Editing Harold Schechter (section)

== Career ==
Schechter is Professor Emeritus at Queens College, and specializes in American true crime, specifically serial murders of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Using primary sources such as newspaper clippings and court records, he supplies thorough documentation of every case he profiles, while still managing to create compelling narratives and fully fleshed-out characters.

His 2014 book, The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Crime that Shook the Nation, was nominated for an Edgar Award in the Best Fact Crime category.<ref name="Edgar Awards">{{cite web |title=Edgar Awards Best Fact Crime list |url=http://theedgars.com/awards/category-list-best-fact-crime/ |website=Edgar Awards |access-date=29 November 2020}}</ref> In addition to his work as a crime historian, Schechter is the author of an acclaimed series of detective novels based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe.<ref name="MahdiFoster1987">{{cite book|last1=Mahdi|first1=Louise Carus|last2=Foster|first2=Steven|last3=Little|first3=Meredith|title=Betwixt & Between: Patterns of Masculine and Feminine Initiation|url=https://archive.org/details/betwixtbetweenpa00mahd|url-access=registration|date=1 January 1987|publisher=Open Court Publishing|isbn=978-0-8126-9048-4|page=[https://archive.org/details/betwixtbetweenpa00mahd/page/67 67]}}</ref> Under the pseudonym H. C. Chester, he has also co-written the middle-grade trilogy, Curiosity House, with his daughter, bestselling YA novelist Lauren Oliver.   The first book in  the series, Curiosity House: The Shrunken Head (2016), was nominated for an Edgar Award in the "Best Juvenile Mystery" category.<ref name="Edgars">{{cite web |title=Edgar Awards |url=http://theedgars.com/awards/ |website=The Edgar Awards |access-date=2020-11-29 |archive-date=2019-12-23 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191223141429/http://theedgars.com/awards/ |url-status=dead }}</ref>

In addition to his historical crime books and mystery fiction, Schechter has written extensively on American popular culture.  In ''The Bosom Serpent: Folklore and Popular Art'', he explores the relationship between contemporary commercial entertainment and the narrative archetypes of traditional folklore. ''Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment'' places the current controversy over media violence in a broad historical context.  Examining everything from Victorian murder ballads to the productions of the nineteenth-century Grand Guignol, the book makes the somewhat contrarian argument that today's popular entertainment is actually less violent than the gruesome diversions of the supposedly halcyon past.<ref name="MahdiFoster1987"/><ref name="Gilbert2006">{{cite book|last=Gilbert|first=Nathaniel|title=Democracide: America on the Road to Fascism and Bankruptcy|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=jwAyO3NwMWAC&pg=PA153|year=2006|publisher=AuthorHouse|isbn=978-1-4259-5922-7|page=153}}</ref>

In his 1973 article, "Kali on Main Street: The Rise of the Terrible Mother in America", Schechter uses the phrase "horror-porn," which is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary as the first printed appearance of the word "porn" in its now-common figurative meaning: "As the second element in compounds: denoting written or visual material that emphasizes the sensuous or sensational aspects of a non-sexual subject, appealing to its audience in a manner likened to the titillating effect of pornography.<ref name="OED">{{cite book |title=Oxford English Dictionary |date=September 2020 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=Oxford, UK}}</ref>

With David Black, Schechter also co-wrote the teleplay for the Season 8 Law & Order episode, “Castoff.”<ref>{{cite web |title=Law and Order Castoff credits |url=https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0629199/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_wr#writers/ |website=IMDB}}</ref>