CHAPTER 1
TEN DAYS BEFORE he became so famous that crowds would form around any building that contained him and waiters would fight over a corncob left on his dinner plate, no one had heard of Charles Lindbergh. The New York Times had mentioned him once, in the context of the coming Atlantic flights. It had misspelled his name.
The news that transfixed the nation as spring gave way to summer in 1927 was of a gruesome murder in a modest family home on Long Island, coincidentally quite close to Roosevelt Field, where the Atlantic flyers were now gathering. The newspapers, much excited, called it the Sash Weight Murder Case. The story was this:
Late on the night of 20 March 1927, as Mr and Mrs Albert Snyder slept side by side in twin beds in their house on 222nd Street in a quiet, middle-class neighbourhood of Queens Village, Mrs Snyder heard noises in the upstairs hallway. Going to investigate, she found a large man – a ‘giant’, she told police – just outside her bedroom door. He was speaking in a foreign accent to another man, whom she could not see. Before Mrs Snyder could react, the giant seized her and beat her so roughly that she was left unconscious for six hours. Then he and his confederate went to Mr Snyder’s bed, strangled the poor man with picture wire and stove in his head with a sash weight from a window. It was the sash weight that fired the public’s imagination and gave the case its name. The two villains then turned out drawers all over the house and fled with Mrs Snyder’s jewels, but they left a clue to their identity in the form of an Italian-language newspaper on a table downstairs.
The New York Times the next day was fascinated but confused. In a big page-one headline it reported:
ART EDITOR IS SLAIN IN BED;
WIFE TIED, HOME SEARCHED;
MOTIVE MYSTIFIES POLICE
The story noted that a Dr Vincent Juster from St Mary Immaculate Hospital had examined Mrs Snyder and couldn’t find any bump on her that would explain her six hours of unconsciousness. Indeed, he couldn’t find any injuries on her at all. Perhaps, he suggested tentatively, it was the trauma of the event rather than actual injury that accounted for her prolonged collapse.
Police detectives by this time, however, were more suspicious than confused. For one thing, the Snyder house showed no sign of forced entry, and in any case it was an oddly modest target for murderous jewel thieves. The detectives found it curious, too, that Albert Snyder had slept through a violent scuffle just outside his door. The Snyders’ nine-year-old daughter, Lorraine, in a room across the hall, had also heard nothing. It also seemed strange that burglars would break into a house and evidently pause to read an anarchist newspaper before placing it neatly on a table and proceeding upstairs. Oddest of all, Mrs Snyder’s bed – the one from which she had arisen to investigate the noise in the hallway – was tidily made, as if it had not been slept in. She was unable to account for this, citing her concussion. As the detectives puzzled over these anomalies, one of them idly lifted a corner of the mattress on Mrs Snyder’s bed and there revealed the jewels that she had reported stolen.
All eyes turned to Mrs Snyder. She met their gazes uncertainly, then broke down and confessed the crime – but blamed it all on a brute named Judd Gray, her secret lover. Mrs Snyder was placed under arrest, a search was begun for Judd Gray, and the newspaper-reading public of America was about to become uncommonly excited.
The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether – very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life. Soon it would be overtaken by the passive distractions of radio, but for the moment reading remained for most people the principal method for filling idle time. Each year, American publishers produced 110 million books, more than ten thousand separate titles, double the number of ten years before. For those who felt daunted by such a welter of literary possibility, a helpful new phenomenon, the book club, had just made its debut. The Book-of-the-Month Club was founded in 1926 and was followed the next year by the Literary Guild. Both were immediately successful. Authors were venerated in a way that seems scarcely possible now. When Sinclair Lewis returned home to Minnesota to work on his novel Elmer Gantry (published in the spring of 1927), people came from miles around just to look at him.
Magazines boomed, too. Advertising revenues leapt 500 per cent in the decade, and many publications of lasting importance made their debut: Reader’s Digest in 1922, Time in 1923, the American Mercury and Smart Set in 1924, the New Yorker in 1925. Time was perhaps the most immediately influential. Founded by two former Yale classmates, Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, it was very popular but wildly inaccurate. It described Charles Nungesser, for instance, as having ‘lost an arm, a leg, a chin’ during the war, which was not merely incorrect in all particulars but visibly so since Nungesser could be seen every day in newspaper photographs with a full set of limbs and an incontestably bechinned face. Time was noted for its repetitious devotion to certain words – ‘swart’, ‘nimble’, ‘gimlet-eyed’ – and to squashed neologisms like ‘cinemaddict’ and ‘cinemactress’. It also had a fondness for odd, distorted phrases, so that ‘in the nick of time’ became, without embarrassment, ‘in time’s nick’. In particular it had a curious Germanic affection for inverting normal word order and packing as many nouns, adjectives and adverbs as possible into a sentence before bringing in a verb – or as Wolcott Gibbs put it in a famous New Yorker profile of Luce, ‘Backward ran the sentences until reeled the mind.’ Despite all their up-to-the-minute swagger, Luce and Hadden were deeply conservative. They would not, for instance, employ women for any job above the level of secretary or office assistant.