Encompassing a span of thirty-one years, author Joe Bilby’s latest book about the Garden State is a chronicle of the bizarre, curious, and sometimes startling criminal events that took place in New Jersey and made national news between 1922 and 1952, a period sometimes referred to as the “Noir” era.
The modern public is obsessed with and entertained by crime stories, but that interest is not just a recent phenomenon. The unusual story sells newspapers, and the weirder the story or the people involved the better. Back in the era when much of America’s home entertainment was provided by reading the newspaper, the post-World War I “Jazz Age” decline in societal mores was exacerbated by the lawlessness that accompanied Prohibition, leaving the American public appalled, but also fascinated, by tales of love, betrayal, and murder.
The stories you are about to read include those of William d’Alton Mann, the nineteenth century founder of tabloid journalism, “rum running” and real estate swindling in Nucky Johnson’s Atlantic City, the murder of a monkey-collecting circus owner by a howling hit man hired by his brother-in-law, the “Hollywood on the Hudson” death of stuntman “Handsome Jack,” the career of Trenton’s freelance executioner, the creative counterfeiter from Elizabeth, the case of a Klansman literally hammered to death, the murder of a bigamist inventor in the Highlands by a “dwarflike man,” the sad fate of the “Radium Girls” of Orange, the bizarre Westfield “torch murderer,” a foiled lynching in Asbury Park, the con man founder of “Storybook Land,” the ironic end tale of New Jersey’s Sherlock Holmes, the Hoboken stamp collector who put his wife up for sale, ghost pretenders on the Morro Castle, the death of the “Dutchman” in Newark, the veteran who claimed to be the shortest man in the army, and much, much more.
