Non-Fiction Books

" Hynd has captured the spirit of the times in this quaint and entertaining sidelight to sports and show-biz history." - Publishers Weekly. Newly revised, expanded and re-illustrated....Mat 2021...... Here is a stunning and largely unknown true story about a scandalous romance, baseball and the American theater in the years before World War One. Think of this as the Joe Di Maggio and Marilyn Monroe of an earlier era. Former 'Sports Illustrated' contributor Noel Hynd has recreated a fascinating era in all its scandal, sexiness, charm and glamour. A memorable true tale! From Publishers Weekly Rube Marquard (ne Richard LeMarquis) was the pitching star of the New York Giants in their pennant-winning years of 1911-1913. Blossom Seeley (nee Minnie Guyer) was a San Franciscan who had great success as a singer on the West Coast and went to New York City, where her first show, The Hen-Pecks, established her as a star. At the time, it was not uncommon for sports stars to play in vaudeville shows written especially for them, and so it was that the skit "Breaking the Record" was put together for Marquard and Seeley. Not only was it a great hit, but the two fell in love and Seeley divorced her husband of just a year to marry Marquard. In 1914, however, the Giants had a bad year, Marquard became less of a stage attraction and his wife went back on the vaudeville circuit as a solo act. They separated in 1916 and were divorced in 1922, as his career went downhill and hers soared so high that George Gershwin wrote "Somebody Loves Me" for her. The divorced couple corresponded for 50 years, until Seeley died in 1974. Hynd (The Giants of the Polo Grounds) has captured the spirit of the times in this quaint and entertaining sidelight to sports and show-biz history.

The expanded and revised edition! A big free-wheeling uncensored FUN read about a great team, a great ball park and a great city. The Giants of The Polo Grounds is the definitive work on baseball’s New York Giants and their tenure in New York City. An “Editor’s Choice” of The New York Times when it was first published more than 20 years ago, the book was also a Spitball Magazine nominee for the Best Baseball Book of the year. Author Noel Hynd, a former contributor to Sports Illustrated, has now created a new edition that maintains all the previous text, but expands the work to more than 600 pages from the original 375. Included this time are more stories about McGraw, Ott, Durocher and Mays and their opponents, plus more on the men and women from other sports and various fields of entertainment who also were ‘giants’ of the Polo Grounds: from boxers Jack Dempsey and Sugar Ray Robinson to entertainers Annie Oakley and Tallulah Bankhead to football’s Red Grange and soccer’s Béla Guttmann. The Giants of The Polo Grounds is the story of a famous team, a renowned ball park, an invincible spirit and America’s most vibrant city from the 1880’s to the 1950’s. The new edition is packed with remarkable anecdotes about Broadway, New York politics, good guys and bad guys who made the Giants' era in New York unique and memorable. The new edition, practically the equivalent of two volumes, also features more than 100 photos and illustrations, most of them new, some rarely seen. Critical Praise for The Giants of The Polo Grounds “A compelling and comprehensive history of an extraordinary ball club.” - New York Times “Grandly digressive! The owners, stars like Mathewson and Mays, various eccentric players are all here in this vivid history by Sports Illustrated contributor Hynd.” - Publishers’ Weekly “Fans of all ages will treasure the crazy quilt text for its stylish recall of the game’s summer roots.” -Kirkus Library Journal “Just plain enjoyable as baseball is supposed to be.” - The Pennsylvania Gazette Think of it as a grand slam into the center field bleachers in the bottom of the 9th!

Nominated by SABR (The Society for American Baseball Research) for Best New Book about The Brooklyn Dodgers in 2019.The Dodgers’ final game in Brooklyn was played on September 24th, 1957. From the author of "The Giants of The Polo Grounds," here's a thoughtful entertaining new account of that last game played by the Brooklyn Dodgers at baseball's fabled Ebbets Field. 'The Final Game At Ebbets Field’ starts this unique collection of true baseball stories. Photographs and a treasure trove of new insights and details accompany this newly researched account. The book continues with a lively assemblage of true major league stories from the golden age of baseball, focusing on New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and Brooklyn, with a touch of San Francisco at the conclusion. We meet the fascinating men and women of the first half of the 20th Century. We get to know the people and places of a colorful bygone time: back when there were sixteen teams and hundreds of legendary players. Meet, for example, the family that lived at a ballpark in New York, the female Olympic swimmer who became the pitcher and captain of the New York Female Giants. Spend time with championship Boston Red Sox team that featured the greatest everyday outfield ever. Go back to the day when John Dillinger played professional baseball and Al Capone asked a Chicago player for an autograph, a request that was not to be refused. Fly a single engine plane with Ruth Law, the skilled aviatrix who dropped a grapefruit from an airplane on the Brooklyn manager. Relive the torments of the A's owner who erected a spiteful wall in Philadelphia to prevent neighborhood fans from seeing his team's games.All these true stories and more are contained here, told in the wry amusing style of Noel Hynd, a former contributor to Sports Illustrated.'The Final Game at Ebbets Field' is an insightful romp through some of American baseball's quirkiest events. It’s a memorable read! Come join us on a road trip into baseball's most colorful times.Praise for Noel Hynd's "The Giants of The Polo Grounds”…...“A compelling and comprehensive history of an extraordinary ball club.” - New York Times“Grandly digressive! The owners, stars like Mathewson and Mays, various eccentric players are all here in this vivid history by Sports Illustrated contributor Hynd.” - Publishers’ Weekly“Fans of all ages will treasure the crazy quilt text for its stylish recall of the game’s summer roots.” -Kirkus Library Journal“Just plain enjoyable as baseball is supposed to be.” - The Pennsylvania GazetteE-book priced in a tribute to Ty Cobb's career batting average. Trade paperback publication, late May 2019.

One sweltering afternoon late in June 1919, a thirty-seven-year-old clerk named Charles Ponzi, who was employed by a Boston, Massachusetts brokerage house, opened an envelope from Spain and made a startling discovery. The envelope contained a postal reply coupon, something Ponzi had never heard of. The coupon, which the writer in Spain had enclosed to cover the postal reply from the brokerage house, had been purchased in Madrid for the equivalent of one cent in U.S. currency. Yet it was redeemable at any post office or bank in the United States for five cents.Ponzi pursed his lips and looked off into space. Here, he decided, was something worthy of serious investigation. So began a unique story in the history of American crime, and so begins ‘The Summer of Charlie Ponzi,’ the newest novel by espionage and crime author Noel Hynd. ‘The Summer of Charlie Ponzi’ is based on the true story of the involvement and reporting of his father, Alan Hynd, in the infamous Ponzi case in 1919 and 1920.Boston in the years after World War One was a bustling, booming metropolis, the fifth-largest city in the United States. The Roaring Twenties were underway. Immigrants from all over the world poured into Prohibition-era Boston. So did young, first-generation American men and women anxious to seek their fortune. America, and Boston in particular, was a wide-open place, filled with crime, jazz, flappers, a new easy morality, and speakeasies. There were two great baseball clubs – the Braves and the Red Sox – and six daily newspapers. Newspapers were everywhere. There were newsstands at North Station, in front of Symphony Hall, in front of Filene’s, and in the streets of Charlestown, Southie and Dorchester. On the rare blocks with no newsstand, the hoarse, aggressive chant of newsboys filled the air. The Boston Post stood out among the daily papers. It was the fourth-leading morning newspaper in the country in circulation. There were many reasons The Post stood out, but one was city editor Eddie Dunn, the best newspaperman in Boston during the hard-drinking, two-fisted era of the 1920s. Eddie Dunn understood news, how to find it, get it, and sell it. By the end of 1919, Charlie Ponzi had hatched out his scheme: he would build his fortune on postal reply coupons and beat the banks in the money lending game. While banks were paying five percent per year, Ponzi promised investors fifty percent interest in forty-five days. He soon had people lining up at his office on School Street, practically throwing money at him. By April of 1920, Charlie Ponzi was taking in a $250,000 every day in cash as his pyramid scheme swept the city. The offices of The Boston Post were also on School Street. Inevitably, The Post and Ponzi took notice and measure of each other. In the summer of 1920, their worlds collided. When the Ponzi swindle became the biggest local story of the year, even bigger than Sacco and Vanzetti, Eddie Dunn threw every spare reporter onto the story. By this time, Alan Hynd, still in his late teens, had cadged a job as a street reporter for The Post. He had only a few weeks of experience, but Dunn assigned him to his team of top reporters covering the case.'The Summer of Charlie Ponzi' is the story of a young man covering the most brazen financial crime of the twentieth century. This hard-edged Jazz-Age tale is full of fascinating women and men drawn from the newsrooms, tenements, speakeasies, high social circles, financial boardrooms, streets, and sidewalks of Boston of the 1920s. Told in the young reporter’s sly acerbic voice, the tale is at times brash and hilarious, at times heartbreaking, frequently astonishing, and always riveting. *‘The Summer of Charlie Ponzi’ joins ‘Ashes from a Burning Corpse’ in the series “An American True Crime Reporter in the 20th Century.” The series recounts the major cases of the American reporter who would later become one of the best-known true crime writers of his era.