For two weeks in March 1939, as Hitler completed his annexation of Czechoslovakia and Europe braced for war, a lurid murder trial captivated Paris. Eugen Weidmann, a German drifter, had killed six people during a spree in 1937, apparently for no greater reason than a need for petty cash. His date with the guillotine would prove to be the last public execution in France. Among the reporters who covered the trial was Janet Flanner of The New Yorker, a new magazine that offered sardonic fare and metropolitan wit. “Only a typical postwar German like Weidmann,” Flanner wrote, “unfamiliar with the value of money as the rest of the freer world knows it, would have killed so many people for so little.”
Flanner and Weidmann are the subjects of Mark Braude’s The Typewriter and the Guillotine, an absorbing, expertly paced work of narrative nonfiction. Despite the twin billing, Flanner is the book’s star, with Weidmann making more of a supporting appearance. Mr. Braude, a historian and the author of Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love, and Rivalry in 1920s Paris (2022), writes in the tradition of Erik Larson, who has published multiple bestsellers that set interpersonal dramas and true-crime accounts against the backdrop of great world events, such as the Chicago World’s Fair (The Devil in the White City, from 2003) and the rise of the Nazis (In the Garden of Beasts, 2011).
What sets Mr. Braude’s work apart from Mr. Larson’s—and what elevates it—is his interest in intellectual history. The Typewriter and the Guillotine covers The New Yorker’s first years and charts its course as the magazine figured out what it aimed to be. Its co-founders, Harold Ross and Jane Grant, approached Flanner soon after creating the magazine in 1925 to offer her a regular “Letter From Paris” column. Grant hoped Flanner could give readers “dope on fields of the arts and a little on fashion, perhaps.”
Flanner was a perfect fit for the breezy tone of the magazine’s first decade. A lesbian free spirit living in Paris since 1922, she had grown up in Indianapolis and written an arts column for the Indianapolis Star. Flanner and her partner, Solita Solano, lived in bohemian splendor at the Hotel Napoleon Bonaparte on the Left Bank, where they wrote unsuccessful novels and drank “black French coffee which tasted like death,” according to Flanner. Among their circle were Margaret Anderson, James Thurber and Ernest Hemingway, who had his own favorite chair in Flanner’s apartment, built low-slung for nursing mothers.
Writing for The New Yorker, Flanner “became the unofficial historian of the fading vieux Paris, lamenting the closings of once-iconic cafes and the shuttering of specialized shops,” Mr. Braude writes. Glamorously writing under the byline Genêt, she filled her dispatches with more fizz than champagne. Many of her stories were about masked balls and celebrity divorces. Yet she could not avoid—and was not always up to—commenting on gathering events. In one column from 1935 she wrote blithely, “if war comes this year, it might come at the beginning of July, if it’s hot, heat and history having an undeniable affiliation in European affairs.” She also played down the sinister nature of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935), writing that it provided “two hours of Hitler, fabulous flags, acres of marching men, shovelers, trumpeters, etc.”
As these tone-deaf lines indicate, Flanner was a gifted writer but not a political seer. Friends even worried that the Nazis had won her over. Yet if Flanner was no oracle, she was also no fascist. Helping to create The New Yorker’s signature voice of amused detachment, she used her reporting to reveal broader insights: the subtle tic as poker tell. In a three-part profile of Hitler, she ably conveyed the Führer’s menacing appeal. He “has mystical tendencies, no common sense, and a Wagnerian taste for heroics and death. He was born loaded with vanities and has developed megalomania as his final decoration.”
In this context came the Weidmann affair, which Flanner covered from the trial through the execution. Weidmann killed a chauffeur, a dancer, a nurse, then a series of men he had lured into phony investment schemes, using their pocket money to pay his rent. Flanner’s reporting on the trial could be uneven. Reaching for a brush that might paint the case into a broader European context, she applied strokes of crass national stereotype: Weidmann the ultimate Aryan, his typically pliant and rudderless French confederates and an American victim whose weakness for “sociability with strangers” spelled doom. Although Weidmann’s crime spree is this book’s narrative conceit, it was neither the height of Flanner’s career (she wrote for The New Yorker until 1975) nor her best moment.
Nor was the war: She left France in October 1939 and did not return until after the liberation of Paris in August 1944. A.J. Liebling, her replacement, covered World War II from Europe and Africa and witnessed the invasion of Normandy. This change in personnel helped build the magazine’s journalistic muscle and was probably best for its readers. There were plenty of intrepid female war reporters, but on Flanner’s sole trip to a battlefield, she dressed in pink pants; red, fur-lined cowboy boots; and matching mittens.
Mr. Braude is suitably critical of his subject for her sometimes glib approach to life-and-death matters, and he pegs her appeal as “delivering hard news as if it was light gossip.” Yet he offers this defense of her reporting: “In hanging on to that way of writing, her unconventional approach, mannered style, and absurdist wit, was she not, in her own way, offering a rebuke to tyrants and their followers who insisted that the world should not be beautiful or funny but only hateful and ugly?”
Whether or not that rebuttal is persuasive, in the end Flanner redeemed herself. After returning to France, she moved past society gossip and vapid crooks like Weidmann to write notable profiles of Marshal Pétain and Charles de Gaulle. In 1945 she visited Buchenwald days after its liberation, writing to her editor that the concentration camps were the essential story of the war. Most significantly, Flanner reported from the trials at Nuremberg, writing that a group of Nazi prisoners “seem already waxen and posthumous, like museum figures of the members of some nefarious long-ago regime which had failed.” Here at last was a trial worth covering, matched with the right correspondent.
