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The life and work of insatiably curious police-beat-reporter-turned-crime writer Edna Buchanan, who defined an era of Miami—and crime—history.

She was Edna Rydzik in Jersey. In Miami, she was the hardboiled crime writer who defined an era and left a complex legacy. Sarah Weinman from CrimeReads take’s a look at Edna Buchanan‘s Miami. Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Edna Rydzik, as she was known from birth until the short-lived marriage that bestowed her professional name, dreamed of the writer’s life at a young age. Dreaming was a good way to pass the time in Little Falls, New Jersey, a small town in Passaic County just outside of Paterson. It beat going to school, something she despised, as she told the Bergen County Record in 1987: “I dreaded Sunday night because Monday morning meant school. I have never dreaded anything as much since. Covering murders, rapes, and riots is a breeze by comparison.” And it certainly beat thinking about the most obvious future for her: working in a factory, like her mother, or a tavern, like her father, or staying at the Western Electric Plant as a switchboard operator.

The notion of writing about crime came later. The inciting incident happened early in the morning of Sunday, July 29, 1957. Rydzik, then nineteen, was driving her Nash Rambler along Lower Market Street in Paterson when she hit a 58-year-old homeless man named Archie Beal as he crossed the street. As the Herald-News described it the next day: “He landed on the car’s hood, which he dented and bounced into the windshield, which he cracked. Then he slid off the front of the hood and the car, still moving, rolled over him.”

When police and the ambulance arrived, Rydzik’s Rambler still lay on top of Beal. By some miracle he escaped real harm, treated for superficial head wounds before his hospital release. The Herald-News story noted Beal’s recurrent arrests for public intoxication; whether that contributed to his cheating death that night cannot be known. But for Rydzik, the ordeal’s aftermath made a permanent impression: how did the newspaper get so many details about what happened, and why did the cops talk to that reporter?

A decade and a half later, she was that reporter. Edna Rydzik, with a limited future in Paterson, had been wholly subsumed into Edna Buchanan, hard-driving, insatiably curious police beat reporter in Miami. Another short-lived marriage, this time to a cop, added insight, but far less than the daily calls to police stations wondering if there was a crime for her to write about. She liked to note, especially during the book tour phase for her 1987 nonfiction collection The Corpse Had A Familiar Face, that she had borne witness to more than 5,000 murders during her career and thousands more assaults, rapes, robberies, and other violent crimes in addition. (A side note: Buchanan was a guest on Late Night With David Letterman, at a time when authors were more customarily on late-night. It’s awkward to watch, though Buchanan is steely throughout.)

Some of Buchanan’s coverage sticks out more than most. The beating death of Arthur McDuffie, a black man, at the hands of a group of white cops, whose acquittal in May 1980 led to race riots that killed 18 people, wounded many more, and caused all manner of fires in the Miami. Contents Under Pressure fictionalizes this story and inserts Britt Montero into the narrative; because it was published in 1992, many people assumed Buchanan was writing about Rodney King or Reginald Denny. As she explained, and as we now know with bitter truth, police kill unarmed black men in every town, in every state.

There was also Jack Murphy, nicknamed “Murph the Surf” whose theft of the Star of India jewel from the American Museum of Natural History in 1964 made him into a minor celebrity, one that persisted even after he was convicted of the murders of two young women five years later. Murphy was released from prison and speaks on the lecture circuit. Buchanan told an interviewer in 2016 that she’ll still get called up by other journalists for background information, but refuses to take part: “You’re just playing into his hands. All he wants is attention…It’s mean cold brutal murder and he doesn’t need to be aggrandized anymore for it.”

Or the story of Jack Maclean, the self-designated “Superthief” whose brazen heisting masked even more brazen sexual assaults, committed in costume, sometimes in broad daylight. Buchanan reported in the Miami Herald, with barely disguised outrage, that Maclean wouldn’t be prosecuted for the rapes. It took decades, but she was eventually proven wrong on that count.

But the crime story that took over Buchanan’s life for a number of years is one even I have trouble stomaching. It’s the basis for her first book, Carr: Five Years of Rape and Murder, published in 1979, crafted out of more than 120 hours of interviews she conducted with Robert Frederick Carr III, a serial killer and rapist who murdered boys, girls, and women from Florida to Connecticut and back throughout the 1970s. He was caught in 1976 attempting to rape a woman. After his arrest he recreated his cross-country travels with police so that they could unearth the mutilated and brutalized bodies of his victims.

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