Annal:2004 Edgar Allan Poe Award® for Best Fact Crime
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Edgar Allan Poe Award® in the year 2004. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- Edgar Allan Poe Award® for Best Fact Crime
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Mystery/Suspense books
- Mystery/Suspense authors.
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
- 2004 Edgar-Fact Crime winner
- 2003 IHG–Nonfiction winner
- 2003 Dagger-Nonfiction shortlist
- 2003 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 32.54
Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his “World’s Fair Hotel” just west of the fairgrounds—a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium. Burnham overcame tremendous obstacles and tragedies as he organized the talents of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, and others to transform swampy Jackson Park into the White City, while Holmes used the attraction of the great fair and his own satanic charms to lure scores of young women to their deaths. What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of that dream city by the lake.
And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank
- 2004 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
- Score: 6.54
On April 27, 1913, the bludgeoned body of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan was discovered in the basement of Atlanta’s National Pencil Factory. The girl’s murder would be the catalyst for an epic saga that to this day holds a singular place in America’s collective imagination—a saga that would climax in 1915 with the lynching of Leo Frank, the Cornell-educated Jew who was convicted of the murder. The case has been the subject of novels, plays, movies and even musicals, but only now, with the publication of And the Dead Shall Rise, do we have an account that…
Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story
- 2004 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
- Score: 6.54
More than fifty years after what has been called “the most notorious unsolved murder of the 20th century,” the case has finally been solved.
On January 15, 1947, the body of beautiful 22-year-old Elizabeth Short—dubbed the Black Dahlia because of her black clothing and the dahlia she wore in her hair—was discovered on a vacant lot in downtown Los Angeles, her body surgically bisected, horribly mutilated, and posed as if for display. Even the most hardened homicide detectives were shocked and sickened by the sadistic murder. Thus began the largest manhunt in LA…
Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders
- 2004 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
- Score: 6.54
On a cold night in January 2001, the idyllic community of Dartmouth College was shattered by the discovery that two professors had been hacked to death in their own home. Investigators searched helplessly for clues linking the victims, Half and Susanne Zantop, to their murderer or murderers. The residents of Hanover, New Hampshire, speculated endlessly—could the killer be a disgruntled student? a spurned lover?—while the grisly nature of the crimes themselves destroyed, perhaps forever, the sanctity and invulnerability of their academic arcadia.
By contrast,…
Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series
- 2004 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
- Score: 6.54
History remembers Arnold Rothstein as the man who fixed the 1919 World Series, an underworld genius. The real-life model for The Great Gatsby’s Meyer Wolfsheim and Nathan Detroit from Guys and Dolls, Rothstein was much more—and less—than a fixer of baseball games. He was everything that made 1920s Manhattan roar. Featuring Jazz Age Broadway with its thugs, speakeasies, showgirls, political movers and shakers, and stars of the Golden Age of Sports, this is a biography of the man who dominated an age. Arnold Rothstein was a loan shark, pool shark, bookmaker, thief,…
