Madison Square Tragedy: The Murder of Stanford White (Treasury of XXth Century Murder)
In this entry in his series recounting historical murder cases, Geary tackles an infamous crime that scandalized New York City in 1901: the shooting of celebrated architect Stanford White by a decadent young millionaire, Harry Thaw, to avenge the honor of his wife, showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, who had an affair with White before their marriage. Geary chronicles the lives of the principals—White’s impressive architectural achievements and decadent playboy lifestyle, Nesbit’s modeling and theatrical career, and Thaw’s mental illness and drug use—before recounting the fatal night when their paths converged and White was gunned down in the rooftop theater of his best-known structure, Madison Square Garden. The tragedy was compounded by a series of trials that spawned sensationalized newspaper coverage, generating a notoriety that persists to this day. Geary’s old-fashioned black-and-white line drawings, vividly evoking the turn-of-the-century milieu, and his reliance on text-heavy captions as a sort of voice-over impart a documentary air to his thoroughly researched account. A standout entry in Geary’s consistently fascinating true-crime series. --Gordon Flagg