Ten top Prohibition-era books

Katharine Schellman is a former actor and one-time political consultant. When not writing about mystery, history, and other improbable things, she can be found in her garden or finding new ways to skip steps while baking.

Schellman currently lives and writes in the mountains of Virginia in the company of her family and the many houseplants she keeps accidentally murdering. Her books include Last Call at the Nightingale and The Last Drop of Hemlock.

At The Strand Magazine Schellman tagged ten Prohibition-era books, including:

The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum

During Prohibition, the Tammany Hall political machine ran New York through a system of bribes, favors, and outright corruption. Their control extended to the coroner’s office—until their appointee became so embroiled in scandal that even they couldn’t keep him in power. His replacement was Charles Norris, one of the pioneers of forensic medicine.

Blum’s account of Norris and his colleagues is set against the proliferation of easily accessible poisons in the Jazz Age, from arsenic to chloroform. It reads like science fiction, examining both poisoning crimes and the many bizarre ways that scientists solved them—including, sometimes, dosing themselves with the poisons they were learning to detect. With its litany of famous, infamous, and often baffling murders, it touches on the life and experience of nearly every social, ethnic, and racial group that lived (or sometimes, didn’t live) through New York City’s Jazz Age.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue