"Captivating ... an epic tale of guns, gams and glamour."

-- The Christian Science Monitor

Maurine Watkins, 1914

Q&A: Sex and murder in Jazz Age Chicago

Doug in Chicago: Take a Tour of Murder City

Praise for The Girls of Murder City:

“I must sternly advise readers not to approach Douglas Perry's The Girls of Murder City without being aware of the risks they run. Like the hero of Jack Finney's Time and Again, who steeped himself so intensely in vintage surroundings that he became unmoored in time and slipped back to Victorian-era New York, so too might the unwary readers of Perry's book find themselves sucked willy-nilly back down the decades to 1920s Chicago, as a result of Perry's incredibly visceral, sensual and hypnotic recreation of that era.”
                     —author and critic Paul Di Filippo

The Girls of Murder City is the untold true story of the beautiful killers who dazzled a city and inspired the blockbuster musical Chicago.

Chicago, 1924.

There was nothing surprising about men turning up dead in the Second City. Life was cheaper than a quart of bathtub gin in the gangland capital of the world. But a pair of murders that spring had something special.

For intrepid “girl reporter” Maurine Watkins, a minister’s daughter from tiny Crawfordsville, Indiana, big-city life offered unimagined excitement. Newspaperwomen were supposed to write about clubs, cooking and clothes, but within weeks of starting at the Chicago Tribune, Watkins found herself embroiled in two scandalous, sex-fueled murder cases. The first involved Belva Gaertner, the witty, sophisticated millionaire divorcée who feared returning to the poverty of her childhood. Next came Beulah Annan, a Kentucky farm girl turned jazz baby whose wistful beauty obscured an ice-cold narcissism. Both had gunned down their lovers under mysterious circumstances.

In Chicago, Watkins learned, the all-male juries didn’t convict women -- especially beautiful women. The young reporter decided to change that. She mocked “Stylish Belva” and “Beautiful Beulah” on the front page and made them the talk of the town. But the public reaction surprised her. Love-struck men sent flowers to the jail; newly emancipated women sent impassioned letters to the newspapers. Soon more than a dozen “murderesses” preened and strutted in Cook County Jail, desperate for the same attention that was being lavished on Watkins’s favorites. None of these women -- nor the police, the reporters, or the public -- could imagine the bizarre way it would all end.

Douglas Perry vividly captures the sensationalized circus atmosphere that gave rise to the concept of the celebrity criminal -- and provided Chicago its most famous story. Fueled by rich period detail and a cast of characters who seemed destined for the stage, The Girls of Murder City is crackling social history that simultaneously presents the freewheeling spirit of the age and its sober repercussions.

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