When America's Greatest Detective took on America's Greatest Crime: Ellis Parker and the Lindbergh kidnapping
This is the story told in Master Detective, of Ellis Parker, America's Sherlock Holmes. After a brilliant 40 year career as a detective, and dissatisfied with the conclusions of the New Jersey State Police, Parker did his own investigation of the Lindbergh kidnapping and obtained a signed confession from a suspect different than the man who was executed for the crime! Parker's reward? He was sent to jail, where he died. Could he have been right? Did this country detective find the real solution to America's most notorious crime?

Programs and Presentations


    Here are summaries of my programs and presentations. I have given these presentations at the Law Enforcement Executive Program of the New Jersey State Association of Chiefs of Police, the Johns Hopkins Police Executive Leadership Program, the Deadly Ink Mystery Writers Conference, the Mt Holly, New Jersey Courthouse, and to various community groups, book clubs and similar organizations. One presentation was taped for local TV.

The programs are from 30 minutes to an hour in length, including questions and answers. If you represent a group or association that would be interested in one of these presentations, given free of charge, please contact me at johnrbooks@yahoo.com.

In Search of the American Sherlock Holmes:  Tracking down the facts behind Master Detective
What does it take to solve an historical mystery? How do you unravel a 70 year old cold case? This is the exciting, and often strange stor of the research that went into reconstructing the story of Ellis Parker and his involvement in the Lindbergh Kidnapping case.  The trail includes a mayor who was a safecracker, an attorney who once defended the Boston Strangler, a retired naval officer whose mother had secrets, some juvenile delinquents, and a box of old newspapers found in an attic. 
(Note: An abbreviated version of this presentation can be combined with the previous one.) 

No DNA? No Problem!: Real life crimes solved by smart detectives and unusual methods
With so many CSI programs on TV, many people think solving a crime is simply a matter of matching up DNA samples, but this presentation looks at other, simpler methods that have yielded big dividends in real cases. Detectives in these cases used. psychology, metalurgy, botany, local knowledge, and plain old shoe leather to get their man. Hear how a college professor solved the last great western train robbery with a microscope and a pair of dirty overalls, howpolice tried to use photography to track Jack the Ripper, how a killer was caught with a coffee stain, and how a botanist trapped a murderer with some weeds.


Rooms of Doom: Real-Life Locked Room Mysteries
Ever since Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue, just about every fictional detective has encountered an “impossible” crime in which a corpse is discovered in a locked and sealed room. Locked room mysteries make for entertaining reading, but do they ever happen in real life? Elementary; they do.  Here are some locked room crimes that bedeviled police. Some were solved, but some were not. In one case, the victim was a mystery author!

Writing is the Easy Part: Getting published in spite of everything
Many writers worry about where their work is coming from when they should be asking where is it going. What is really involved in getting your work published? Are publishers just itching to grab your masterpiece or will you meet with a collective yawn?  For local author John Reisinger it took five years and three broken contracts before Master Detective saw the light of day. Hear the exciting story of the slush pile, the publisher who went to jail, the agent who was looking for a Pulitzer Prize winner, the mysteries of the query letter, and all the ways a work can get rejected. Learn what to do and what not to.

Engineering: What is it and why should you care?
Engineering is using scientific principles and ingenuity to make the world a better place. But that’s just the beginning. Find out why the towers of the Verazzano Narrows bridge are not parallel, how engineering designed the Skipjack, why there are miles of pipes buried in the concrete of Hoover Dam, why structures in the Arctic need ventilation below them, how a huge lump of concrete helps the Knapp’s Narrows bridge be the busiest drawbridge in America, why there is no Outer Harbor Tunnel in Baltimore, and how engineers used balloons to bring telephone service to an African nation.

 

Deathstyles of the Rich and Famous: Three prominent men whose deaths are still unsolved
The classic mysteries of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s often featured a rich man killed in an isolated setting among a host of suspicious characters, but that never really happened, did it? Actually, it did. Here are three real life wealthy and prominant men of that period who died mysteriously. One was killed at his Hollywood bungalow, one on an ocean liner, and one at his tropical estate. No one was convicted in any of these cases. You can't make up plots like these! Hear the stories and follow the clues. It might not be too late to crack these cases.