Shame does stick it’s head out at the most inconvenient and thus embarrassing moments. France is leading the centenary commemoration of the end of WW1 – the Great War. Over sixty world leaders will be here on Sunday, November 11, for the main ceremony at Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. President Trump will be one […]
When Dr Marcel Petiot (see my book Die in Paris) was guillotined on Saturday, May 25, 1945, he had a scar on his left foot. Always was this man – France’s most prolific serial killer – proud of the scar. He showed it to those he told the story of his Great War experience. […]
On September 17, 2017 (last year) I wrote here on this website how Englishman Adrian Spong has in his possession two artworks he believes are by Vincent van Gogh. Having studied Mr Spong’s research, I believe he has. You can read what I wrote here – https://www.marilynztomlins.com/articles/vincent-van-gogh-death-of-the-virgin-is-this-painting-a-van-gogh/ In fact, I recommend that you do read […]
A proposal for a one-off dramatized television documentary based on the true-crime book ‘Die in Paris’ by Marilyn Z. Tomlins, published in the U.K. by Ravencrest Books Ltd. The Subject: Dr Marcel Petiot, WW2 French serial killer. Dr Marcel Petiot was one of the 20th Century’s most notorious – and prolific – murderers. […]
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Is there anything more French than the guillotine, you may well ask? As a true crime writer resident in France, I’ve written about this head-chopping apparatus, first put to work in 1792 and last put to work in 1981, four years after capital punishment had been abolished by a parliamentary vote (1977). One of […]
Money makes the world go round, it is said. Money also turns people into murderers: those not having it, wanting it. And murdering to have it. This case – the fatal shooting of Monaco billionaires, Hélène Pastor, on Tuesday, May 6, 2014 – is such a case. I reported the shooting in detail and I […]
In July this year of 2018 France’s prison population was 70,710. This number is out of France’s population which comes to 65,286,555 of whom about 6 million are foreign-born. Not bad, would you say? The French are behaving themselves. Not if you consider that France ‘s prisons can accommodate just 60,000. Therefore, France’s prisons […]
For the first half of this year of 2018 17,1 million tourists have come to Paris and the Ile de France (Paris region). Paris, since the end of WW2, having, each year, received more visitors than any other city in the world, has never ever had such a tourist boom. Tell it to us who […]
August 1997 the world media, especially the British nationals, had just one lead story. Tabloids like the Daily Mail, Mirror and The People, even broadsheets like The Times, kept calling their correspondents for updates: the editors did not want to miss anything. The story was: Princess Diana, divorced from Prince Charles heir to the […]
To stand facing one of these on a Paris street calls for that famous French cry ‘oh là là!’ It is Paris’s newest public urinal for men. Known in French as an uritrottoirs – uri for urine and trottoirs for pavement (sidewalk) – four of them were placed in tourist spots in the French capital […]
Today – July 30 – in the year 1890 – it was a Wednesday – Vincent van Gogh was buried in the village where he had died – Auvers-sur-Oise. He had died the day before – Monday, Tuesday, July 29, from a gunshot wound. About his death I will say no more. However, […]
It is summer and France is under a heatwave. All – female, male, thin, fat, beautiful, ugly… whatever – are wearing shorts or hot pants, the females in very revealing dresses and tops as well. Often when a girl/woman is raped people say: “Look what she was wearing; she was asking for it!” This summer, […]
At No. 47 Rue Raynouard in Paris’s chic 16th district (arrondissement), there is a house, one not very large or grand, but which all the same left me in silent awe. This house is where French writer Honoré de Balzac, had lived. I visited the house, today a museum – the Maison de Balzac – […]
From 1940 to 1944, the Second World War raging, Frenchman Marcel Petiot, to all appearances a kind family doctor – and loving husband and father – was killing people in Paris. The Nazis’ killing spree having acted as background, and indeed offering protection, for his killings, he, at the start of 1944, it […]
