Stranger Than Fiction
Monthly true-crime columns by Dean Jobb
THIS MONTH’S COLUMN
Penny (Press) Dreadfuls
by Dean Jobb
At Christmastime in 1843, Polly Bodine murdered her sister-in-law and her infant child, and stole jewelry, silverware, and other valuables before setting fire to their Staten Island home to destroy the evidence of her crime. That, at least, was the verdict of New York City’s feisty and trashy penny press. Bodine was convicted in print and in the court of public opinion long before she stood trial in court of a law, where a starkly different outcome awaited her. READ MORE
PAST COLUMNS
2024
January 2024
Arthur Conan Doyle and the Case of the Spurned Lover
February 2024
Storied Crimes
March 2024
Wayward Son
April 2024
Scam Artists
May 2024
A Man of Means
June 2024
Guys and Dolls
2023
January 2023
Arthur Conan Doyle and the ‘Frightful Murders at Walworth’
February 2023
Confidence Tricks
March 2023
The Case of the Speedy President
April 2023
Just the Facts
May 2023
The Jazz Age Crimes of Dapper Don Collins
June 2023
Character Studies
July 2023
Delusions of Grandeur: The Scandalous Crime of a Los Angeles Millionaire
August 2023
Great Escapes
September 2023
The “Human Bomb”: John Thornburg and the Great Chanute Bank Robbery of 1939
October 2023
Crimes of a Century (Ago)
November 2023
Witness to an Execution
December 2023
Political Crimes
2022
January 2022
Arthur Conan Doyle and Murder in England’s “Smiling and Beautiful Countryside”
February 2022
Murder Most Irish
March 2022
A Taste for Poison: The Curious Case of Dr. Lamson
April 2022
Spy Versus Spy
May 2022
The “Bogus Priest” and the Murdered President
June 2022
Frontier Justice
July 2022
Murder in the Air? The Mysterious Death of Stunt Pilot B.H. DeLay
August 2022
True Crime Stories
September 2022
How Do You Say Murder? When a Dispute Over the Pronunciation of “Newfoundland” Turned Deadly
October 2022
Ghoulish Tales
November 2022
“I’ve Got a Bridge to Sell You”: The Con Artist Who Peddled the Brooklyn Bridge
December 2022
Real-Life Mysteries
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Author & Journalist
The realms of crime fiction and true crime have many intersections. Fiction writers often draw on actual investigative techniques, police procedures, and even notorious crime cases in fashioning their stories, and, conversely, fictional sleuths and their methods have occasionally influenced the practices of actual police forces. In this way, the interests of readers of crime fiction and true crime naturally dovetail, yet until 2018 the latter field had never been represented in EQMM. In January of 2018, we launched a new department to remedy that omission. Entitled Stranger Than Fiction, and written by award-winning Canadian author and journalist Dean Jobb, the column was offered free, exclusively here on our website, exploring true crime through reviews of true-crime books and original articles on real-world crimes and criminals. The feature proved so popular online that it was incorporated into the magazine itself (both print and digital editions) as of May/June 2020. In each bimonthly issue of the magazine, readers will now find an original true crime article by Dean Jobb, with supplemental material, including documents and photos, right here on our website, under the Stranger Than Fiction banner. On alternate months (when there is no new issue of the magazine releasing), you’ll still find web-exclusive true crime book reviews by Dean Jobb right here.
A true-crime specialist with more than a half-dozen titles in print, Dean Jobb is the author of one the most notable true-crime works in recent years, Empire of Deception. The story of a master swindler in 1920s Chicago, the book won both the Crime Writers of Canada and Chicago Writers Association awards, and earned rave reviews. The New York Times Book Review called it “intoxicating and impressively researched.” Readers will also want to look for the upcoming Jobb title The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream (Algonquin Books and HarperCollins Canada, 2021). In addition to pursuing his literary and journalistic careers, Dean Jobb teaches in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
We hope you’ll continue to enjoy this newest of EQMM’s departments, which has joined the Jury Box and Blog Bytes in EQMM’s long tradition of cutting-edge reviewing and scholarship.
— Janet Hutchings, Editor in Chief