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Bowery Murder
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781616466510
Publisher: Coachwhip Publications
Published: May 12 2026
Pages: 380
Weight: 1.12
Height: 0.85 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Gangsters, Broadway divas, crooked politicians, stock market manipulation . . . Bowery Murder is a maelstrom of 1920s murder and media antics as the police (and one intrepid reporter) sort through the evidence, eyewitness statements, and plenty of lies to find the truth behind the shooting of wealthy Wall Street investor and cad Thomas Woodward. The story is told mainly through published newspaper accounts (from conservative stalwarts to gossip sheets) as they lay out the twists and turns of the murder investigation-always in search of the next scoop. Multiple suspects, multiple motives, and multiple confessions build a thrilling mystery.
. . . the mystery of who killed the rascal Tom Woodward lasts to the end. Just as the police and the reader think that the story is straightening out to its solution, another kink comes up through some confession or new evidence and the uncertainty is as bad as ever. To the very last this continues and a series of climaxes brings the book to a close. . . . [I]t is an absorbing book, without any horrors, but with a real stimulus to the readers' effort to determine the answer to the mystery. (1929 review)
At times the story seems a bit attenuated, but the author juggles his suspects, his tell-tale bullets, the discovered revolvers and all that sort of thing deftly and one can overlook a rather remiss attention to news verbosity, used by divers papers to cover up the fact that they don't know anything about the case. And as a novelty it is more than good enough. It is amusing, puzzling and chatty. It reads along like the stories told by reporters after the third drink of celery tonic as they start bragging to each other about this and that. And if a certain amount of repetition creeps in that must be charged to the defect of following a murder case from day to day in the news with the clippings of a month side by side. Mr. Smith at least has given the detective story another method and the reader will be in his debt for that. (1929 review)
[A] rather interesting satire on the modern newspaper handling of headline crimes. The author, Willard K. Smith, is a publicity man for a New York advertising agency-Frank Kiernan & Co., and the book is his first. (1929 review)
Willard K. Smith (The Bowery Murder) once ran an amusement park. Later he was a miner, explorer and mill hand in a furnace plant. . . . (1929)
Bowery Murder was published in 1929. For more vintage detective fiction and mysteries visit Coachwhip Publications.
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