Murder City

Michael Lesy's portrait of a gruesome era could be fiction - but it's not. "Things began as they usually did: Someone shot someone else." So begins a chapter of Lesy's disturbingly satisfying account of Chicago in the 1920s, the epicentre of murder in America. A city where daily newspapers fell over each other to cover the latest mayhem. A city where professionals and amateurs alike snuffed one another out, often for the most banal of reasons. Men killing men, men killing women, women killing men - crimes of loot and love. Just as Lesy's first book, "Wisconsin Death Trip", subverted the accepted notion of the Gay Nineties, so "Murder City" gives us the dark side of the Jazz Age. Lesy's sharp, fearless storytelling makes a compelling case that this collection of criminals may be the progenitors of our modern age.