Harold Schechter

HAROLD SCHECHTER is Professor Emeritus at Queens College, CUNY, where he taught courses on American literature for 42 years.  His essays on crime, psychopathology and media violence have appeared in many newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the International Herald Tribune.  He has written for network television (Law & Order) and been featured as an expert on PBS’ History Detectives, as well as various shows on cable channels, including Investigation Discovery, A & E Biography, and Court TV. 

Among his more than forty published books are a series of historical true-crime narratives about America’s most infamous serial killers, several encyclopedic works (The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, The Serial Killers Files, Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of), and an anthology of American true crime writing published by the Library of America.  

In the realm of fiction, he has written a series of mystery novels featuring Edgar Allan Poe as the narrator and protagonist--Nevermore, The Hum Bug, The Mask of Red Death, and the Tell-Tale Corpse--as well as two horror novels, Outcry and Dying Breath. In collaboration with his daughter, bestselling YA author Lauren Oliver, he has also written a series of middle grade mystery books, the first of which--Curiosity House: The Shrunken Head--was a 2016 Edgar nominee in the Best Juvenile category..

His 2014 book, The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, The Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation was praised in the Wall Street Journal as a nonfiction account “as gripping as the cleverest Golden Age mystery” and was a 2015 Edgar nominee in the Best Crime Fact category.  His 2018, Hell’s Princess, became a Washington Post and Amazon Charts bestseller.  His most recent book is Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Murderer.