U.S. writer in Paris chronicled pre-war serial killer case

What do an American writer and a German murderer have in common? In this compelling non-fiction account, Vancouver-based historian Mark Braude suggests their intersecting lives in 1930s Paris capture some of the social, political and cultural forces roiling Europe in the leadup to the Second World War.

Braude, whose works include Kiki Man Ray, The Invisible Emperor and Making Monte Carlo, has a knack for bringing history to a general audience, using focused biographical accounts and fascinating little details to develop big, important ideas.

The Typewriter and the Guillotine combines pacy, descriptive storytelling with sound, solid research. (The work includes extensive notes and a substantial bibliography, though no index.) Fans of the narrative history genre will see similarities to such books as Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City and In the Garden of the Beasts.

The title’s typewriter belongs to Janet Flanner, a queer woman from the American Midwest who heads to Paris in the 1920s to live an independent, creative life away from her conservative family and failed marriage. She wants to write about “Beauty, with a capital ‘B,’” and in the 1920s she starts penning Letter from Paris columns under the nom de plume Genêt, becoming the first foreign correspondent for the newly minted New Yorker magazine.

Flanner’s adventures in the City of Light seem at first like the usual expatriate experience — food and drink, grit and glamour, glimpses of Colette, Gertrude Stein, Josephine Baker, Ernest Hemingway.

But Flanner’s writing takes a much darker turn heading into the 1930s, as she encounters the swelling wave of authoritarianism in Germany and rising civil strife in France.

The guillotine of the title represents the destiny of German-born serial killer Eugen Weidmann. Convicted of killing six people, often for paltry sums of money, he will become the last person to be publicly executed in France in 1939.

Born into an ordinary middle-class family in Frankfurt, Weidmann felt he was made for finer things, papering over his violent criminality with a thin veneer of culture and a smattering of Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Baudelaire. Joining up with some jailhouse confederates (including a guy who wanted to be called “Scarface” even though he had no scars), Weidmann embarks on a killing spree in France. When he is finally arrested and tried, his high-profile lawyer argues against the death penalty, framing his argument as a triumph of French civilization over German barbarism.

Braude’s inclusion of a true-crime serial-killer saga makes for a catchy hook, but he never establishes a convincing link between Flanner and Weidmann.

Flanner covered Weidmann’s trial, of course, along with most of the other journos in France, but this is not like the close connection examined in Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, or Truman Capote’s obsession with one of the In Cold Blood killers.

Braude is on much surer ground examining Flanner’s fabulously complicated life and her important, under-covered work as a journalist.

He starts with the early, uncertain days of the New Yorker, relating how the magazine struggled to find its characteristic tone, eventually settling on a voice that was insouciant and casually cultured but never earnest or overly highbrow.

This became an issue as Flanner found herself duty-bound to deliver serious reporting on the growing threat of totalitarianism in Germany. (As E.B. White joked, the magazine’s only stated political stance was strong opposition to the relocation of the Penn Station information booth.)

Braude uses Flanner’s story to discuss the challenges of covering history as it’s made. He demonstrates how liberal democracies and their journalists sometimes struggled to respond to the Nazi regime, often falling into normalization and even appeasement.

With the benefit of hindsight, some of Flanner’s early dispatches can seem glib or naïve. But she learned as she went, and her insights are often penetrating. “Everything that is happening here in Europe now is happening according to the characters, rather than the politics, of a few leading men,” she wrote in 1937. “What is taking place here is psychology, not history. History will come later.”

Braude never explicitly pushes parallels to our current era, but Flanner’s accounts of the rising darkness in Europe — the corruption and repression, the hatred and divisiveness, the conspiracy-mongering and censorship — will seem depressingly familiar to many readers in 2026.

The Typewriter and the Guillotine feels unfortunately relevant, then, but as Braude evokes Flanner’s unflinching commitment to truth, it is not without hope.

Alison Gillmor writes on movies for the Free Press.