Ready to Hang

Robert Tallant says that "New Orleans need never apologize for its murder history." From that elegant brothel on Basin Street, where fat Kate Townsend's body was found on her lace-hung bed, with a basket of flowers suspended from the tester, to the shuttered filthy room where the hypnotist Dr. Deschamps lay with a dead child beside him, the murder history of New Orleans has been a dramatic one.Robert Tallant has worked from contemporary records and his stories are authentic, making for fascinating reading. The reader watches the dread Mafia in action; sees proper Miss Annie Crawford playing her favorite role, respectable killer; and learns about the omnipresent (or so it seemed) Axman, all set in the glamorous, mysterious, and beautiful city of New Orleans. Tallant was a novelist who made his characters and scenes move from the pages; a man who knew the city he was writing about, knew it and loved it. Tallant was born in New Orleans on April 9, 1909, and lived there all of his life. He wrote short stories, articles, nonfiction books, novels, and books for children. Among them are Evangeline and the Acadians; Mardi Gras . . . As It Was; The Pirate Lafitte and the Battle of New Orleans, which won the 1951 Louisiana Library Association Award for best book of the year; Voodoo in New Orleans; The Voodoo Queen; and Gumbo Ya-Ya: Folk Tales of Louisiana, of which he was a co-author. They are all published by Pelican.