| On September 16, 1922, the bodies of Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills were discovered at an abandoned farm near New Brunswick, New Jersey. Hall was a prominent Episcopal minister and the husband of an heiress with family ties to Johnson & Johnson, and Mills was a choir singer from his congregation. The two had been engaged in a love affair. The murders and the ensuing trial, as Joe Pompeo writes in a story this week, “was to the Jazz Age what the O. J. Simpson case became seventy years later.” Pompeo’s piece, based on research he conducted for his new book, “Blood & Ink: The Scandalous Jazz Age Double Murder That Hooked America on True Crime,” traces how the trial, which began nearly four years after the murders, coincided with the rise of tabloid journalism, and he documents how the writer Morris Markey covered it for The New Yorker, then in just its second year of publication. It was Markey, in fact, who established the rubric A Reporter at Large, which is used to this day, and helped carve out the kind of reporting and style for which the magazine would become known. “Unlike the formulaic copy that filled the daily papers,” Pompeo writes, “Markey’s prose burst with attitude, wit, and literary élan.” Pompeo’s history serves not only as a primer on a double-murder case that’s catnip for true-crime obsessives—with its cast of characters including a womanizing minister, a teen-age flapper, and a spurned wealthy widow—but as a fascinating look at the fledgling days of The New Yorker. Read Markey’s Hall-Mills Trilogy:
• “Digging Up the Hall-Mills Murder Mystery”
• “The Most Absorbing Crime in American History”
• “The Modern Circus of the Hall-Mills Murder Trial” | 
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