A wealthy, fashionable medical man is murdered in his own home. His long-time mistress, a highly respectable woman, is arrested. As the full tale comes to light β the evidence grows stranger, more lurid, and more exciting β the story makes headlines in the New York newspapers; eventually it becomes a worldwide sensation.
This is the story, not of Herman Tarnower, but of one Harvey Burdell, a "society physician" who lived on Bond Street in New York City and died there, in his own study, in 1857. The inquest and the trial of his accused murderer became the biggest news item of that year, a classic of nineteenth-century crime, rivaling the trial of Lizzie Borden. Yet this incredible tale is gone, the eyewitnesses long dead, the story a piece of forgotten news.
Until now. In FORGOTTEN NEWS, Jack Finney performs the most remarkable magic of all by taking us back to the cobblestone streets of old New York to find out about Harvey Burdell's strange death, along with several other equally fascinating stories: the cannibals of the South Pacific who ate their way through 300 shipwrecked sailors; ritualized lunacy on the floor of the Stock Exchange; a trapper's strange gift to a President; the tragic wreck of a steamship off the coast of Florida.
These amazing tales are illustrated with sharply drawn woodcuts, many taken from actual photographs of the people and places involved. The stories are told in Jack Finney's inimitable style, yet without a word of dialogue or an incident invented.
With a novelist's eye for drama and an investigator's passion for truth, Finney re-creates here a compelling and fascinating past, a treasure trove of FORGOTTEN NEWS.
Jack Finney has written numerous celebrated books, including The Body Snatchers, Good Neighbor Sam, Assault on a Queen and the illustrated novel Time and Again. Some six movies have been made from his novels.