A. Brad Schwartz has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 5 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 9 ratings. The most-rated is Scarface and the Untouchable.
Scarface and the Untouchable
Summary
A thrilling magnum opus on America's great crime epic A Mystery Writers of America “Grand Master” - author of the gangster classic Road to Perdition, longtime Dick Tracy writer, and multiple Shamus Award winner - teams with an acclaimed rising young historian in this riveting, myth-shattering dual portrait of Al Capone, America’s most notorious gangster, and Eliot Ness, the legendary Prohibition agent whose extraordinary investigative work crippled his organization. Written with novelistic pacing and underpinned by groundbreaking research, Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz's Scarface and the Untouchable delivers - at last - the definitive account of the “Battle for Chicago”, the iconic struggle between the mythic yet real combatants who have captivated the world for 90 years.
©2018 Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers
Broadcast Hysteria
Summary
In Broadcast Hysteria, A. Brad Schwartz examines the history behind the infamous radio play. Did it really spawn a wave of mass hysteria? Schwartz is the first to examine the hundreds of letters sent directly to Orson Welles after the broadcast. He draws upon them, and hundreds more sent to the FCC, to recapture the roiling emotions of a bygone era, and his findings challenge conventional wisdom. Relatively few listeners believed an actual attack was underway. But even so, Schwartz shows that Welles's broadcast prompted a different kind of "mass panic" as Americans debated the bewitching power of the radio and the country's vulnerabilities in a time of crisis. Schwartz's original research, gifted storytelling, and thoughtful analysis make Broadcast Hysteria a groundbreaking work of media history.
©2015 A. Brad Schwartz (P)2015 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher
Summary
In the spirit of Devil in the White City comes a true detective tale of the highest standard: the haunting story of Eliot Ness' forgotten final case - his years-long hunt for "The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run", a serial killer who terrorized Cleveland through the Great Depression and tormented Ness to his dying breath. "A careening read that’s full of surprises.... Collins and Schwartz deliver a nimble, taut tale. More importantly, they offer a portrait of a complex crime fighter who believed in science and reason at a time when most officers smacked suspects around with a blackjack, a portrait set against a backdrop of ethnic and class collisions, labor unrest, and political intrigue. Catnip for true-crime buffs." (Kirkus Reviews) In 1934, the nation’s most legendary crime fighter - fresh from taking on the greatest gangster in American history - arrived in Cleveland, a corrupt and dangerous town about to host a world's fair. It was to be his coronation, as well as the city's. Instead, terror descended, as headless bodies started turning up. The young detective, already battling the mob and crooked cops, found his drive to transform American policing subverted by a menace largely unknown to law enforcement: a serial murderer. Eliot Ness' greatest case had begun. Now, Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz - the acclaimed writing team behind Scarface and The Untouchables - uncover this lost crime epic, delivering a gripping and unforgettable nonfiction account based on decades of groundbreaking research. Ness had risen to fame in 1931 for leading the “Untouchables”, which helped put Chicago’s Al Capone behind bars. As Cleveland's public safety director, in charge of the police and fire departments, Ness offered a radical new vision for better law enforcement. Crime-ridden and devastated by the Depression, Cleveland was preparing for a star-turn itself: in 1936, it would host the "Great Lakes Exposition", which would be visited by seven million people. Late in the summer of 1934, however, pieces of a woman’s body began washing up on the Lake Erie shore - first her ribs, then part of her backbone, then the lower half of her torso. The body count soon grew to five, then 10, then more, all dismembered in gruesome ways. As Ness zeroed in on a suspect - a doctor tied to a prominent political family - powerful forces thwarted his quest for justice. In this battle between a flawed hero and a twisted monster - by turns horror story, political drama, and detective thriller - Collins and Schwartz find an American tragedy, classic in structure, epic in scope.
©2020 Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers