The Footsteps Die Out Forever

Got an e-mail yesterday from a man named Mark Moore, who is investigating a homicide case  that has haunted him for years: the murder of three young boys on the Gila River Indian Reservation in the summer of 1976.  The boys’ bodies were found near the railroad tracks southeast of Phoenix.  They had been stabbed to death. Mark went to grade school with Richard Chase, the oldest of the three victims. Mark contacted me because I wrote about the case about a decade ago as part of a series on Unsolved Mysteries in Arizona.  If, after all these years, any of you have any information on this case, contact Mark at markuswelby66@yahoo.com or send me a message.  I’m not sure I have my notes on the case any more.  If I do, I’ll write more about it in this blog and pass the information to Mark.  A very sad echo from the past.  Here’s the Unsolved Mystery story: http://www.azcentral.com/news/famous/articles/0520Unsolved-Boys20.html?&wired


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Can you format an ebook?

Ebooks are all the rage, and if you have a book-length manuscript written, or even a long article, you can upload it and sell it on Amazon and Smashwords.  The question is: can you format it, and how tough is that?  The answers are, “Yes,” and “Kind of tough, but possible if you stick with it.”  By far the best place to start is uploading to Amazon, and the best place to learn how to do that is a blog called CJ’s Easy as Pie.  CJ, a very nice lady, takes you step by step through the process.  Also download the Smashwords formatting guide and read it carefully.  If you have a friend who knows a little HTML, all the better.  Give it a shot.  The feeling of control in being able to publish your own work is awesome!


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The Plea of Tony Mancini

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was recently reviewing photos related to a 1931 American trunk murder.  They put me in mind of the Brighton Trunk Murder trial in 1934 in London, as described in A Second Companion to Murder.  The accused was Tony Mancini, a thief and lowlife.  The body of Violette Kaye, a prostitute with whom Mancini had been living, had been found in a trunk in his residence.  He asserted she had died in a drunken fall.  Who would believe him?  However, he was defended by the finest advocate in England, Mr. Norman Birkett, and Birkett made an impassioned argument on his behalf.  Mancini’s story was simple.  He had not fetched the police when he found Kaye dead, he said, because, “Where the police are concerned, a man who’s got convictions never gets a square deal.”  Mancini said he had no ill feeling against Kaye.  “I did not kill her,” he said.  “Strange as it is, I used to love her.”  The jury acquitted him.


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The Plea of Tony Mancini

I was recently examining photos dealing with a 1931 American trunk murder.  They put me in mind of the Brighton Trunk Murder trial in 1934 in London, as described in A Second Companion to Murder.  The accused was Tony Mancini, a thief and lowlife.  The body of Violette Kaye, a prostitute with whom Mancini lived, had been found in a trunk at his residence.  Mancini asserted she had died in a drunken fall, but who was to believe him? Fortunately for him, the greatest advocate in England, Norman Birkett, took his case, and made an impassioned argument on his behalf.  Mancini’s case was simple. He did not fetch the police when he found Kaye dead, he said, because “Where the police are concerned, a man who’s got convictions never gets a square deal.”  Mancini said he had no ill will against Violette Kaye. “I did not kill her,” he said. “Strange as it is, I used to love her.”   The jury acquitted.


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Flat-tops and firearms

I had almost forgotten the hair style referred to as the “flat-top” until I saw it referred to in the 1966 thriller  The Vengeance Man by Dan Marlowe.  Used to be plenty of flat-tops and firearms around in southeastern Nebraska, where I grew up.  The Vengeance Man has only one flat-top, but there are guns galore.


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I’ve caught the ebook bug

I’m getting very busy now that I’ve caught the ebook bug.  On Amazon and Smashwords I just published a self-help ebook called Finnegan’s Way: The Secret Power of Doing Things Badly.  I also plan to publish two more ebooks in the next couple of months.  One will be a thriller called Grace Humiston and the Vanishing.  It’s a novel based on a actual murder investigation in New York City in 1917.

Grace Humiston

The second “ebook” will in fact be a long nonfiction article, tentatively titled The Crime Lawyer, which will tell the true story of Humiston and her exploits.  Also, I’m involved in a project with the executor and the agent of the late hardboiled writer Dan J. Marlowe. We’re going to publish several of Marlowe’s novels as ebooks.

At some point, I will actually publish the biography of Marlowe that I’ve been working on for several years.  So stay tuned.


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Scanning old paperbacks

If you have occasion to scan an old paperback (or hardback) into a digital file for publishing it as an ebook, proof the resulting copy with an eagle eye.  I spent a week proofing Dan J. Marlowe’s The Vengeance Man, first published in 1966, and I must have turned up 40 or 50 instances of mistakes the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software made in scanning the book.  The process works, but it is labor-intensive. Eventually we’ll get to Marlowe’s novel The Fatal Frails, first published in 1960.  We’ll proof it, and it will come out looking very nice, I’m sure, but it will be hard to capture the flavor of the original cover.


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