The typewriter and the guillotine : an American journalist, a German serial killer, and Paris on the eve of WWII / Mark Braude.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Braude, Mark, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Murder--Press coverage--France--Paris.

Murder.

Serial murderers--France--Paris.

Serial murderers.

Women journalists--France--Paris.

Women journalists.

Flanner, Janet, 1892-1978.

Flanner, Janet.

Weidmann, Eugen, 1908-1939.

Weidmann, Eugen.

Paris (France)--Social conditions--20th century.

Paris (France).

Genre:

Biographies.

Informational works.

True crime stories.

Physical Description:

xi, 415 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Grand Central Publishing, 2026.

Summary:

"In 1925, the Indianapolis-born Janet Flanner took an assignment to write a regular 'Letter from Paris' for a lighthearted humor magazine called The New Yorker, started by some friends in New York. She'd come to Paris to with dreams of writing about "Beauty with a Capital B." Her employer, self-consciously apolitical, sought only breezy reports on French art and culture. But as she woke to the frightening signs of rising extremism, economic turmoil, and widespread discontent in Europe, Flanner ignored her editor's directives, reinventing herself, her assignment, and The New Yorker in the process. While working tirelessly to alert American readers to the dangers of the Third Reich, including producing one of the first detailed profiles of Hitler in an American publication, Flanner became gripped by the disturbing crimes of a man who embodied all of the darkness she was being forced to confront. Eugen Weidmann, a German con-man who killed six people in and around Paris in the late 1930s, and who was last man to be publicly executed in France-mere weeks before the outbreak of WWII. Flanner covered his crimes, capture, and highly politicized trial, seeing the case as a guiding metaphor through which to understand the tumultuous years through which she'd just passed and to prepare herself for the dangers to come. The Typewriter and The Guillotine offers the personal and professional coming-of-age story of an indomitable journalist set against a glamorous, high-stakes backdrop - a tightly-coiled drama full of romance and intrigue"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

The last public execution in France

It is all I have, darling

The diagnosis

An oversized minnow learning how to swim

A young man alone on a mountaintop

Hotel Bonaparte

True north strong and free

Becoming Genêt

Deported

Smoked pork, sweet cabbage, and Moselle wine

The chauffeur

Cracking up

The Stavisky affair

The librarian

Hell on wheels

She doesn't do very well on the slighter subjects

The business

Not who won, naturally

The crossing

All I am trying to do is weather events

The villa

Everything's just fine!

An American ballet teacher in Paris

Our moving and tormented era

The spree

To Bluebeard's cell

A small and sinister European entanglement

I am the wound and the knife

The last middle-westerner

He has abnormalities

Itsy-bitsy anti-Nazi me

A tour of the Caverne des Brigands

History looks queer when you're standing close to it

The cello

Nothing to write except hatred for all

A judgment at Versailles

A letter from Perpignan

The gospel of the murderer

The blood in his veins and the climate of his days

I hope to Heaven mom doesn't see it

Fantastic and unreal as it may seem

This miserable beautiful world

Thanks for money. What a strange war.

Paris, Germany

Coda. Harsh intelligence and beautiful spoils.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

9781538767115

1538767112

OCLC:

1536366532

Publisher Number:

90103564058