Murderesses Row: guns, gams, and glamour in 1920s Chicago

Q: What was Chicago, the ultimate modern city, like in the 1920s?

A: Of all the large cities in the country, it was the most open to doing something new. It was the first Northern city that really embraced jazz, and it was the headquarters of bootlegging.

Q: A prim young woman named Maurine Watkins came to the big city from the sticks and got herself a job as a crime reporter. How did this nice girl end up hanging out with some seriously not-nice people?

A. She grew up in a little town in Indiana and was very religious, but she was a liberated woman too. She remained a good Christian her whole life, but she wanted to be a playwright and get out there and experience real life. The place to do that was Chicago.

Everyone on Murderesses Row saw this pretty, shy young woman, assumed she was a sob sister, and opened up to her, expecting she would present things in a way that was beneficial to them.

It took weeks for them to realize she was not like that. The Tribune was called the city's "hanging paper" because they were out for conviction always. That was their niche in the market.

Q: Watkins later wrote the play "Chicago," which inspired movies (including one with Ginger Rogers and the hit 2002 version) and a Broadway musical. How close was the plot to real life?

A: In the broad strokes, she stayed pretty close to the actual narrative. But her fictional characters were caricatures. She didn't want them to be too human because she didn't want her audience to sympathize with or relate to them. She wanted her audience to hate them.

Q: You point out that this was a very different time in journalism, when it was much more routine for reporters to shade the truth or even make it up entirely, which Watkins scrupulously didn't do.

A: There weren't journalism schools. The professionalization of journalism came later. But on the other hand, newspapers were a lot more fun to read.

Reporters really viewed police offers as competition: they wanted to solve crime first. There were no police spokesmen, and reporters had full access to police stations and jails 24 hours a day. They could sit in the cells and talk to the inmates and stay the night if they wanted to.

Q: What's relevant about the story of "The Girls of Murder City" today?

A: We tend to think that this celebrity mania is a recent phenomenon that grew out of cable television and the Internet and this ubiquitous media that we're all now surrounded with. That's not the case.

We've always been fascinated by celebrity in this country. That’s another way that Chicago was a pioneer.

Prior to the early years of the 20th century, celebrities for the most part were European royalty, national leaders, and war heroes. Chicago helped change that. They made killers famous and they made killers stars.

Randy Dotinga regularly reviews books for the Monitor.

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