Stovall – författare

The women in this volume of the Heads and Tales series have a way with words. They are remarkable women, all with remarkable and sometimes extraordinary stories.

Jim Stovall, in this volume, brings us his unique journalistic and artistic vision of women who whose writings and lives were always notable, sometimes notorious, and occasionally astonishing. Some of these women, such as Louisa May Alcott, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Eleanor Roosevelt, you will have heard of or read. Others will have receded - often unfairly - into the mists of history.

What you will find here about each of these women is something new - some part of their story that you had never known.

For instance:

Louisa May Alcott, famously the author of Little Women, was also A.M. Bernard, author of what was in her time known as the "blood and thunder" novel, the gothic sensationalism that many readers of her day craved. Such writing put food on her family''s table.

Aphra Behn, possibly the first female writer in English to make her living as a writer, was not only a popular playwright but also a spy for King Charles I.

Anne Brontë, the least well known of the Brontë sisters, wrote the most shocking and forward-looking feminist novel of them all - a novel that sister Charlotte hardily disapproved of.

Rachel Harding Davis, mother of the famous journalist and early 20th century heart-throb Richard Harding Davis, supported her family by writing some of the first American realism stories - decades before her male counterparts in the realism school took up their pens.

And we haven''t even gotten to page 25 yet.

There are many more such stories: the first female presidential candidate (far earlier than you might think); the first American detective novelist; the first voice from the White House that Americans heard after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The list goes on and on.

And then there are the caricatures. These drawings by the author himself add insight and entertainment to this unique and powerful collection.

In addition to those women mentioned above, discover the stories of Helen Gurley Brown, Maxine Cheshire, Mary Mapes Dodge, Mary Anne Evans (George Elliot), Wanda Gág, Martha Gellhorn, Susan Glaspell, Anna Katherine Green, Angelina Grimké and Sarah Grimké (and their collaborator Theodore Weld), Fannie Lou Hamer, Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Marguerite Higgins, Emma Lazarus, Caroline Norton, Helen Kirkpatrick, Anne Ratcliffe, Catherine Parr, Mary Seacole, Elizabeth Cochran Seaman (Nellie Bly), Ida Tarbell, Dorothy Thompson, Mercy Otis Warren, Victoria Woodhull, and Mary King Ward.

Read them all. You will be enlightened and delighted.

Murder Most Criminous: The Cases of William Roughead, Father of Modern True Crime Literature

Jim Stovall, Ed Caudill, William Roughead

William Roughead is among the founders and one of the great popularizers of the "true crime" genre as it blossomed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By those truly familiar with the genre, he is well-known as the father of modern true-crime writing.

Roughead called himself a "historian of homicide." He was a reporter in that he recorded the facts and evidence of a case. But he was much more. As an attorney, he understood procedures, the legal actors in a trial and their appropriate roles and duties, with stress on appropriate in that he was quick to critique judge or prosecutor or defense attorney for failings in procedure or presentation of evidence, or simply ignoring evidence. It is in this respect that Roughead set himself apart with commentary and insight about the facts and with his expertise in the law.

Though undeniably an author for a popular audience, his legal background and the critical instincts of a journalist made him much more than a mere transcriber of cases or reporter of trial proceedings and outcomes. His commentary often was sharp, as he reassessed evidence, procedure, actions, or lack thereof by judges, defense, and prosecution.

Roughead sat in on many of Edinburgh''s most notable murder trials from `1889 to 1949. He spared no detail in terms of gore and vile motives, and readers apparently loved him for it.

From 1913 to 1941, Roughead published 119 essays and 14 books, with many of the essays having originally appeared in the Juridical Review, a Scottish legal journal. He republished the articles in a series of anthologies, centered on, of course, murder.

This volume is the first of a series designed to introduce to the modern reader to the writing and overall genius of the Scottish barrister William Roughead. We have selected the four cases included in this book not because they are his best or most interesting but rather to demonstrate that just about anything you read of this author is of high enough quality to draw you into his world of British crime and the British criminal court system.