough trivia to have their own version of the game and it’s fascinating to read.

The book is dedicated to “mystery lovers and true crime aficionados everywhere” and has a foreword written by Hallie Ephron. It’s laid out in a manner for quick reads or has a great index in the back for searching for the particular murder or murderer you have an interest in.

The book is divided into the seven deadly sins and each murder mentioned is linked to one of these causes. Take lust for example:

Lust for sex. Lust for power. Lust for life—and death. The Marquis de Sade knew whereof he spoke. As the first of the seven deadly sins, lust commands a special place in the lexicon of transgression. It’s a trigger-happy emotion that can turn from inarticulate ardor to homicidal mania on a dime. Lust is the sin that drives ordinary people to extraordinary measures, one corpse—or more—at a time.

And their example of the sin action:

Lust for Death

Jane Toppan liked to climb into bed with her dying patients and hold them close as they began to slip away from the world of the living. In fact, she liked to overdose them with morphine, then bring them back from the brink of death with atropine before finally killing them off for good. Toppan, born in Boston in 1857, worked as a nurse at Cambridge Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital before embarking on a twenty-year career as a private nurse and murderer. She finally overreached herself in 1901, when four members of one family died under her care in a six-week period. All were given lethal amounts of morphine. When apprehended, Toppan confessed to killing thirty-one people and said she was sexually aroused by the act of killing-reviving-killing. She was confined to a state mental institution until she died at age eighty-one.

You take every sin and every action and you’ve got a book filled with facts and trivia that will keep you up at night checking the latches on doors and windows.

There are also many ways to give your brain a good workout. The book is filled with mix and match and Q&A puzzles that are loads of fun:

Lazy Does It

1. Who gave us his take of the court system in The Ways of the Hour, published in 1850?

2. Who introduced legal loopholer attorney Randolph Mason in the 1896 collection of short stories titled, The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason?

3. Which pulp writer, turned bestselling creator of Nero Wolfe, published the 20,000- word legal novella Justice Ends at Home in All-Story magazine?

Find the answers at the end of the blog.

In between the stories and tidbits of information are famous quotes about murder and murderers. This is one of my particular favorites:

“Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them.” —Edgar Watson Howe

If you’d like to have a copy of A Miscellany of Murder, signed by all the authors, share your idea about the perfect murder. It can’t be too difficult, right? People have been doing it for years.

The contest will be on until 7 p.m. Wednesday and the winner will be announced on Friday!

If you need some good ideas, you may want to go ahead and buy a copy of the book.

Answers to the Lazy quiz: 1) James Fenimore Cooper; 2) Melville Davisson Post; 3) Rex Stout, whose 1915 story features lazy, slow-witted, yet likable-lawyer Simon Leg.