The Crime Novelist Who Wrote His Own Death Scene
Eugene Izzi’s unpublished manuscript described a death almost exactly as his own. Did the writer predict his own demise, or was this all an elaborate, attention-getting ruse?
By Philip Caputo Esquire
This article originally appeared in the May 1997 issue of Esquire. Get access to every Esquire story ever published at
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He was a powerfully built man, six feet tall and two hundred pounds, with thick, dark hair, a prominent nose, piercing eyes, and an intensity that electrified some people and intimidated others. On December 7, 1996, he committed suicide in a spectacular fashion, after leaving a trail of clues designed to lead the police and the public to conclude that he’d been murdered by an Indiana militia group. For a while, his colleagues in the midwestern chapter of the Mystery Writers of America novelists whose minds run in winding channels of plots and conspiracies bought into his fiction. Within hours after
An obituary for the Chicago-raised writer who wrote often of the Greek-American immigrant experience. His novel "A Dream of Kings" and story collection "Pericles on 31st Street" were just two from a long list of works.
New Yorker writer Bill Barich is best known for his horse racing book
Laughing in the Hills, published 25 years ago now. For his latest book, Barich has again written about horses, but this time added Ireland as a topic as well in
A Fine Place to Daydream: Racehorses, Romance and the Irish. Barich fell in love, moved to Dublin and took quickly to the Irish love for the race track. As Barich explores Ireland, he also meets top trainers, horses and jockeys.
A Fine Place to Daydream builds up to the English Cheltenham Festival in March when Irish and British patriotism do battle on the track. Along the way, Barich paints a humorous picture of Ireland that will appeal to racing fans and non-fans alike. ($23 / 228 pages / Knopf)