Mark Lynch hosts the popular Inquiry radio show on WICN Public Radio in Worcester, Mass. This week, he interviewed Ron about MORGUE: A LIFE IN DEATH, co-authored with Dr. Vincent Di Maio. The Edgar-nominated MORGUE was recently was released in paperback by Picador. Here’s the podcast of the interview. Read More…
June 21, 2007 Somewhere in the Arctic on a day when the sun never sets While Matt sleeps, I watch the subtly changing sky as the sun circles around to the north. The clouds are breaking up and patches of blue are oozing through. The day is warming. I smell spruce, woodsmoke and musky earth. …Read More…
Excerpted from The Crime Buff’s Guide to Outlaw Los Angeles (2017, WildBluePress) Every generation has its bogeyman. Before 1969, maybe it was Adolf Hitler. After 2001, Osama bin Laden. But for those 30 or so years in between it was unquestionably an aspiring musician, deeply damaged outlaw, and hippie Svengali named Charles Manson. On…Read More…
Genene Jones, a Texas nurse who murdered a baby in the 1980s, got 90 years in prison for her cold-blooded crime. Prosecutors and cops suspected strongly she had done it before—likely several times—but they had put all their eggs in one tragic basket. Maybe a smart strategy … or maybe misguided. During Jones’ time…Read More…
Listen live at 2pm Pacific time on Saturday, June 10, by clicking here. Where better to kick off the new CRIME BUFF’S GUIDE™ TO OUTLAW LOS ANGELES than at the Los Angeles-based True Crime Uncensored radio show, hosted by the legendary Burl Barer. Los Angeles is where America’s dreams and nightmares got all tangled up. Sunny days dissolved…Read More…
Cagney May 17, 2000 ~ May 14, 2017 I am suddenly jealous of anyone whose dog dies abruptly and young, because although they felt a different kind of pain, this was the kind of long goodbye they never had to say. We were improved, indeed, by Cagney’s presence in our life. Dogs are not human,…Read More…
Can you come out to play? Click here … if you dare. Buy it nowRead More…
We know almost nothing of him, except he was a gypsy photographer, drifting the dusty roads of the territories. Trooping wearily from one far-flung town to another, he’d likely stop his dark-room wagon outside of busy saloons, brothels, maybe even a hanging. He’d mount his big camera, unfurl his backdrops, and hope word spread before…Read More…
So many books, so little time. On Saturday, I will be both an author and a reader (two things I seldom do at the same time). I’m privileged to be among the authors who’ll speak at the 5th Annual San Antonio Book Festival—one of the USA’s fastest rising book events—about our bestseller MORGUE: A LIFE IN…Read More…
Essayist Robert Fulghum once surmised that everything he ever needed to know he learned in kindergarten, but I was a slow learner. Maybe Little League was just the beginning of my higher education, but everything else I ever needed to know I learned in the sandlot on endless summer days that simmered into night games…Read More…
This morning, the Mystery Writers of America announced that MORGUE: A LIFE IN DEATH, by Dr. Vincent Di Maio and Ron Franscell, is among the nominees for its prestigious Edgar Awards as one of the five best true crimes of 2016. “It’s always a humbling moment when a life’s story is considered worthy of re-telling,” co-author…Read More…
“Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” —SATCHEL PAIGE I lived a hundred lives last year. The curious wanderer, the angry plumber, the heartbroken son who refused to cry, the willing friend, the writer who lost his words, the proud stonemason, the reclusive loner, the expectant fisherman, the father who missed too much,…Read More…
Ready or not, a new year is about to begin, even though it doesn’t seem like that long ago when the “old” year started. An amateur philosopher friend of mine has two theories about why time passes so much quicker as we get old. Theory No. 1: Every year is an incrementally smaller fraction of the…Read More…
This essay originally appeared in 1998. It appears here today with a few minor but festive updates. No businessman in the history of literature has been as misunderstood as Ebenezer Scrooge. His very name is now a synonym for pinch-fisted churlishness and humbuggery. Why? Certainly because that was Charles Dickens’ aim when, in his classic…Read More…
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” —William Faulkner So the would-be mass murderer at Ohio State University this week was apparently inspired by the hateful words of American-born cleric Anwar al Awlaki, al Qaeda’s most powerful recruiter before he was obliterated in a US drone strike in Yemen in 2011. A few years ago, I…Read More…
Where I grew up, you learned the smell of rain coming, and could damn near tell the exact day, maybe the exact moment, the seasons changed. Well, a dark season lies ahead. In 2009, in the earliest, scariest days of the Great Recession and the uncertainty of a new presidential administration, I predicted an uptick…Read More…
I ended a lifelong friendship today. I canceled my local newspaper subscription. And it breaks my heart. I feel like a traitor to a cause I have embraced since I was a kid. Or maybe it’s a feeling that I wasted my life on such a passion. Or maybe I simply felt a fool to…Read More…
Some stories are about love, and some are about pain. But painful love stories like the star-crossed romance between Annie Beatrice McQuiston and Claude “Cowboy” Henry started long before they met in a whorehouse on a humid night in Depression-era Texas. EXCERPT Joe Calloway died naked in a Louisiana rice field, trembling with terror and…Read More…
Every crime writer has heard this little heckling voice, usually from the cheap seats, but sometimes from inside his own head. It isn’t always loud, but it’s often piercing. Tragically, today is the 43rd anniversary of a monstrous crime against two of my childhood friends in the small town where we grew up: Two young sisters were abducted…Read More…
The story you are about to read is true. No names have been changed to protect anybody. I’m not that creative. ~~~~~~~~~ The city is Beaumont, Texas. I carry a chewed-up pencil, a ratty notebook and my fingers are stained with bubble-jet ink. I’m a newspaperman. (Here’s where you, the reader, sing, “Dum-de-dum-dum.”) It was…Read More…
Among the historic, infamous, and heartbreaking deaths we explore in the brand-new book MORGUE: A LIFE IN DEATH (St. Martin’s Press) is the presumed suicide of the troubled genius Vincent van Gogh. Presumed. When van Gogh’s latest biographers, Pulitzer-winning authors Steven Naifeh and the late Gregory White Smith, were perplexed by the evidence, they eventually…Read More…
If government was required to generate 1,000 jobs for every new word it tried to insert in the cultural lexicon, we’d all be employed. The Washington Post recently ran a guest column by U.S. Department of Justice Assistant Attorney General Karol Mason, who has headed the Office of Justice Programs since 2013. (And while we’re editing, how…Read More…
Would you click to watch someone die? Maybe you just did. The proliferation of cameras—smartphone, news, surveillance, security, webcams, dashboard, GoPro, cops’ body-cams, and “old fashioned” digital models—means the moment of death will increasingly be captured. And the wildly unpredictable moral compass of social media and web content means more of those images will be…Read More…