Author Visit: Charlie Cosgrove

Charlie Cosgrove, author of They Both Reached for the Gun, will give a presentation on his book, and on one of Owensboro's most notorious figures: Beulah Sheriff Annan. He will do a book signing after the presentation.

They Both Reached for the Gun is the story of Beulah Annan, whose 1924 trial for murder inspired the play Chicago by Maurine Watkins. That play was remade into a 1920s silent film, a 1940s movie, and a 1970s musical by Bob Fosse that was revived to great acclaim in the 1990s and then turned into the blockbuster movie-musical Chicago, starring Rene Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Based on interviews with Beulah’s relatives and newly discovered court and police records in the archives of the Cook County Medical Office and the Library of Congress, Both Reached for the Gun pulls back the curtain on the genesis of Chicago with engaging tales of real life in the Jazz Age. Charles H. Cosgrove ex­pertly combines meticulous research into inquest transcripts, police records, and interviews with Annan’s relatives with de­tailed analysis to shed new light on the participants, the trial, and the subsequent play and musical. Although no one will ever know what really happened in the South-Side apartment one hundred years ago, Cosgrove’s interrogation shows how sensa­tionalized Watkins’s writing was.