A Carnival of Crime

Through ten interconnected true-crime stories, this historical account captures a South Carolina county’s most violent decade—a time when bullets felled a mayor, a police chief, and a beloved bookseller, each in separate shocking incidents.

llustrated with dozens of photographs, A Carnival of Crime: Murder, Mischief, and Malice in 1890s Spartanburg delves into the exploits of a crooked local attorney who became one of the nation’s most slippery con men, the controversial hanging of a teenaged girl, and the bedlam unleashed when a governor tried to crush the moonshine trade. All this chaos and more unfolds amid Spartanburg’s first economic boom, as cotton mills multiply across the county and the community becomes one of the South’s rising industrial powers, generating many great fortunes.

At once a gripping true narrative and richly researched local history, A Carnival of Crime reveals how ambition, corruption, and rapid economic change shaped the region in unexpected ways. The result is a vivid portrait of a community coming of age—where prosperity and violence often advanced side by side, leaving behind stories that still echo more than a century later.