Books by Bill LeFurgy
Books by Bill LeFurgy explore the showgirls, silent-film stars, art, crime, language, and popular culture of America’s Gilded Age and Jazz Age. His nonfiction draws on decades of work as an archivist and historian, while his historical mysteries recreate the streets and hidden worlds of early twentieth-century Baltimore.
Choose a title below for photographs, excerpts, background information, and purchasing options.
Jazz Age, Silent Film, and Cultural History
Ziegfeld Girls and the Birth of Hollywood Glamour
Portraits and short biographies of fifty-three Ziegfeld performers who carried Broadway’s visual language into silent film and Old Hollywood. A photographic history of glamour, celebrity, and women’s careers during the Jazz Age.
Louise Brooks: A Life in Pictures
A visual biography tracing Brooks from Kansas and the Ziegfeld Follies to silent-film immortality as Lulu. Includes an account of her life and career, rare photographs, and a complete filmography.
Sex, Art, and Salome
A lavishly illustrated history of the femme fatale who haunted Western culture—from the biblical story to Gustave Moreau, Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, Richard Strauss, and the Salome craze.
Flynn’s Dictionary of the Underworld
A newly compiled and annotated edition of Flynn’s remarkable dictionary of underworld language—the slang of criminals, gamblers, grifters, police, and the streets.
Criminal Slang
An annotated edition of Joseph M. Sullivan’s 1908 Dictionary of the Vernacular of the Underworld, preserving and explaining the language of criminals, police, prisons, gambling, confidence schemes, and street life.
Historical Mystery Novels
The Sarah Kennecott and Jack Harden mysteries combine carefully researched Baltimore history with murder, corruption, and the uncanny.
Into the Suffering City
In 1909 Baltimore, a brilliant woman doctor and a damaged private detective investigate the murder of a young showgirl. The first Sarah Kennecott and Jack Harden mystery.
Murder in the Haunted Chamber
Baltimore, 1910. When Dr. Sarah Kennecott’s dead sister appears in a dream and correctly predicts a murder, Sarah and Jack Harden confront a deceptive medium, deadly séances, and secrets that may—or may not—be supernatural.
Book two in the Sarah Kennecott and Jack Harden mystery series.