Former Professor Giles Fowler: Practicing What He Preached

Giles Fowler spent two decades teaching students how to craft the perfect sentence. It’s a painstaking process subject to multiple rewrites and plenty of frustration – and never more so than when Fowler retired from Iowa State and jumped into the biggest writing project of his professional life.

“When I was finally given the first copy of the manuscript, I read through it and was horrified,” Fowler says of the now-published book. “I was thinking, ‘How dare I submit this thing for publication?’”

He did, of course, and the resulting “Deaths on Pleasant Street” is a page-turner set in a stately mansion near Kansas City 100 years ago. Revisiting a sensational murder among the area’s moneyed set, Fowler’s book achieved an unusual twofer: an award from a Missouri historical society, as well as an award for true-crime book of the year award, given by an organization that highlights the work of independent publishers.

“Deaths on Pleasant Street: The Ghastly Enigma of Colonel Swope and Dr. Hyde” was put out by Truman State University Press, a publishing house better known for serious history than true crime — even 100-year-old true crime. (Links to purchase from Amazon.com or the publisher.) The historians who peer-reviewed Fowler’s book – as an academic book, it was subject to the same rigor as the typical tome about war or politics – didn’t know what to make this gothic tale with grisly crime scenes and a corpse so frozen it couldn’t be autopsied.

“Academic historians didn’t get it at all,” he said. “I was trying to write a page-turner.”

Not to say the research wasn’t exhaustive: Fowler spent months reading archives and trials transcripts – on microfiche – and every issue of two newspapers from the period the case made national news. At the time, the story of a high-society doctor possibly poisoning his own relatives was monitored from coast to coast.

Fowler spent 24 years on the Kansas City Star as a theater critic and magazine writer. He spent another 20 teaching ISU students long-form feature writing, literary journalism, and basic reporting, and was the faculty adviser to the Iowa State Daily for several years.

He first heard of the murder case as a young Star reporter in the 1960s; even then, more than 50 years after the deaths, the case captured the city’s interest. Fowler began work on the book after retiring in 2003, researching and reporting for about three years and then writing for another two. He wrote and rewrote and then rewrote again – agonizing over every paragraph, every sentence, every word. The book was published in 2009 – 100 years after the deaths.

“It inhabited my damn life,” he said. “I’ve never worked remotely as hard on anything.”

The story has attracted the interest of Hollywood. Bill Paxton, the actor known for roles in Titanic, Twister and the current HBO series “Big Love,” is a distant relative of an attorney involved in the 1909 case; he contacted Fowler to talk about developing it for the movies or for HBO. No word yet on whether those talks will pan out.

–By Chris Adams