Author: Peter J. Heck
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
ISBN: 1479428892
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 780
Book Description
There was a ghastly murder in New York City, and Mark Twain's address was in the dead man's pocket. But even more alarming was that Twain had just received a message sent by anold friend from his riverboat days -- and the handwriting matched the note found on the corpse. So with his new secretary, Wentworth Cabot, Twain caught a steamboat bound for New Orleans. On board were all matter of people -- wealthy tourists and old river rats, literary amateurs and high-stakes gamblers . . . and a determined killer whose only goal was to bring Mark Twain's celebrated career to a stop!
Death on the Mississippi: The Mark Twain Mysteries #1
Author: Peter J. Heck
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
ISBN: 1479428892
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 780
Book Description
There was a ghastly murder in New York City, and Mark Twain's address was in the dead man's pocket. But even more alarming was that Twain had just received a message sent by anold friend from his riverboat days -- and the handwriting matched the note found on the corpse. So with his new secretary, Wentworth Cabot, Twain caught a steamboat bound for New Orleans. On board were all matter of people -- wealthy tourists and old river rats, literary amateurs and high-stakes gamblers . . . and a determined killer whose only goal was to bring Mark Twain's celebrated career to a stop!
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
ISBN: 1479428892
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 780
Book Description
There was a ghastly murder in New York City, and Mark Twain's address was in the dead man's pocket. But even more alarming was that Twain had just received a message sent by anold friend from his riverboat days -- and the handwriting matched the note found on the corpse. So with his new secretary, Wentworth Cabot, Twain caught a steamboat bound for New Orleans. On board were all matter of people -- wealthy tourists and old river rats, literary amateurs and high-stakes gamblers . . . and a determined killer whose only goal was to bring Mark Twain's celebrated career to a stop!
Death in the Delta
Author: Molly Walling
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1617036102
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Book Description
Growing up, Molly Walling could not fathom the source of the dark and intense discomfort in her family home. Then in 2006 she discovered her father's complicity in the murder of two black men on December 12, 1946, in Anguilla, deep in the Mississippi Delta. Death in the Delta tells the story of one woman's search for the truth behind a closely held, sixty-year old family secret. Though the author's mother and father decided that they would protect their three children from that past, its effect was profound. When the story of a fatal shoot-out surfaced, apprehension turned into a devouring need to know. Each of Walling's trips from North Carolina to the Delta brought unsettling and unexpected clues. After a hearing before an all-white grand jury, her father's case was not prosecuted. Indeed, it appeared as if the incident never occurred, and he resumed his life as a small-town newspaper editor. Yet family members of one of the victims tell her their stories. A ninety-three-year-old black historian and witness gives context and advice. A county attorney suggests her family's history of commingling with black women was at the heart of the deadly confrontation. Firsthand the author recognizes how privilege, entitlement, and racial bias in a wealthy, landed southern family resulted in a deadly abuse of power followed by a stifling, decades-long cover up. Death in the Delta is a deeply personal account of a quest to confront a terrible legacy. Against the advice and warnings of family, Walling exposes her father's guilty agency in the deaths of Simon Toombs and David Jones. She also exposes his gift as a writer and creative thinker. The author, grappling with wrenching issues of family and honor, was long conflicted about making this story public. But her mission became one of hope that confronting the truth might somehow move others toward healing and reconciliation.
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1617036102
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Book Description
Growing up, Molly Walling could not fathom the source of the dark and intense discomfort in her family home. Then in 2006 she discovered her father's complicity in the murder of two black men on December 12, 1946, in Anguilla, deep in the Mississippi Delta. Death in the Delta tells the story of one woman's search for the truth behind a closely held, sixty-year old family secret. Though the author's mother and father decided that they would protect their three children from that past, its effect was profound. When the story of a fatal shoot-out surfaced, apprehension turned into a devouring need to know. Each of Walling's trips from North Carolina to the Delta brought unsettling and unexpected clues. After a hearing before an all-white grand jury, her father's case was not prosecuted. Indeed, it appeared as if the incident never occurred, and he resumed his life as a small-town newspaper editor. Yet family members of one of the victims tell her their stories. A ninety-three-year-old black historian and witness gives context and advice. A county attorney suggests her family's history of commingling with black women was at the heart of the deadly confrontation. Firsthand the author recognizes how privilege, entitlement, and racial bias in a wealthy, landed southern family resulted in a deadly abuse of power followed by a stifling, decades-long cover up. Death in the Delta is a deeply personal account of a quest to confront a terrible legacy. Against the advice and warnings of family, Walling exposes her father's guilty agency in the deaths of Simon Toombs and David Jones. She also exposes his gift as a writer and creative thinker. The author, grappling with wrenching issues of family and honor, was long conflicted about making this story public. But her mission became one of hope that confronting the truth might somehow move others toward healing and reconciliation.
One Night in Mississippi
Author: Craig Shreve
Publisher: Dundurn
ISBN: 145973100X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161
Book Description
After fifty years of guilt over his brother’s brutal murder in Civil Rights–era Mississippi, Warren Williams decides to renew his fight to bring the men responsible to justice. His efforts put him face-to-face with one of the murderers, Earl Olsen, in a remote Ontario town where a contest of wits will end in death.
Publisher: Dundurn
ISBN: 145973100X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161
Book Description
After fifty years of guilt over his brother’s brutal murder in Civil Rights–era Mississippi, Warren Williams decides to renew his fight to bring the men responsible to justice. His efforts put him face-to-face with one of the murderers, Earl Olsen, in a remote Ontario town where a contest of wits will end in death.
Deer Creek Drive
Author: Beverly Lowry
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1984898361
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Book Description
The stunning true story of a murder that rocked the Mississippi Delta and forever shaped one author’s life and perception of home. “Mix together a bloody murder in a privileged white family, a false accusation against a Black man, a suspicious town, a sensational trial with colorful lawyers, and a punishment that didn’t fit the crime, and you have the best of southern gothic fiction. But the very best part is that the story is true.” —John Grisham In 1948, in the most stubbornly Dixiefied corner of the Jim Crow south, society matron Idella Thompson was viciously murdered in her own home: stabbed at least 150 times and left facedown in one of the bathrooms. Her daughter, Ruth Dickins, was the only other person in the house. She told authorities a Black man she didn’t recognize had fled the scene, but no evidence of the man's presence was uncovered. When Dickins herself was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, the community exploded. Petitions pleading for her release were drafted, signed, and circulated, and after only six years, the governor of Mississippi granted Ruth Dickins an indefinite suspension of her sentence and she was set free. In Deer Creek Drive, Beverly Lowry—who was ten at the time of the murder and lived mere miles from the Thompsons’ home—tells a story of white privilege that still has ramifications today, and reflects on the brutal crime, its aftermath, and the ways it clarified her own upbringing in Mississippi.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1984898361
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Book Description
The stunning true story of a murder that rocked the Mississippi Delta and forever shaped one author’s life and perception of home. “Mix together a bloody murder in a privileged white family, a false accusation against a Black man, a suspicious town, a sensational trial with colorful lawyers, and a punishment that didn’t fit the crime, and you have the best of southern gothic fiction. But the very best part is that the story is true.” —John Grisham In 1948, in the most stubbornly Dixiefied corner of the Jim Crow south, society matron Idella Thompson was viciously murdered in her own home: stabbed at least 150 times and left facedown in one of the bathrooms. Her daughter, Ruth Dickins, was the only other person in the house. She told authorities a Black man she didn’t recognize had fled the scene, but no evidence of the man's presence was uncovered. When Dickins herself was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, the community exploded. Petitions pleading for her release were drafted, signed, and circulated, and after only six years, the governor of Mississippi granted Ruth Dickins an indefinite suspension of her sentence and she was set free. In Deer Creek Drive, Beverly Lowry—who was ten at the time of the murder and lived mere miles from the Thompsons’ home—tells a story of white privilege that still has ramifications today, and reflects on the brutal crime, its aftermath, and the ways it clarified her own upbringing in Mississippi.
Murder in McComb
Author: Trent Brown
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807173657
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 318
Book Description
What remained of the badly decomposed body of twelve-year-old Tina Marie Andrews was discovered underneath a discarded sofa in the woods outside of McComb, Mississippi, on August 23, 1969. Ten days earlier, Andrews and a friend had accepted a ride home after leaving the Tiger’s Den, a local teenage hangout, but they were driven instead to the remote area where Andrews was eventually murdered. Although eyewitness testimony pointed to two local police officers, no one was ever convicted of this brutal crime, and to this day the case remains officially unsolved. Contemporary local newspaper coverage notwithstanding, the story of Andrews’s murder has not been told. Indeed, many people in the McComb community still, more than fifty years later, hesitate to speak of the tragedy. Trent Brown’s Murder in McComb is the first comprehensive examination of this case, the lengthy investigation into it, and the two extended trials that followed. Brown also explores the public shaming of the state’s main witness, a fifteen-year-old unwed mother, and the subsequent desecration of Andrews’s grave. Set against the uneasy backdrop of the civil rights movement, Brown’s study deftly reconstructs various accounts of the murder, explains why the juries reached the verdicts they did, and explores the broader forces that shaped the community in which Andrews lived and died. Unlike so many other accounts of violence in the Jim Crow South, racial animus was not the driving force behind Andrews’s murder; in fact, most of the individuals central to the case, from the sheriff to the judges to the victim, were white. Yet Andrews, as well as her friend Billie Jo Lambert, the state’s key witness, were “girls of ill repute,” as one defense attorney put it. To many people in McComb, Tina and Billie Jo were “trashy” children whose circumstances reflected their families’ low socioeconomic standing. In the end, Brown suggests that Tina Andrews had the great misfortune to be murdered in a town where the locals were overly eager to support law, order, and stability—instead of true justice—amid the tense and uncertain times during and after the civil rights movement.
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807173657
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 318
Book Description
What remained of the badly decomposed body of twelve-year-old Tina Marie Andrews was discovered underneath a discarded sofa in the woods outside of McComb, Mississippi, on August 23, 1969. Ten days earlier, Andrews and a friend had accepted a ride home after leaving the Tiger’s Den, a local teenage hangout, but they were driven instead to the remote area where Andrews was eventually murdered. Although eyewitness testimony pointed to two local police officers, no one was ever convicted of this brutal crime, and to this day the case remains officially unsolved. Contemporary local newspaper coverage notwithstanding, the story of Andrews’s murder has not been told. Indeed, many people in the McComb community still, more than fifty years later, hesitate to speak of the tragedy. Trent Brown’s Murder in McComb is the first comprehensive examination of this case, the lengthy investigation into it, and the two extended trials that followed. Brown also explores the public shaming of the state’s main witness, a fifteen-year-old unwed mother, and the subsequent desecration of Andrews’s grave. Set against the uneasy backdrop of the civil rights movement, Brown’s study deftly reconstructs various accounts of the murder, explains why the juries reached the verdicts they did, and explores the broader forces that shaped the community in which Andrews lived and died. Unlike so many other accounts of violence in the Jim Crow South, racial animus was not the driving force behind Andrews’s murder; in fact, most of the individuals central to the case, from the sheriff to the judges to the victim, were white. Yet Andrews, as well as her friend Billie Jo Lambert, the state’s key witness, were “girls of ill repute,” as one defense attorney put it. To many people in McComb, Tina and Billie Jo were “trashy” children whose circumstances reflected their families’ low socioeconomic standing. In the end, Brown suggests that Tina Andrews had the great misfortune to be murdered in a town where the locals were overly eager to support law, order, and stability—instead of true justice—amid the tense and uncertain times during and after the civil rights movement.
Murder in Mississippi
Author: John Safran
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0349134278
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
In 2009 John Safran, a controversial Australian journalist, spent an uneasy few days interviewing one of Mississippi's most notorious white supremacists. A year later, he hears that the man has been murdered by a young black man. But this is far from a straightforward race killing. Safran flies back to Mississippi in a bid to discover what really happened, immersing himself in a world of clashing white separatists, black lawyers, police investigators, oddball neighbours and the killer himself. In the end, he discovers just how profoundly complex the truth about someone's life - and death - can be. A brilliantly innovative true-crime story. Safran paints an engrossing and revealing portrait of race, money, sex and power in the modern American South. 'John Safran's captivating inquiry into a murder in darkest Mississippi is by turns informative, frightening and hilarious' - John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0349134278
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
In 2009 John Safran, a controversial Australian journalist, spent an uneasy few days interviewing one of Mississippi's most notorious white supremacists. A year later, he hears that the man has been murdered by a young black man. But this is far from a straightforward race killing. Safran flies back to Mississippi in a bid to discover what really happened, immersing himself in a world of clashing white separatists, black lawyers, police investigators, oddball neighbours and the killer himself. In the end, he discovers just how profoundly complex the truth about someone's life - and death - can be. A brilliantly innovative true-crime story. Safran paints an engrossing and revealing portrait of race, money, sex and power in the modern American South. 'John Safran's captivating inquiry into a murder in darkest Mississippi is by turns informative, frightening and hilarious' - John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
Mississippi Trial, 1955
Author: Chris Crowe
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440650314
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Book Description
As the fiftieth anniversary approaches, there's a renewed interest in this infamous 1955 murder case, which made a lasting mark on American culture, as well as the future Civil Rights Movement. Chris Crowe's IRA Award-winning novel and his gripping, photo-illustrated nonfiction work are currently the only books on the teenager's murder written for young adults.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440650314
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Book Description
As the fiftieth anniversary approaches, there's a renewed interest in this infamous 1955 murder case, which made a lasting mark on American culture, as well as the future Civil Rights Movement. Chris Crowe's IRA Award-winning novel and his gripping, photo-illustrated nonfiction work are currently the only books on the teenager's murder written for young adults.
Ghosts of Mississippi
Author: Maryanne Vollers
Publisher: Little Brown & Company
ISBN: 9780316914857
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 411
Book Description
An examination of a noted civil rights case involving the murder of an NAACP official and his killer's three trials draws comparisons between the case and the racial climate in the Deep South
Publisher: Little Brown & Company
ISBN: 9780316914857
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 411
Book Description
An examination of a noted civil rights case involving the murder of an NAACP official and his killer's three trials draws comparisons between the case and the racial climate in the Deep South
Till Death Do Us Part
Author: Allan Amanik
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496827929
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285
Book Description
Contributions by Allan Amanik, Kelly B. Arehart, Sue Fawn Chung, Kami Fletcher, Rosina Hassoun, James S. Pula, Jeffrey E. Smith, and Martina Will de Chaparro Till Death Do Us Part: American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders Uncrossed explores the tendency among most Americans to separate their dead along communal lines rooted in race, faith, ethnicity, or social standing and asks what a deeper exploration of that phenomenon can tell us about American history more broadly. Comparative in scope, and regionally diverse, chapters look to immigrants, communities of color, the colonized, the enslaved, rich and poor, and religious minorities as they buried kith and kin in locales spanning the Northeast to the Spanish American Southwest. Whether African Americans, Muslim or Christian Arabs, Indians, mestizos, Chinese, Jews, Poles, Catholics, Protestants, or various whites of European descent, one thing that united these Americans was a drive to keep their dead apart. At times, they did so for internal preference. At others, it was a function of external prejudice. Invisible and institutional borders built around and into ethnic cemeteries also tell a powerful story of the ways in which Americans have negotiated race, culture, class, national origin, and religious difference in the United States during its formative centuries.
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496827929
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285
Book Description
Contributions by Allan Amanik, Kelly B. Arehart, Sue Fawn Chung, Kami Fletcher, Rosina Hassoun, James S. Pula, Jeffrey E. Smith, and Martina Will de Chaparro Till Death Do Us Part: American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders Uncrossed explores the tendency among most Americans to separate their dead along communal lines rooted in race, faith, ethnicity, or social standing and asks what a deeper exploration of that phenomenon can tell us about American history more broadly. Comparative in scope, and regionally diverse, chapters look to immigrants, communities of color, the colonized, the enslaved, rich and poor, and religious minorities as they buried kith and kin in locales spanning the Northeast to the Spanish American Southwest. Whether African Americans, Muslim or Christian Arabs, Indians, mestizos, Chinese, Jews, Poles, Catholics, Protestants, or various whites of European descent, one thing that united these Americans was a drive to keep their dead apart. At times, they did so for internal preference. At others, it was a function of external prejudice. Invisible and institutional borders built around and into ethnic cemeteries also tell a powerful story of the ways in which Americans have negotiated race, culture, class, national origin, and religious difference in the United States during its formative centuries.
Remembering Emmett Till
Author: Dave Tell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022655967X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323
Book Description
Take a drive through the Mississippi Delta today and you’ll find a landscape dotted with memorials to major figures and events from the civil rights movement. Perhaps the most chilling are those devoted to the murder of Emmett Till, a tragedy of hate and injustice that became a beacon in the fight for racial equality. The ways this event is remembered have been fraught from the beginning, revealing currents of controversy, patronage, and racism lurking just behind the placid facades of historical markers. In Remembering Emmett Till, Dave Tell gives us five accounts of the commemoration of this infamous crime. In a development no one could have foreseen, Till’s murder—one of the darkest moments in the region’s history—has become an economic driver for the Delta. Historical tourism has transformed seemingly innocuous places like bridges, boat landings, gas stations, and riverbeds into sites of racial politics, reminders of the still-unsettled question of how best to remember the victim of this heinous crime. Tell builds an insightful and persuasive case for how these memorials have altered the Delta’s physical and cultural landscape, drawing potent connections between the dawn of the civil rights era and our own moment of renewed fire for racial justice.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022655967X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323
Book Description
Take a drive through the Mississippi Delta today and you’ll find a landscape dotted with memorials to major figures and events from the civil rights movement. Perhaps the most chilling are those devoted to the murder of Emmett Till, a tragedy of hate and injustice that became a beacon in the fight for racial equality. The ways this event is remembered have been fraught from the beginning, revealing currents of controversy, patronage, and racism lurking just behind the placid facades of historical markers. In Remembering Emmett Till, Dave Tell gives us five accounts of the commemoration of this infamous crime. In a development no one could have foreseen, Till’s murder—one of the darkest moments in the region’s history—has become an economic driver for the Delta. Historical tourism has transformed seemingly innocuous places like bridges, boat landings, gas stations, and riverbeds into sites of racial politics, reminders of the still-unsettled question of how best to remember the victim of this heinous crime. Tell builds an insightful and persuasive case for how these memorials have altered the Delta’s physical and cultural landscape, drawing potent connections between the dawn of the civil rights era and our own moment of renewed fire for racial justice.