THE MAD SCULPTOR

In the tradition of Karen Abbott’s Sin in the Second City, Paula Uruburu’s American Eve, Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City, and of course Harold’s own highly regarded work, this is the best of historical true crime.

Robert Irwin, the mad sculptor of the title, was a moderately talented artist with a tortured past when he killed three people, including pulp magazine pinup Veronica Gedeon, over the Easter weekend in 1937 in New York City’s Beekman Hill neighborhood. The colorful supporting cast includes the renowned and influential psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham, the legendary defense attorney Samuel Leibowitz (one of the most colorful courtroom personalities in the history of American law), the pioneering forensics expert Alexander Gettler, J. Edgar Hoover, Gedeon and her family, and Irwin’s own parents. And the themes and overlapping cultural, social, and intellectual worlds investigated and illustrated include early psychoanalysis, art (great art and mediocre art and what’s the difference), money and squalor side-by-side in early twentieth century New York City (real estate!), tabloid and crime hysteria, religious mania and charismatic movements, pulp fictions and the pulp sensibility, the law, and the dawn of forensic science. Harold Schechter is the dean of American true crime. The author of more than thirty books, he is best known for his historical true crime writing. His books Deviant, Deranged, and Depraved are considered classics of the genre, and his The Serial Killer Files and The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers are the definitive, and much-read, reference texts. His essays have appeared in various newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Harold Schechter has been a professor of American literature and culture at Queens College, the City University of New York, since 1975. He lives in Brooklyn and Mattituck, New York with his wife, the poet Kimiko Hahn.