This article originally appeared in the May 1997 issue of Esquire. Get access to every Esquire story ever published at Esquire Classic.He was a powerfully built man, six feet tall and two hundred pounds, with thick, dark hair, a prominent nose, piercing eyes, and an intensity that electrified some people and intimidated others. On December 7, 1996, he committed suicide in a spectacular fashion, after leaving a trail of clues designed to lead the police and the public to conclude that he’d been murdered by an Indiana militia group. For a while, his colleagues in the midwestern chapter of the Mystery Writers of America—novelists whose minds run in winding channels of plots and conspiracies—bought into his fiction. Within hours after he’d been found hanging out the window of his fourteenth-floor office in Chicago’s Loop, they began issuing statements that Izzi, who had a reputation for taking risks to gather material for his novels, could not have died by his own hand. The ever-competitive Chicago media printed and broadcast these pronouncements, and soon Izzi’s death had become a whodunit, with all the melodramatic elements of the potboilers he wrote.Even Izzi’s closest friend, a man he called his brother, inadvertently fed the wild speculation: “There is no question that Guy [as Izzi’s friends called him] was in the midst of investigating certain individuals at the time of his death—that’s beyond dispute,” Andrew Vachss, a New York lawyer and a crime novelist in his own right, told the Chicago Sun-Times. “You don’t wrap… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
Read More
The Crime Novelist Who Wrote His Own Death Scene
