The Mad Sculptor by Harold Schechter
An unputdownable true crime story set in the pulp-fiction obsessed world of 1930s America.
On Easter Sunday 1937, Bob Irwin - a handsome, failing sculptor with a history of depression and psychopathic episodes - commited a grisly triple murder. Creeping back to the flat of his ex-landlady in a swish New York borough, Irwin killed her, her lodger, and her stunning daughter Ronnie with an ice-pick, an apparently motiveless homicide that would shock the entire country.
Crafted like a Chandler novel, THE MAD SCULPTOR thrillingly relates Irwin's crime, flight, and capture, his trial and its aftermath, whilst painting a vivid portrait of 1930s America.