Founded in 2017, Strange Times is a twice-monthly newsletter that explores the weirdest news of 1921, one day at a time. To get free games and the original PDFs of every article that runs in Strange Times—plus stories that didn’t make the cut—back me on Patreon.

To Kill a Cook

This week I was treated to one of the most fun parts of traditional publishing: choosing a narrator for the audiobook of To Kill a Cook. A producer at Penguin Random House Audio sent short audition clips from four different actors, each containing the book’s first few paragraphs, plus a couple snatches of dialogue to show off the accents they’d use for a Brooklyn mobster and a French chef. It was incredibly difficult to choose, not just because all four actors were wonderful but because it’s so weird to hear them bringing to life a voice that, up until now, has only existed in my head.

I’m thrilled with the actor we ended up going with, who nailed both Bernice’s uniquely funny voice and the various accents required. If you’re an audiobook person you can preorder it now. Just to give you a taste of what it sounds like—when read by an author, sadly, and not a professional audiobook actor—here’s my interpretation of the passage the actors were asked to read:

If you were choosing an audiobook actor, would you pick me? Yeah, neither would I. This is why we leave it to the pros!

Things I Like

1. Missing the Playoffs! My beloved New York Mets spent the second half of the season in a slow motion collapse that they completed on the season’s final day, when they missed the playoffs by a single day. This was a disappointment, sure, but the result has been that I’m far more relaxed this October than I was a year ago. I’ve actually been able to enjoy the spectacle of what’s been a pretty good postseason so far. Every time I think about the frustrated misery that, say, Yankees fans are going through right now, I breathe deep and say, “There but for four months of horrible starting pitching go I.”

2. One Battle After Another! I wasn’t even planning on seeing this but a friend asked if I wanted to go and I try to never refuse an invitation to the movies. I went in with rock bottom expectations—always a good thing—and I absolutely loved it. (And not just because it felt like a Let’s Play for Comrades.) As so much American media tacks furiously rightward, it was refreshing to see a movie that portrays militarized police putting people in camps as obviously, unquestionably, irredeemably evil.

3. The Lamy Safari! After too many years fighting unreliable fountain pens, I did something I should have done ages ago and bought myself a fine nib Lamy. It’s simple, it’s classic, it always works. Who needs anything else?

Today we have a single story about an alleged Sicilian death society. (There’s also an incredibly strange ad for milk down at the bottom—make sure you read the whole thing.) Fear the “good killers” on…

August 19, 1921

• The Cleveland police seize one yacht, seven men, and four women—one of them a Montreal stenographer—as they bust up what they say is “a whisky ring operating in Canada and the United States.”

• In Wareham, Massachusetts, two Black men accused of assault are menaced by a 200 person mob who attempt to bust into their jail while crying, “Lynch him!”

• Mrs. Emma Kurg is found nude in a rowboat in the Kill van Kull, having leapt off a barge when one of the seamen attempted to rape her.

• Five deer escape the Central Park Zoo, requiring 40 policemen and zookeepers to round them up.

• After winning a nationwide contest, two Scottish boy scouts are recruited to join Ernest Shackleton on his next Antarctic expedition.

• The Weather: Fair today and tomorrow; moderate temperature.

There’s a lovely simplicity to naming your murder for hire outfit “the good killers.” They don’t even claim to be the best killers—they’re just good. What else do you want?

A total of more than 125 unsolved Italian murder mysteries in New York, Chicago, Detroit and Pittsburgh may be attributed, the police believe, to the Sicilian murder syndicate whose wholesale killings were revealed in the statement of Bartolo Fontano, who sought police protection after confessing to the murder of his “best friend,” Carmelo Caizzo, at Asbury Park last month. In addition to the seven Italians now in the Tombs awaiting extradition to New Jersey for trial for Ciazzo’s murder, more arrests are expected here and others in Detroit and Buffalo. In the latter city the police expect to apprehend the supposed chief of the self-styled band of “good killers.”

Co-operation between the police of New York and other large cities of the East and Middle West has raised t he estimate of killings traceable to organized Sicilian assassins to 125 in the last few years. Acting Captain Fiaschetti of the Italian squad at Police Headquarters has raised the number of New York victims to seventeen.

According to dispatches from Detroit last night Inspector William Good, former chief of the “black hand squad” of that city, declared that during the last four years seventy Detroit Italians have been slain by the “good killers.” Chicago Italian murder victims of the gang are now estimated at twenty. During 1921 eighteen unsolved Italian murders in the neighborhood of Pittsburgh bore evidence of having been committed in a vendetta.

Could Find No Motive In Pittsburgh, in almost every case, the work of police investigators of these murders was handicapped by apparent lack of motives for the killings, and this led strongly to the belief, even before Fontano’s confession, that they were carried out from the headquarters of an Italian gang. No arrests were made for any of these crimes. One man is reputed to have been slain on account of his efforts to put an end to the secret killings by persuading Italians and Sicilians in America to sever their connections with death societies.

As the trail of the “good killers” spread to other cities the New York police promptly forwarded the results of their investigations of Fontano’s statements to the authorities of Pittsburgh, Detroit, Buffalo and Chicago. Cable messages have been sent to the Italian police notifying them of developments in this country that have a bearing upon the existence of the “G.H.Q.” of the death syndicate in Sicily.

Lieutenant Bert McPherson, Chief of the Detroit “black hand squad,” left yesterday for New York to assist Captain Fiaschetti and his subordinates in their investigations. Fontano will be questioned by the Detroit officer today.

Just before his departure from Detroit yesterday, Lieutenant McPherson said that while Fontano had been arrested in Michigan on divers charges, the young Italian barber never had been charged with murder there. Fontano, he said, had been identified as having associated with Detroit Sicilians suspected of implication in the seventy Italian murder mysteries in that city.

Nine arrests are planned in Detroit and three in Buffalo. Among the possible Buffalo arrests is that of the supposed leader of the murder band in this country who is thought to have directed the 125 killings throughout the country in accordance with mail and cable instructions from the Sicilian headquarters.

This is the man, the police have been informed, who has control of the $200,000 fund for the protection of members of the death syndicate and for the payment of hired assassins, who in turn have been done away with, lest they confess to the police.

According to Fontano’s statement at Police Headquarters, Stefano Magadino, one of the seven men now in the Tombs, handed Fontano $30 and advised him to flee to Buffalo, where the “chief” would give him further financial assistance should the police trail become to hot. Fear of the band which, he said, forced him to kill Caizzo, coupled with hallucinations in which his “best friend’s ghost” appeared before him, led Fontano to give himself up to the police instead of attempting to draw upon the Sicilian murder gang’s war chest.

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