{"id":11279,"date":"2021-06-11T15:48:43","date_gmt":"2021-06-11T15:48:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedailyherald.co.uk\/uncategorized\/the-crime-novelist-who-wrote-his-own-death-scene\/"},"modified":"2021-06-11T15:48:43","modified_gmt":"2021-06-11T15:48:43","slug":"the-crime-novelist-who-wrote-his-own-death-scene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedailyherald.co.uk\/lifestyle\/the-crime-novelist-who-wrote-his-own-death-scene\/","title":{"rendered":"The Crime Novelist Who Wrote His Own Death Scene"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019d been murdered by an Indiana militia group. For a while, his colleagues in the midwestern chapter of the Mystery Writers of America\u2014novelists whose minds run in winding channels of plots and conspiracies\u2014bought into his fiction. Within hours after he\u2019d been found hanging out the window of his fourteenth-floor office in Chicago\u2019s 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\u2019s death had become a whodunit, with all the melodramatic elements of the potboilers he wrote.Even Izzi\u2019s closest friend, a man he called his brother, inadvertently fed the wild speculation: \u201cThere is no question that Guy [as Izzi\u2019s friends called him] was in the midst of investigating certain individuals at the time of his death\u2014that\u2019s beyond dispute,\u201d Andrew Vachss, a New York lawyer and a crime novelist in his own right, told the Chicago Sun-Times. \u201cYou don\u2019t wrap… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1020,"featured_media":11280,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[36],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Crime Novelist Who Wrote His Own Death Scene - The Daily Herald<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thedailyherald.co.uk\/uncategorized\/the-crime-novelist-who-wrote-his-own-death-scene\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Crime Novelist Who Wrote His Own Death Scene - The Daily Herald\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"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. 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