B-2 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE APRIL 8, 1994
BOOKS
Atmosphere and grisly killings keep pages turning
Torsos
by John Peyton Cooke Mysterious Press, 359 p., $19.95, hardcover
Reviewed by George Barnum
The Cleveland we love is a city with a fascinating and somewhat checkered history. Like any large city there are tales of crime and intrigue alongside the stories of monuments and events. One of the strangest chapters is surely the serial killings in the 1930s that became known as the Kingsbury Run Murders or, more popularly, the Torso Slayings. More than a dozen victims, primarily men, were found severely dismembered in desolate areas to the immediate southeast of downtown. Cleveland's newly hired Director of Public Safety, Eliot Ness, was unable to crack the case, and it remains unsolved to this day.
The Torso case is fertile ground for the crime writer. A number of fiction and nonfiction stories have appeared over the years, positing a variety of theories about who the
killer really was and how he managed to remain uncaught. John Peyton Cooke's third
characters drawn from suggestions in the record and his sharp imagination. He creates a character for the unknown killer who is not only well fitted to the attributes described by Ness and others in the investigation, but which also creates the necessary aura of sinister intent that keeps the books tense and suspenseful. Cooke's other wholly fictional characters are equally successful, in particular the closeted Hank “Lucky” Lambert, detective in charge of the case, and world-wise protagonist. These characters (with the exception of Ness) and their relationships are wholly Cooke's creation, and flesh out the skeletal story from the historical record.
The book is a wonderful read from the point of view of a page turning thriller. It is surely not for the squeamish; the murders were grisly, and Cooke spares us little of that grit. Neither is it a sedate mystery of the Agatha Christie variety, with subtle clues placed here and there. It works as a polished fictionalization of a case that is so dramatic
The book is a wonderful read from the point of view of a page turning thriller. It is surely not for the squeamish; the murders were novel Torsos grisly, and Cooke spares us little of
does a remark-
able job not
only of drama-
tizing the events
that grit.
of the case itself, but of portraying Cleveland in the 1930s with a sharp descriptive eye and no small measure of finesse.
The record of the case, both in primary and secondary sources, is ample. Cooke novelizes the facts of the case, which he researched primarily in the library of the Wisconsin State Historical Society, where he absorbed backruns of the Plain Dealer and various histories of Cleveland, with
Confused by your accounting?
on its own that fictionalization almost seems redundant. And it's
there that
Torsos is most
suc-
cessful. The
facts of the
case, the history and atmosphere of 1930s
Cleveland, even the geography of the city, have been painstakingly researched by Cooke. This reviewer was astonished to discover that the author had never set foot in the city until the publicity tour that brought him here in late January. Characters in the book look out windows of well-known buildings and see the correct buildings and landmarks. Lengths of time between various
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sites are believable. The scenes of downtown and the "Roaring Third" precinct could nearly be used as a guidebook to historic Cleveland today. This is a special pleasure that Clevelanders can take in the book, and one that makes the story of Cooke's characters more engaging. Coupled with the well done characterizations and the very tightly spun plot, Torsos is almost irresistible.
The book is not without its small blemishes, particularly as the facts grow scarcer and the end of the story approaches. Not wanting to dampen the impact of the very suspenseful ending, I will only say that the invention that closes the story, which is, of course, completely fictional, falls a little short
of the rest of the pure fiction in the story. Cooke's description (see below) of the ending was "contrived," I would describe it as more neat than contrived. A little too neat. I felt less challenged, less drawn in to the ending than the rest of the situations and twists of the plot.
But I was surprised. Torsos is filled with surprises, and with really skillful writing that belies Cooke's age and output. I began to read it feeling a little skeptical of anything so clearly a "genre piece." I finished completely converted, have been recommending it ever since, and am looking forward to more and bigger things from John Peyton Cooke. ♡
An interview with author John Peyton Cooke
by George Barnum
John Peyton Cooke, author of the thriller novel Torsos, discusses his adolescent search for gay material in Wyoming, his writing inspirations, and how he decided to craft the book.
George Barnum: I want to start with a little about you and how you wound up writing suspense novels.
John Peyton Cooke: I grew up in Laramie, Wyoming from age 2 to 18. Horror and suspense was what I began reading for pleasure. I was always kind of a TV junkie, old movies, horror movies, and then at about age 13 I found the fiction of Robert Block, who wrote Psycho and Richard Matheson (The Incredible Shrinking Man). They turned me on, the short stories in particular. Reading for pleasure and writing for pleasure happened at the same time for me, as a result of reading these authors. Later I read Stephen King and the other people in the field of horror, mystery, and science fiction. That was really the bulk of my reading until I started reading gay fiction at 16 or 17.
Please talk about that.
I spent a lot of time at the William Robertson Coe Library at the University of Wyoming, and they had interesting things. I read Querelle in Wyoming, when I was 16. I found [Jean] Genet, and Allen Ginsberg. All kinds of things, like bound volumes of After Dark...
How many of us learned what a gay magazine was from After Dark? Even though nowhere in the magazine would they actually admit it, we knew. There were all the photos, and all the travel pieces about Provincetown and Key West. Of course the best pictures had been cut out. People in Wyoming were starved and so out came the X-acto knives. . . There were a lot of photocopied pages that they had bothered to obtain, though.
Librarians being who they are...
This was a revelation for me. I read every issue. Then it just seemed to die. At the same time I found a book of Paul Cadmus' paintings and Querelle. I tried to read Funeral Rites and couldn't. Querelle was fairly accessible, essentially a murder story. Then Vito Russo's Celluloid Closet. Everything I wanted was there. There was a book that City Lights or somebody published of correspondence between Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, that was the first indication I ever had of a long term gay relationship.
My parents had no idea what I was doing. I was at the library, reading books. I was lucky to know how to use a library!
Since then I've been reading a lot of "gay lit" but also a lot of classics. I'm finding that classic writers are classic for a reason. Conrad. Henry James. I rip through their work much more eagerly than the average horror novel that's designed to be a fastpaced read. I read fewer and fewer “genre” books.
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