THE TYPEWRITER AND THE GUILLOTINE

The City of Light, before darkness set in.

Braude, author of the excellent Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love, and Rivalry in 1920s Paris (2022), opens his latest book with an impending execution. The place is Versailles. The year, 1939. On this hot night, just months before the start of World War II, a frenzied crowd gathered to wait for the drop of the guillotine’s shining blade. The victim was the German serial killer Eugen Weidmann, in whom the legendary New Yorker writer Janet Flanner took a deep and lasting interest. Flanner, whom the magazine’s co-founder Harold Ross tasked with sending dispatches under the “Letter from Paris” column, saw in Weidmann a window to the tumultuous 1930s. Braude traces the lives of both Flanner and Weidmann until the latter became the former’s journalistic fascination. The two came from opposing worlds. Flanner was at the heart of the 1920s Paris literary set and a participant in what F. Scott Fitzgerald called “the greatest, gaudiest spree in history.” Weidmann was a troubled youth prone to crime. The book contains many fascinating stories, especially of the early days of the New Yorker and of prominent Paris writers including Ernest Hemingway, whom Braude notes once played “bullfighter and bull,” lunging across the room as a friend did veronicas with his cape. One of Braude’s achievements is he expands our sense of the tempestuous 1930s, “the hangover,” as he calls it, painting a picture of the turmoil beyond Germany in places like France, where Weidmann was carrying out his murders. Throughout, Braude gives us a briskly paced account in short, crisp chapters. His vibrant writing lends the narrative immense thrust; rarely does one not want to turn the page. His penetrating study of Flanner speaks to his skill as a researcher. Weidmann, however, appears in less vivid detail, suggesting an imbalance in source material. All the same, this slight unevenness does not tarnish what is surely a significant work of nonfiction.

Part biography, part true crime narrative, this book presents something rare: a novel story about interwar Paris.