When I was in my junior year of high school, my history teacher assigned us a project to write about something relating to the 1920s. I chose “Famous Crimes of the 1920s,” and I spent most of my time researching two still technically unsolved 1922 murders: that of the Hollywood director William Desmond Taylor (the subject, many years later, of William Mann’s vividly drawn 2014 Edgar winner, Tinseltown), and the shooting deaths of New Brunswick, New Jersey, minister Edward Hall and his lover, choir singer Eleanor Mills. This second set of murders is now the subject of Vanity Fair media reporter Joe Pompeo’s exhaustively researched book, Blood & Ink.
Both Taylor’s murder and those of Hall and Mills are remembered today because of their high scandal-and-sin quotient, major investigative errors by law enforcement, and changing technology (radio, newswires) that disseminated the news nationally in an unprecedented way. Though Mann focused more on illuminating the myriad dysfunctional personalities at the center of the Taylor case, Pompeo infuses more energy into the media coverage of Hall-Mills, and the tabloid wars that resulted from, and forever contaminated, the story.
