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Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
by Michael Wolraich
The riveting story of how the murder of femme fatale Vivian Gordon in 1931 brought about the downfall of the mayor of New York City and led to the end of Tammany Hall's dominance.
Vivian Gordon went out before midnight in a velvet dress and mink coat. Her body turned up the next morning in a desolate Bronx park, a dirty clothesline wrapped around her neck. At her stylish Manhattan apartment, detectives discovered notebooks full of names—businessmen, socialites, gangsters. And something else: a letter from an anti-corruption commission established by Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Led by the imperious Judge Samuel Seabury, the commission had uncovered a police conspiracy to frame women as prostitutes. Had Vivian Gordon been executed to bury her secrets? As FDR pressed the police to solve her murder, Judge Seabury pursued the trail of corruption to the top of Gotham's powerful political machine—the infamous Tammany Hall.
"This engrossing true crime tale from journalist Wolraich ... examines mobsters and misconduct in 1930s Manhattan through the case of murdered actor Vivian Gordon... . Wolraich does a sterling job spinning the investigation into a portrait of wider New York society, all while keeping the pages turning as quickly as in any top-shelf mystery novel. Fans of Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City will be enthralled." —Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
"It was an unlikely David-and-Goliath battle, one which historian and journalist Wolraich presents in a massively researched chronicle of fraud and vice that is as relevant today as it was a century ago." —Booklist
"A first-class murder mystery, unfolding addictively through its twists and crooked turns. But it's also a remarkable portrait of New York during the Prohibition Era, alive with speakeasies and forbidden cocktails, crime and corruption, the perfect setting for evil to thrive and heroes to emerge undaunted."
—Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York
"A real-life murder mystery that proves that fact is stranger than fiction. [It] starts with a tip-of-the-iceberg murder and ends with the sinking of an era. Michael Wolraich is a remarkably good writer who delivers history, alive and well, to the modern reader."
—Nelson DeMille, New York Times bestselling author
"The true crime tale of a woman obsessed with revenge against the crooked cop who put her behind bars, whose unsolved murder brought down New York City's mayor and propelled Franklin D. Roosevelt into the White House. With impeccable research, evocative details, and an extraordinary cast of characters, Michael Wolraich exposes the ugly underbelly of the Jazz Age."
—Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age
This information about The Bishop and the Butterfly was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Michael Wolraich is the author of the critically acclaimed Unreasonable Men (2014) and Blowing Smoke (2010). His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, the Daily Beast, New York magazine, Reuters, and CNN, and he is the founder and editor of dagblog.com. Wolraich grew up in Iowa and graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts before falling in love with New York City, where he has lived since 2000.
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