Harold Schechter
Author Interview - Harold Schechter
Author of MANIAC: THE BATH SCHOOL DISASTER AND THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN MASS MURDERER
“My book is about Andrew Kehoe, perpetrator of an act that has been more-or-less totally forgotten but that I have come to believe was the most terrible American crime of the twentieth century: the so-called Bath School Disaster of May, 1927. A resident of the small farming town of Bath, Michigan, he was a respected member of the community who at one point served on the board of Bath’s modern new Consolidated School, which educated the town’s children from kindergarten through high school. Driven by increasing paranoia and a pathological resentment of the increased taxes he and his wife--a childless couple--would have to pay, he concocted a diabolical plan, rigging the school’s basement at night with hundreds of pounds of surplus World War I explosives and setting a timer to detonate the dynamite on the last day of class. Fortunately, much of it failed to go off, but one entire wing exploded. Then, when the first responders rushed to the scene, he loaded his pickup with shrapnel and more dynamite , drove the school and blew up himself and several other people. (Just before this, he also murdered his wife, blew up his house and outbuilding , and killed his farm animals.) Thirty-eight children and seven adults were killed. The Bath School Disaster remains the worst school massacre in our history, as well as the most deadly act of domestic terrorism before Timothy McVeigh’s. It was also the earliest suicide car bombing in our history. My book also explores the reasons Kehoe’s atrocity was so quickly forgotten. One reason is that it was immediately displaced from the front pages by Charles Lindbergh’s epochal flight, which took place a few days later.”
Author Interview - Harold Schechter
Author I draw inspiration from: Truman Capote
Author Interview - Harold Schechter
Favorite place to read a book: Living room sofa
Book character I’d like to be stuck in an elevator with: Lily Bart from Edith Wharton's HOUSE OF MIRTH
Author Interview - Harold Schechter
The moment I knew I wanted to become an author: When I realized in college that I was never going to make it as a doctor or a lawyer
Hardback, paperback, ebook or audiobook: ebook
The last book I read: THE MOONFLOWER MURDERS by Anthony Horowitz
Author Interview - Harold Schechter
Pen & paper or computer: Computer
Book character I think I’d be best friends with: Nathan Zuckerman from any of Philip Roth's Zuckerman novels
Author Interview - Harold Schechter
If I weren’t an author, I’d be a: College Professor. Which I was for 42 years.
Favorite decade in fashion history: 1940s
Place I’d most like to travel: Norway
My signature drink: Jack Daniels on the rocks
Favorite artist: Austrian Expressionist, Alfred Kubin
Number one on my bucket list: I've already done the top four--Machu Picchu, Galapagos, Cambodia, Japan. .
Author Bio: HAROLD SCHECHTER is Professor Emeritus at Queens College, the City University of New York, where he taught course on American literature and culture for forty-two years. His essays on crime, psychopathology and media violence have appeared in many newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the International Herald Tribune. He has written for network television and been featured as an expert on PBS’ History Detectives, as well as various shows on cable channels, including Investigation Discovery, A & E Biography, and Court TV.
Among his more than forty published books are a series of historical true-crime narratives about America’s most infamous serial killers, several encyclopedic works (The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, The Serial Killers Files, Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of), and an anthology of American true crime writing published by the Library of America. His 2014 book, The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, The Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation was praised in the Wall Street Journal as a nonfiction account “as gripping as the cleverest Golden Age mystery” and was a 2015 Edgar nominee in the Best Crime Fact category.
In the realm of fiction, he has written a series of mystery novels featuring Edgar Allan Poe as the narrator and protagonist--Nevermore, The Hum Bug, The Mask of Red Death, and the Tell-Tale Corpse--as well as two horror novels, Outcry and Dying Breath. In collaboration with his daughter, bestselling YA author Lauren Oliver, he has also written a series of middle grade mystery books, the first of which--Curiosity House: The Shrunken Head--was a 2016 Edgar nominee in the Best Juvenile category.
