Stranger Than Fiction
October 2026
Globetrotting Crime
By Dean Jobb
Call it a tale of four cities. Recent nonfiction books tackle crimes on both sides of the Atlantic, from France on the eve of World War Two and political corruption in 1980s Louisiana to the mysterious death of a young man who plunged into the Thames in 2019. Buckle up for a true-crime tour without leaving the comfort of your armchair.
New Orleans, 1985: When Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards stood trial—twice—on charges of fraud, obstruction of justice, and bribery, Vanity Fair magazine sent novelist Nancy Lemann to her hometown to cover the proceedings. Her dispatches were compiled in a book published in 1987 and reissued this year by the Spartanburg, South Carolina-based Hub City Writers Project. When The Ritz of the Bayou first appeared, Publishers Weekly hailed it as “a compelling evocation of idiosyncratic Southern political and judicial usages.” In a foreword to the new edition, the magazine’s longtime columnist James Wolcott describes the “unjustly neglected” work of reportage as “a true-life movie” and “a quest for truth and beauty.”
Lemann is a master of describing mood and setting. “My way of covering the case was to chronicle the vibe,” she explains in an afterword, “a sense of place, the atmosphere, the characters.” She captures the faded glory of New Orleans and its shabby, once-palatial buildings; readers can almost feel the weight of history and the sweltering tropical air. She’s just as adept at shining a spotlight on people, from the state’s smug, cigar-smoking politicians to the citizens summoned for jury selection who will say anything to get out of fulfilling their civic duty (“I think my nephew might know the Governor” was among the many lame excuses the judge fielded).
Edwards, who was in his third term as governor, was charged with reaping millions of dollars from the awarding of contracts to supply hospitals. Lemann, however, is more interested in what the case says about Louisiana’s people and politics than the sordid details of the alleged crimes. (Wolcott reveals that the initial story she filed to Vanity Fair was “all mood, séance atmosphere, and sketchy artistry” and details of the case against the governor had to be added.)
Mood and atmosphere are essential to the story and explain how a sitting governor could escape punishment in a state where a jaded populace did not demand better from its politicians. “Politics,” Lemann writes, “is not the place to look for saints.” And 1980s Louisiana was not the place to look for honesty in government. Governors enjoyed wider powers than in other states—“we elect our governors to be king,” observed one political columnist—and there was a high tolerance for what Lemann calls “human frailty,” especially in a self-made man like Edwards, a sharecropper’s son who rose from poverty to claim the governor’s mansion. Not only was Edwards acquitted after two trials, he was elected to a fourth term in 1991 before being convicted of fresh charges of corruption and imprisoned in 2002. To understand how such a shady politician could survive—and thrive—in Louisiana, read The Ritz of the Bayou.
Los Angeles, 1947: Is there a more notorious unsolved Hollywood murder than the brutal killing of Elizabeth Short, who became known as the Black Dahlia? Is there a true crime writer better equipped to tackle this perplexing case eight decades later than William J. Mann, the biographer of Hollywood stars and winner of the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award? Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood (Simon & Schuster) provides the answer: a resounding “no.”
Mann shifts the focus from the unknown killer to the vulnerable victim, who was only twenty-two when her nude, mutilated body was dumped on a vacant lot. Dark hair and black outfits prompted the reporters who sensationalized her murder to christen her the Black Dahlia, and writers then and since have cast her as one of the “seductive femme fatales of film noir,” a temptress and prostitute whose dangerous lifestyle ended in murder. Mann looks at the case through fresh eyes and his deep research and razor-sharp analysis strips away the layers of myth that have hidden the truth.
Short, he asserts, “was a young woman whose father had abandoned and rejected her, who was fired up by curiosity and wanderlust to leave her small New England town and see the world, defying increasingly draconian postwar gender expectations to settle down, marry, and have children.” She was conniving, using her charm and vulnerability to wheedle free meals and temporary lodgings from friends and strangers, but Mann makes a convincing case that she was not promiscuous and did not prostitute herself to survive. We can only know her as others saw her—she left behind no interviews or diaries—but Mann sifts the evidence to produce a nuanced portrait of a young woman who struggled to escape a troubled past and, in the first few days of 1947, fell prey to a sadistic killer. “This,” he writes, “is the first book that tries to see things as she did.”
Mann, a professor of film and popular culture and a biographer of Brando, Streisand, and Katharine Hepburn, investigated the unsolved 1922 murder of Hollywood director William Desmond Taylor in his Edgar-winning Tinseltown. He knows the territory and skilfully dispenses with theories that Short might have become entangled in the L.A. underworld or that police corruption or a coverup explains why her murderer was never caught. And while he did not set out to try to solve the crime, he eliminates one suspect after another until only two possibilities remain. Who was Elizabeth Short and who killed her? Mann deftly guides readers through the tangled evidence and recreates the landscape of postwar America as he tackles both questions in this masterful work of historical true crime.
London, 2019: In the early morning hours of November 29, a nineteen-year-old who called himself Zac Ismailov plunged into the Thames from a fifth-floor balcony of an exclusive apartment block. He was the son of a billionaire Russian oligarch and his Swiss-born mother, a former model, lived in Dubai with his five siblings. His death appeared to be a suicide—footage captured by a surveillance camera installed at the headquarters of the intelligence agency MI6, directly across the river, showed him emerging onto the balcony and peering over the edge before he jumped to his death.
This, however, was no open-and-shut case. The victim’s real name was Zac Brettler and he was the second of two children of a London financial consultant and his wife, a freelance journalist. His parents were shocked to discover their troubled son had concocted a fantasy life, complete with elaborate but bogus international deals. His biggest gambit was a claim he was about to inherit £200 million from his late father’s estate. This tall tale attracted the interest of some unscrupulous characters who were not pleased when they discovered they had been hoodwinked. Was Brettler driven by despair when he jumped from the balcony, or was he fleeing the apartment and making a desperate bid to escape? Had his lies given someone inside a motive for murder?
Patrick Radden Keefe, the acclaimed author and staff writer for The New Yorker, unravels the threads of Brettler’s double life and suspicious death in London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth (Doubleday). An incredible feat of reportage and brilliantly told, it’s an addictive read and one of the best true-crime books of 2026. It’s more than an indictment of a flawed Scotland Yard investigation and a window into the anguish of a family coping with unimaginable grief. It’s a tale of two Londons—the postcard-perfect one visitors and most residents see and a festering underworld of crooks, corruption, dirty money, and shady emigres, where a poser like Zac Brettler looked like an easy mark. At least, until his lies were exposed.
The Thames is a tidal river and for centuries the ebb and flow of its waters have offered killers a convenient means to dispose of their victims. Charles Dickens described the river as “an image of death” in “the midst of the great city’s life . . . hiding strange things in its mud, running away with suicides and accidentally drowned bodies,” as well as murdered ones. Brettler’s body appears to have stayed put until it was found at dawn, thanks to an eddy created by a bridge abutment. This pinpointed where he entered the water, yielded the MI6 surveillance images, and identified two suspects. Follow Keefe’s search for answers and find out if this lucky break was enough to expose who killed Brettler and why.
Paris, 1937: Eugen Weidmann may be the most ruthless serial killer you’ve never heard of. On the eve of World War Two he murdered five people—and induced an accomplice to kill a sixth—from his base, a dingy house in the Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud, near Versailles. One of his victims was a young American tourist, Jean De Koven, and this put the case on the radar of Janet Flanner, the Paris-based columnist for The New Yorker, a journalistic legend who chronicled European life and politics under the pseudonym Genêt.
Weidmann, she wrote, engineered “one of the most complicated queer mass murders that ever took place here,” and this was no exaggeration. He enlisted two Frenchmen he had met in a German prison to lure tourists and businessmen to secluded spots where they were murdered and robbed. He stalked his prey in hotel lobbies and used classified ads to entice entrepreneurs looking for investors willing to finance their schemes. One of Weidmann’s victims, a cab driver, was killed for his car, so his team would be able to drive others to secluded areas. Most were killed without warning and execution-style, with a single bullet to the back of the head.
The Vancouver, British Columbia-based author and scholar Mark Braude tells the intertwined stories of Flanner and her murderous subject in The Typewriter and the Guillotine: An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII (Grand Central Publishing). The narrative focuses more on the typewriter than the guillotine, however, as Flanner’s career and accomplishments—and her efforts to alert Americans to the danger of Adolph Hitler’s war-mongering fascist regime—take center stage. Braude appears to have had little success tracing Weidmann’s past, which included a stint working on the Canadian Prairies as a young man that ended with his first criminal conviction, for theft, and a three-month jail sentence. Until his murder spree begins, at almost the halfway point in the book, the story is all about Flanner and the dark clouds threatening Europe.
Flanner’s perceptive pieces in The New Yorker on Weidmann’s arrest and trial captured the tawdriness of his crimes. He killed without hesitation, sometimes for as little as a few hundred francs, and kept some of his victims’ possessions as trophies; when arrested, he was wearing suspenders stripped from a man he had lured to his death. The Typewriter and the Guillotine captures a vivid snapshot of a moment in time, when a German serial killer was menacing France and the worst mass murderer of the twentieth century was about to plunge the world into war. © 2026 by Dean Jobb
—
Dean Jobb’s latest true crime book, A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue (Algonquin Books and HarperCollins Canada), is a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a Canadian bestseller. It’s the story of Arthur Barry, who charmed the elite of 1920s New York City while planning and executing some of the most brazen jewel thefts in history. Find him at deanjobb.com