[Having been laid up with the flu, I have not had a chance to post anything new here in a while. But I've revised and corrected a previous article on Leopold and Loeb that I wrote back in the spring. Enjoy. -- Brooks]

Strange Bedfellows: The Legacy of Leopold and Loeb

Earlier this year, while killing time at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas (during a lull in my research among its amazing Ziegfeld Follies memorabilia), I stumbled by chance upon a mention of Erle Stanley Gardner’s papers in its catalog. Since, as is obvious by an earlier entry on my blog, I have become obsessed with all things related to Perry Mason (see here), I decided to take a quick gander at this intriguing collection. I couldn’t believe what I found! It’s a vast treasure trove of materials relating to mystery novels and true crime, in particular, “the crime of the century.”

Gardner was a tireless workhorse and wrote or dictated reams of prose every day: letters, proposals, lectures, novels and essays. He wrote at least two Perry Mason novels a year, as well as countless others under various pseudonyms. His correspondents numbered into the thousands. He seems to have replied to every fan letter he ever got. His collection runs to over 33,000 items, and includes a replica of his writing studio from his California ranch. It would take a lifetime to pore through, which might explain why there hasn’t been a biography of him written since the 70s. Not even Della Street could make sense of it all. But a reference in the center’s collections guide’s witty “Gay Lives” section (which in a funny twist turned out to be written by John B. Thomas, a friend of mine) led me directly to a pair of folders of letters between Gardner and Nathan Leopold, the luckier half of the infamous duo Leopold and Loeb.

Leopold and Loeb? Those notorious Nietzschean nihilists? Those kinky “killers for kicks”? “Babe” and “Dickie,” as they were nicknamed by their loving parents and later by the tabloid press, were the star-crossed lovers of crime. Their tragic folie à deux was a twisted inversion of the traditional Shakespearean romance. But rather than kill themselves for love, they took the life of an innocent 14-year old boy.

On a summer day in Chicago in 1924, these two handsome teenagers from well-to-do Jewish families kidnapped a young school friend, Bobby Franks (Loeb, who was a cousin of his, had played tennis with Bobby just the day before), and murdered him in cold blood by beating his head in with a cudgel. Then they poured hydrochloric acid over his genitals and face, and stuffed his nude corpse into a culvert before demanding $10,000 in ransom from his parents for his “safe return”. Why in hell? “For the thrill of it,” they said, coolly and without apology.

Clarence Darrow, above, of the later Scopes Monkey Trial fame, defended Leopold and Loeb and saved them from the death penalty. At the time, their diabolical actions were dubbed “the crime of the century,” even though the new century was not much older than the youths themselves. But in some ways the title still stands since the senselessness and naked cruelty of their crime was never equaled. Far worse things were done in the decades that followed. But no single event had the resonance of this inexplicable act.

The boys’ homoerotic attachment to each other gave their maniacal compact as amoral “Supermen” an added frisson of blood lust, at a time when such subjects were strictly taboo. A court specialist, talking about Leopold, revealed that even in jail “a look at Loeb’s body or his touch upon his shoulder thrills him so, immeasurably.” During their trial the judge refused to let the jury, or any women and reporters in attendance, hear the sordid details of their peculiar sexual predilections. This only added to their notoriety, even if references in court to “mouth perversions” and “interfemoral intercourse” were edited out of news accounts or sealed as privileged testimony. In time, rumors fanned by scandal rags and malicious gossips would add whole new dimensions, including necrophilia, castration and rape, to their crimes, tarring them as vicious sodomites as wicked as Gilles de Rais and Jack the Ripper. But the truth is that their crime was absolutely arbitrary and pointless. There was no sexual gratification and no previous pattern of sadistic behavior.

It was ultimately, however, despite their best laid plans, a very imperfect crime, poorly thought-out and executed. They never got the ransom money and were quickly caught. The acid they used concealed nothing, and the eyeglasses Leopold accidentally left (a Freudian slip?) at the scene sealed their doom. Both confessed too easily and immediately blamed the other. In fact, the “crime of the century” was an inept fiasco. And yet rarely has a pair of such mismatched misfits generated so much media attention! Their case has captivated each new generation of writers, jurists, psychiatrists, criminologists, filmmakers, and artists. Perhaps their story is so popular because of their failings, their tragic flaws, which render them more human, less evil. For the truth is that Leopold and Loeb were no different than the rest of us.

There’s no need to go into further specifics here of the killing and the subsequent trial. The casebook has been well-documented on numerous websites and several informative blogs, including this one.

The curious friendship between Erle Stanley Gardner and Nathan Leopold, above, began shortly after Gardner reviewed the novel Compulsion, by Meyer Levin, for the New York Times in 1956. Gardner praised the novel, which was a fictionalized account of the case, as a “masterly achievement in literary craftsmanship.” He wrote candidly of the unique aspects of the Leopold and Loeb story: “When two child prodigies, the highly educated sons of wealthy families, were found to have been experimenting in homosexuality and then went out to commit murder just for the sake of the experience, society shivered with a premonitory thrill.” The key thing here is that Gardner understood that the “thrill” of the kill was just as much in the minds of the American culture that devoured each new revelation as it was for the boys who did it.

At the end of his review, Gardner took issue with Levin’s conclusions, stating that “the last chapter has been omitted.” He wanted to know: “What has happened to the one central character who has remained alive?” That is — Nathan Leopold. It was an open challenge. And one that Leopold responded to immediately. Days later, Leopold wrote a fawning letter to Gardner, thanking him for his supportive words about his right to rehabilitation and telling him how much of a fan he had always been of his Perry Mason novels. Leopold was limited in the number of letters he could write, and had to include his prison number “9306-D.” All his letters were read and approved by censors.

Gardner, who seems to have been flattered by Leopold’s admiration, quickly wrote back and began a lengthy correspondence that led to a close friendship for the rest of their lives. Gardner also ended up writing the introduction to Leopold’s memoirs Life Plus 99 Years. The latter helped Leopold eventually get parole, as did efforts by Gardner and his team at the Court of Last Resort, a legal think tank that Gardner established which took on special cases and examined the pros and cons of rehabilitation. The Court became a popular TV show and book. And in 1957 Gardner’s most famous creation, Perry Mason, was lighting up the tube, with Raymond Burr bringing justice to his falsely accused clients week after week. So it’s no wonder that Gardner was drawn to Nathan Leopold’s predicament. He loved a tough case as much as Perry Mason.

The notion that a confessed killer who barely escaped the death penalty could ever get parole seemed far-fetched when Leopold and Loeb first went to prison. But by the late 50s, public opinion on prison reform had changed dramatically and Leopold saw a way out. This was partly in response to the wave of juvenile crime sweeping across the nation, a point Gardner hammered home in his introduction to Leopold’s memoir. Leopold’s crimes no longer were so singular, or so scary, he said. Far worse things were happening everyday across the country. In fact, the Clutter family murders which Capote immortalized in In Cold Blood were just around the corner. Gardner, along with Carl Sandburg and Elmer Gertz, who represented Leopold, managed to convince the parole board that Nathan Leopold deserved a second chance. He was finally released from prison in 1958, having served 33 years of his life sentence. By then the press, rather than calling Nathan “Babe,” began to call him “Pudgy.”

I find the exchange between Gardner and Leopold fascinating. It’s not often, I would think, that a convicted murderer develops a friendship with a mystery writer and manages to get this famous author to write for him. (Norman Mailer comes to mind but he was not a mystery writer so the connotation is different.) The friendship between Gardner and Leopold is paradoxical too because the entire notion of the “perfect murder” which had been Loeb’s idée fixe stemmed from his reading pulp detective fiction of which Gardner was one of the earliest masters. No doubt for Leopold this added a level of nostalgia to his interplay with Gardner since it had to remind him of Dickie Loeb. He must have been tickled pink by the irony of it all.

The symbiosis throughout the correspondence between Gardner and Leopold is revealing too of Leopold’s uncanny people skills. In all his letters, Leopold is a master at flattery and charm. He downplays his talents and paints Gardner as an extremely generous man who risked his reputation to take on Leopold’s case. Leopold constantly criticizes his own prose style and laughingly admits that he only wanted Gardner to write the introduction so that the reader wouldn’t be too disappointed in the final product. It’s a clever ploy to win over the immensely successful author (who never really achieved literary recognition for his immense output, and only won an Edgar award for his non-fiction book The Court of Last Resort). Leopold must have known that by stroking Gardner’s ego he was nudging the door open to his own freedom.

But there’s no denying that the friendship was genuine. Leopold may have seen the advantages of his connection to a famous writer who went out on a limb to help him achieve parole. But the affection seems completely real and definitely mutual. In one letter Leopold offers to put up Gardner in his tiny apartment in Puerto Rico (after his parole) if Gardner were to visit. The idea of Gardner shacking up with this notorious killer is too good to be true. It’s not clear from the correspondence if Gardner ever took him up on his offer.

What is most surprising about this cache of letters is that no one seems to have read them, at least not in the context of the literature surrounding the case. Hal Higdon’s book The Crime of the Century (Putnam), which came out in 1975, makes no mention of Gardner at all. Likewise in the latest book on the case: Simon Baatz’s For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder that Shocked Chicago (Harper, 2008) Gardner’s name does not appear anywhere within its more than 500 pages despite the fact that he was instrumental in helping Leopold get parole. Leopold, himself, said to Gardner that he was the single most important person in helping him achieve it. He was deeply grateful.

In explaining why he felt it necessary to write his new book, Baatz boasts about its importance and uniqueness. He seems to think very little has been written about the case in the past (although John Theodore’s Evil Summer, a scholarly examination of the crime, had come out in 2007 from the Southern Illinois University Press), and makes the odd assertion that Higdon’s book was merely a hack job, even though it was a thorough piece of detective work which revealed a lot of new material, and helped unravel the “ABCD murders” for which Loeb and Leopold had also been implicated.

Baatz also goes off on long tangents about the myriad lawyers and judges involved. He quotes endless reports from the various physicians and “alienists” of the day who examined the two boys. And yet he offers little insight of his own into the mindsets of these troubled youths. (For a much more rewarding take on the case read Paula S. Fass’s brilliant essay, “Making and Remaking an Event: The Leopold and Loeb Case in American Culture.” HERE.)

When discussing the murder, Baatz relies on Nathan Leopold’s version of events, firmly planting Richard Loeb in the backseat, despite the fact that no one knows for sure who committed the actual cudgeling, and Loeb always claimed Leopold did it. Likewise when Loeb is slashed to death in jail in 1936 by punk convict James Day, the author takes the killer’s version of events as gospel. Day claimed he killed Loeb after he made unwanted advances, and he’d wrestled a razor away from him. But evidence was later submitted that James Day had brought the stolen razor in with him and had most likely been set-up to kill Loeb. In fact, Loeb was sliced to death with 56 separate gashes, some as long as two feet. His jugular vein was severed. Despite the grisly details, Clarence Darrow stated at 79 years of age: “I’m glad he’s dead all the same. He’s better off than Leopold.” As for James Day, below; he was found not guilty of murder.

No citations are offered by Baatz for any of his coverage of Loeb’s mysterious murder. He also uses the Chicago Daily Tribune as his source for assertions that Dickie Loeb often had sex in prison with other male inmates, something which many involved in the prison, or who studied the evidence later, either questioned or denied. (Although there is a very interesting letter in the Gardner files from a writer who claims both Loeb and Leopold preyed on inmates.) Loeb’s cellmate Edward Steplowsky claimed Loeb was busy writing a history of the Civil War, and objected whenever Ed turned on the radio. He does not sound like someone chasing punks in shower rooms. Even if it were true that Loeb had lovers in jail, which is certainly understandable, it seems pointless to footnote a newspaper of the period as proof of his predatory behavior since newspapers are notoriously unreliable, and so much better stuff has already been written about it. Nevertheless, it’s helpful to read the book. It never hurts to refresh one’s memory about the specifics of the Leopold and Loeb case.

Like many, I first learned of these two infamous “thrill killers” by watching Compulsion (1959) starring Orson Welles (above). Directed by Richard Fleischer, it’s a potent, underrated film, which thanks to a new DVD release is having a much-deserved second life.

Based on the Levin novel, the movie takes a psychoanalytic view of the case. Dean Stockwell played the part based on Nathan Leopold with a sad neurotic genius while Bradford Dillman took on the smooth, devil-may-care Dickie Loeb in his usual deft manner. Welles’s take on Clarence Darrow is a sight to behold and proof that he was as great an actor as he was a director. Apparently, however, he was a difficult cast member and took off for Mexico before looping was finished. His closing remarks, Dean Stockwell once stated, had to be pieced together from leftover scraps by a clever editor.

What most of us have forgotten is that Compulsion first ran on Broadway as a stage play, above. It was part of Zanuck’s option when he purchased rights to the novel that Levin had to write a dramatic version which would open prior to the film, generating word of mouth and advance hype. Levin eventually disassociated himself from the staged play, after arguments with the producer Michael Myerberg who brought in Robert Thom to revamp the script. Levin later published his own edition of the play (Simon & Schuster, 1959) with a long foreword discussing his battles with the producer.

The play opened in October, 1957 at the Ambassador Theatre with Dean Stockwell in the Nathan Leopold role (he was trying to break out of his earlier goody-good child star roles) and Roddy McDowall, above, (who also needed to move away from being typecast in his Lassie vehicles) in the more glamorous Loeb part. Included in the cast were Howard da Silva, Frank Conroy (who ended up having a near-fatal heart attack during the run) and a very young Suzanne Pleshette as “the Fourth Girl.” Cy Coleman provided the music! It ran for 140 performances. Critics didn’t warm to it much, finding it “muddled” and “too long”. But audiences lapped up its weird psycho dramas, especially when Roddy McDowall cried out: “I want my Teddy Bear!”

Nathan Leopold hated Compulsion, although he acknowledged that Meyer Levin had done a good job of weaving fact with fiction. Too good a job, apparently. Leopold said he threw up after reading it. His biggest complaint was that Levin had only interviewed him for about an hour and made a lot of his assumptions on Freudian theory rather than on the evidence. No doubt Leopold must have been shocked by the innuendoes in the novel about his obsession for Loeb. He ended up suing Levin, Zanuck and others when Compulsion debuted as a film, claiming that the parties had illegally appropriated his name, likeness and life story. Levin countered that the book was a roman a clef and that the names had been changed. But Leopold’s lawyer Gertz proved that the ad campaigns for the book and film relied heavily on Nathan Leopold’s name. Leopold won a million dollar verdict. But the decision was later reversed when it was decided that a criminal as notorious as Leopold could not deny being a public figure, open to fictionalization. He never made a dime from it.

Compulsion, it turns out, was not the only novel based on the case. In 1957 Mary-Carter Roberts wrote Little Brother Fate (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy) which uses the Leopold and Loeb case as part of a tripartite retelling of three famous 20s crimes. The other two being the Snyder-Gray case, used by James M. Cain in Double Indemnity (Raymond Chandler wrote the screenplay) and the notorious Halls-Mills “Lover’s Lane” case which remains unsolved. Roberts’ take on Leopold and Loeb is more about the strange hold one boy had over the other, and less about the killing. Anthony Boucher of the Times called it “vivid and penetrating,” a portrait of “larger-than-life characters…in all their torment.” He included it in his list of best books of the year.

Another novel that year also examined the case: James Yaffe’s Nothing but the Night (Little Brown). Siegfred Mandel in the Times stated that it was more tightly written and neatly plotted than Compulsion with more stress on the guilt of the parents, but that it “avoids the homosexual tie.” This is odd considering the Bantam paperback version blatantly used gay pulp style cover art to market it, and talked of “abnormal passions.” Yaffe himself said: “My object was to do a novel which would give the feeling that the boys were not obviously different from any other boys, that the same thing would happen to anybody…I give the reader the feeling that these were his boys.”

The effect of three books coming out within one year inspired some soul-searching. Rabbi Newman placed an ad in the Times promoting “Criminal Responsibility,” a sermon he was giving at Rodelph Sholom on the novels by Yaffe and Levin. Nothing But the Night was optioned to be made into a film. Bernice Block, who had produced Dino with Sal Mineo for TV’s Studio One, bought the screen rights and announced that she had contacted Elia Kazan as a possible choice for director. Perhaps she had Sal Mineo in mind for the lead. But alas nothing came of it. It would have been fascinating to see Mineo tackle the part of Nathan Leopold.

In 1964 Don Murray, below, the handsome star of Bus Stop, announced that he had optioned Life Plus 99 Years and was going to produce and star in a film based on Nathan Leopold’s life. It was to be directed by Paton Price (who later directed episodes of Surfside 6 and the Partridge Family). Murray actually went to visit Nathan Leopold in Puerto Rico. But sadly nothing came of it either.

Long before any of these versions appeared, however, the story of Leopold and Loeb inspired a play by Patrick Hamilton in 1929 called Rope. Hamilton set the tale in Mayfair, London, England, rather than Chicago, giving it more of an aristocratic edge. It was produced at the Strand in 1929. Lee Shubert produced it later on Broadway at the Theatre Masque and the Maxine Elliott Theatre. Renamed Rope’s End, it starred Ernest Melton as Rupert Cadell; Ivan Brandt as Charles Granillo, and Sebastian Shaw as Wyndham Brandon. Reginald Denham directed. The BBC made two TV versions of it: one in 1939; the other in 1950.

Few would remember it today if Alfred Hitchcock hadn’t directed a film version of it in 1948 called Rope starring James Stewart, Farley Granger and John Dall. Arthur Laurents and Hume Cronyn adapted it for the screen. In both the play and the movie, the focus is on how two sensually corrupt and spoiled youths (less explicitly homosexual in the stage version) plot to commit the perfect murder. They kill a friend of theirs, stuff his body in a trunk, then throw a cocktail party for him, inviting his family. They are outsmarted by their mentor, a Nietzschean professor, who is appalled that they took his dark philosophical musings to an illogical extreme.

The film is not one of Hitchcock’s most popular, despite excellent performances from Granger and Dall, above, and an experimental approach that involved very long takes. The problem is that James Stewart is miscast as the glib professor who misleads his protegees. If James Mason or Claude Rains had played the part, it would have been a classic. Cary Grant, alas, turned it down. Today it is a field day for queer studies theorists who see endless layers of homoerotic subtext in its campy dialogue. Indeed, I’ve often wondered if Arthur Laurents was aware of the double-entendre in the title since “rope” like “pearl necklace” is gay slang for semen. Ironically the film was criticized by the Anti-Defamation League for portraying two Jews as homosexual murderers although neither character is described as Jewish and neither of the actors was.

I have my own peculiar connection to the Leopold and Loeb case. My mother’s guardian, Elmer Gertz, above, had been the lawyer who helped Nathan Leopold finally get parole after being in prison for over 30 years. It wasn’t until after my mother died in 1993 that I finally got to meet Mr. Gertz and talk to him specifically about the case. He told me a lot of interesting things, most of which has been fully documented in his two books of memoirs. When I asked him directly about the rumors of Leopold and Loeb’s being lovers he told me a funny story. He had gone to stay with Leopold and was shocked to find that in his bedroom he kept a photograph of Elmer Gertz, and beside that, one of Richard Loeb. Leopold said they were the two most important men in his life. After Leopold got married in Puerto Rico to the widow of a local doctor, he took the picture of Dickie Loeb down.

I asked Gertz if he had seen the film Swoon by Tom Kalin (1992) which had just come out. He said he had and that he liked it which surprised me since he was a man in his late-80s at the time. Swoon takes the Leopold and Loeb case to a completely different level, offering a post-modern spin on the crime. The homoerotic relationship is made the central theme. With striking photography, anachronistic props (including a TV and touch-tone telephone) and a minimum of period costumes, Swoon breathed new life into a story that by the 90s was becoming routine. The film reawakened interest in the affair and since then there have been a number of plays and films and even graphic novels that touch upon the trial. The film Murder by Numbers, by Barbet Shroeder, is said to be based on the case, although the story line diverges in many directions.

In 1985 John Logan wrote a play called Never the Sinner which was inspired by the actual court transcripts. It won the Outer Circle Critics award and has been revived many times (above). A play version of Rope has been revived, relying on the film script as much as Hamilton’s original.

In 2003 Stephen Dolginoff premiered his musical Thrill Me: The Leopold and Loeb Story. It’s appeared in many productions around the world. In 1999, Kevin Spacey’s Darrow in the series Haunted History recreated parts of the famous trial with Jamie Harrold and Barry Del Sherman as Leopold and Loeb.

One of the most interesting tidbits I gleaned from Simon Baatz’s new book is that F. Scott Fitzgerald told a newspaper reporter from the New York World in 1927 over lunch at the Plaza (no doubt a wet lunch) that he was writing a novel based on the story of Leopold and Loeb. One can only imagine what might have been. Coming on the heels of The Great Gatsby, a novel by Fitzgerald on the “crime of the century” might just have been “the great American novel” we’ve all lusted for, a serious rival to Dreiser’s classic An American Tragedy.

What is it about these two monsters that still calls to us after 85 years? Throughout that time, the boys’ names have become synonymous with juvenile delinquency — a phrase that is almost quaint in its antiquated naivete since today no one is surprised when a child or teenager commits a crime. But back in 1924, the world was shocked by what these “juvies” had done (Loeb was only 18; Leopold a mere 19), but even more so by what they had set out to do. For their intention was to commit “the perfect murder.” To plan such a brutal killing, including kidnapping and extortion, defied logic and reason, and undercut the normal bonds of society. Their crime was beyond comprehension, sickening in its implications. And yet, despite all its evil overtones, it still thrills us to the bone.

A few months back in a blog entry here entitled “A Panoply of Penelopes,” I described how I always knew I was going to enjoy a book if it were written by someone whose first name was Penelope. That same quirky concept also pertains to titles. If a novel has the word “butterfly” in its name, it’s a given that I am sure to find something to like in it. As if by some bizarre literary alchemy, most books with the word butterfly in their titles have a tendency to touch upon gay themes. And since I collect books that fit this narrow niche, I am always thrilled when I stumble upon another tome on the shelf waiting to take wing. [Photograph, below, by Cora Büttenbender]

I first noticed this phenomenon when I began to collect gay fiction back in college. I would roam the dusty racks in used bookstores (there were many more of them back then) and my eye would inevitably land on a dingy, old volume with a cover sporting a butterfly. I’d pick it up and start to thumb through it. And lo and behold, I was immediately caught up in the story and would end up taking it home. Pretty soon I had a little collection of them. Of course, it was the subject matter of these books that really intrigued me. The title was just a teaser, a sign post. In some ways, a secret code. I can only think of a few other words that suggest this implicit compact between the reader and the author — evocative terms such as “shadows” and “twilight” and, of course, any tome that teases its readers with exposés of “twisted” desires.

But “the butterfly effect” has become a surprisingly predictable indicator, especially when it comes to books with subtle, and often, latent gay themes. This shouldn’t necessarily be a stretch since butterflies have traditionally been linked to homosexuals. Indeed, the word “mariposa” in Spanish, which means “butterfly,” is slang for an effeminate homosexual. I remember in college, during one of my intensely fascinating seminars with Shoshana Feldman (a brilliant scholar in the deconstructionist vein), we were reading “La Fille Aux Yeux D’Or,” a short story by Honoré de Balzac [shot, below, from the 1961 Albicocco film.]

It’s one of his most notoriously bizarre “contes drolatiques,” centering on a young man obsessed with a beautiful girl with golden eyes. It turns out at the end that this beguiling creature is being kept by a maniacal lesbian who is in fact the protagonist’s twin sister. At the moment of climax, the girl calls the boy, “Mariquita,” which, like its cousin “maricon,” is Spanish slang for queer or faggot. Balzac delighted in such lurid twists in his tales. The youth is humiliated, his manhood destroyed. I won’t begin to try and chart the Freudian (if not Lacanian) layers hidden in this conte here (you’ll have to read my term paper), but I will tell you that it set my mind abuzz, thinking about the meaning of “butterflies” in the realms of sexually ambivalent fiction.

It’s not unexpected that an insect known for flitting about and being frivolous should come to be equated with so-called fairies and men who are a bit “light in the loafers.” And, of course, the butterfly is a symbol of transformation. Plus the spectacular colors and array of designs that butterflies naturally exude offer a tantalizing parallel to the wild costumes and flamboyant personalities of certain fey creatures. This is by no means limited entirely to gay men. Butterflies are symbols of merriment in straight fiction as well as theater. “The Butterfly of Broadway,” Dorothy King, became fodder for the tabloids after her brutal murder in the Roaring 20s, precisely because she represented an ethereal laissez-faire loucheness when it came to flirting with stage door johnnies. There has always been something demimondaine about butterflies, something racy and wicked. Louise Brooks portrayed Dot King, in the S. S. Van Dine mystery based on her killing, The Canary Murder Case, (publicity still, below.) Even with her plumage, she looks more like a butterfly than a songbird.

And perhaps, too, there is an aspect of nerves in the equation. We still say “I’ve got butterflies in my stomach,” to express heightened nervousness or anxiety. A constant state of agitation was common for men who were considered over-strained or neurasthenic, effete members of what used to be derided as “the third sex.” Of course, none of this is a science (although the Monarch butterfly is one of the best known examples of animal life that exhibits homosexual tendencies) and there are obvious exceptions. The artist James McNeill Whistler, aka “The Butterfly,” was as straight as they come. And James M. Cain’s notorious novel The Butterfly is a tale of incest, not homosexuality.

But knowing the rest of Cain’s strange oeuvre, which includes his gay-themed novel Serenade about an opera singer kept by a sophisticated, but jealous queen, I think he may have subconsciously chosen this title because of its widely-perceived decadent resonances. It was made into a 1982 camp classic film starring Pia Zadora and Orson Welles.

The first and most obvious gem in my collection is Butterfly Man by Lew Levenson. This ground-breaking novel about the homosexual underworld first appeared in 1934. Published by Macaulay Press, it is an incredibly provocative portrait of a subterranean set (at the height of the “pansy craze.”) The male lead, Ken Gracey, is a former basketball player-turned-dancer who falls under the influence of a ruthless older man with interests in his family’s farm. The boy travels across America trying to pay off this ogre and encounters all sorts of evil characters. He is raped, becomes an alcoholic, and suffers venereal disease. Not a pretty picture by any means, but one that does give us a glimpse into the mindset of that era. Lew Levenson was a playwright and drama critic who knew his terrain well. It was reprinted in 1967 in a new edition, causing many to think of it as a post-war novel when in fact it was written during the Depression. Despite its lack of finesse, it is an important relic of a lost chapter in gay history.

Another of these early finds was Butterfly Days (1957) by Aubrey Fowkes, the nom de plume of British airman Esmond Quinterley. Published by Fortune Press in England, this peculiar book follows in the footsteps of his infamous “Boy” series, detailing corporeal punishment (mostly by caning and whipping) and romances between “chums” in school and in prison. He followed it up with More Butterfly Days in 1958, which I recently revisited. Fowkes’s style is fascinating. He writes in long, breathless sentences, in an almost incantatory trance. The sexuality is not so much in the situations (which are pretty obvious, although somewhat obscured for censorship reasons) but in the language. His use of double-entendres and suggestive plays-on-words is ingenious and at times shocking. He writes of “lads of spunk” named Dick and Romeo who sigh often and seem to climb into each others beds at night with abandon.

A typical sentence reads: “I was already pining for Dick next morning as I cleaned out a water-closet, fearing that I would be as lonely as in the first days.” The narrator then meets a boy named Tom White. “Tom was up to a few tricks with me during the day, giving me a few friendly kicks on the quarter that has, when you are young, a seemingly irresistible attraction for your friends and enemies alike… I found that he was as cute as Dick at whispering without appearing to be moving his lips.” Tom, he discovers, is a bit of an exhibitionist. “He, I may add, had a habit of stripping himself stark naked before settling himself under the prison rug — most never took their clothes off at all at night during these cold months — and he would stand about unabashed in this state for a minute or two to the merriment of the lads around… standing rigid the while…” And on and on, page after page, so it goes.

The next book I stumbled upon, this time at the Strand in New York, was a little-known novel called The Butterfly Tree by Robert Bell. Published in 1959 by Lippincott, this lyrical tale revolves around an area Bell calls “Moss Bayou” in Alabama. Bell was from Fairhope, a small resort town on Mobile Bay with a Southern Gothic allure. The novel tells of the narrator’s “strange search,” at the end of which “he was to find fulfillment and an end to innocence.” One doesn’t have to be a mind-reader to figure out where such quests end up. Its pages, like works by Carson McCullers and Truman Capote, are full of colorful eccentrics: Edward Bloodgood, the undertaker; Miss Claverly, student of lepidoptera; and Karl Heppler, an “oddly beautiful young man.”

It’s a neurotically atmospheric story of loss and yearning set amid the magnificent moss-covered trees that dappled the landscape, the mystical butterfly trees of the title. While visiting Bloodgood, Peter, the book’s protagonist, notices a photograph of a beautiful young man: “Here was a remarkable enlarged picture of a man standing on a beach. He was naked, but there was no detail, for the pictures had seemingly been made either late in the afternoon or with the sun at the wrong angle. Even the face was blurred, almost silhouetted… man naked and alone against the background of a cold and impersonal universe.” Bloodgood says that Peter reminds him of this heroic youth. “There was beauty and death about him,” he says. “I suppose that is why he fascinated me more than anyone I ever knew.” It turns out that this strange beauty has died at a young age, and become a symbol of all that is eternal. “He used to mention frequently the oriental symbol of immortality,” Bloodgood adds, “the butterfly. Something must die in one place before it can be resurrected in another. Beauty — human beauty — comes from the dark and twisted wetness and sliminess of uterus or cocoon…” It’s a metamorphosis. “He was a butterfly?” Peter asks, mesmerized by the image of the beautiful young man. “Yes, my friend,” the undertaker sighs. “Can you think of anything more exquisitely beautiful, so eternal, yet so brief?” Despite its often effete self-consciousness, this novel deserves to be better known.

The Butterfly Revolution is a well-known saga of youth run amok and not one that usually is included in lists of gay novels. Ian Young’s definitive bibliography of “the male homosexual in literature” does not mention it. And perhaps it shouldn’t. But there are some stories that have a gay aesthetic without meaning to. Written in 1961, by William Butler, The Butterfly Revolution is a seething tale of boys gone wild at a summer camp. The stern director, who hunts butterflies, is overthrown and the young men take over, wreaking havoc and misery as they express their most savage desires. Whatever homosexual intrigue is present is couched between the lines and in the male bonding that lies at its heart. The novel, reissued many times in paperback, has become a staple of lit classes, often read along with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. And it evinces a similar moral, that lack of authority breeds chaos. But one can also read in its warnings that too much repression can lead to rage and disorder.

Butler’s tale was made into a low-budget thriller, Summer Camp Nightmare, in 1987, starring Chuck Connors in one of his last screen appearances. The story line was drastically altered and the resulting movie bears little resemblance to the skillful effects of the novel. But the kernel of perversion remains. Connor’s character is accused of being a “fruit” and a pedophile, which gives the campers justification in staging their ill-fated coup d’état. The film, which has become something of a cult classic among aficionados of bad 80s flicks, is now available for viewing in its entirety on YouTube.

Chester Anderson’s The Butterfly Kid, published by Pyramid in 1967, is an award-winning Sci-Fi novel that epitomizes the psilocybin-popping and peyote-smoking counter culture of the Sixties. Set in Greenwich Village, it recounts the psychedelic adventures of two hippie detectives battling drug-induced monsters (the “blue lobsters”) and nefarious alien invasions. Reality pills — LSD — cause users to experience bizarre butterfly hallucinations. Vivid in its depiction of the zany characters, gay and straight, at loose in the Village in those days, it holds nothing back. Anderson was a rock critic and erstwhile editor at Crawdaddy. The work was the first part of a trilogy, and ended up winning the Hugo Prize. Anderson, below, later wrote the popular gay novel Puppies under his pseudonym, John Valentine.

Another example of the hippie-era, flower-power appeal of butterflies is the long-running play, Butterflies Are Free. What? I can hear you say. What does that have to do with gay novels or queer studies! Well, this 1969 play by Leonard Gershe is one of the gayest things I’ve ever seen, even if the entire premise is based on the idea of a kooky chick seducing an innocent mama’s boy who just happens to be blind. Urban legend has it that Gershe (who also wrote the screenplay for the camp classic Funny Face) was listening to the radio one night when he learned about a young blind lawyer, Harold Krents, who had trouble breaking free of the strangling hold his smothering, Scarsdale mother had on him.

So Gershe sat down and knocked-out a play, expanding Krents’s situation into a kind of Oedipal triangle, involving Jill, who befriends the blind boy, Don, over his prudish mother’s objections. The boy finally learns that “butterflies are free” (which is taken from a line in Bleak House by Charles Dickens) when the liberated babe next door seduces him and he falls in love for the first time.. It ran for over 1100 performances on Broadway, starring Eileen Heckart as the Mom and gorgeous Keir Dullea as the troubled son.

But the truth of its creation is a bit more revealing. Gershe, who was a “close personal friend” of Roger Edens’ in Hollywood, based the character of the wacky next-door neighbor on Mia Farrow, who had once been his own neighbor in New York. Given her famously androgynous charms, it is easy to see how Gershe would have been captivated by her. She’s basically a clinically-correct portrayal of a “fag hag,” a gypsy spirit who helps Don open up and experience life in all its erotic glory.

The play is shamelessly full of gay humor, including a hilarious riff on how boring homosexuals had become. Jill is telling Don about an audition she just had for a play about a girl who gets “all hung up because she’s married a homosexual.” Originally, she says, “he was an alcoholic, but homosexuals are very ‘in’ now, so they changed it. Are you homosexual?” He says, “No, just blind.” Big laugh. But Jill goes on. “They are in everything now… books, plays, movies. It’s really too bad. I always thought of them as kind of magical and mysterious — the greatest secret society in the world. Now they’re telling all the secrets and you find out they’re just sad and mixed up like everybody else. Do you know any homosexuals?” He says, “I doubt it. I’ve been in Scarsdale all my life.”

Gershe was playing to the house, of course, but you don’t have to be a pocket-rocket scientist to see what he’s getting at here. She’s trying to find out if he’s gay, and Gershe is also defusing the issue in audience’s minds by making a joke out of it. There’s oodles of subtext throughout the play which indicates to me that he was aware of how the tale of a handicapped boy who is imprisoned by a dominating mother could be read by some in the theatre community as a metaphor for stereotypes of closeted gay men. One can’t read or watch this play without feeling that there is a gay play at its heart. This was made even more apparent when the ever-glamorous Gloria Swanson took over the lead.

And the 1972 film, starring Goldie Hawn as Jill and pretty-boy Edward Albert Jr. as Don, underscored this duality by relocating the play to the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. Some of the scenes, especially when they go shopping for clothes, is like something straight out of Can’t Stop The Music. It’s a marvelous film, with a powerhouse performance by Eileen Heckart reprising her Tony-winning turn. But in my book, despite all its attempts at being hip and with-it, it’s basically just a groovy twist on Tea and Sympathy and will always be as queer as a three-dollar bill.

1969 was a good year for butterfly epics. That same year saw the release of the memoir Papillon (which is French for butterfly) about a tattooed convict who escapes from remote Devil’s Island. The book features a gay character named Maturette who is expressed in a relatively positive light. You can’t have a prison novel without a gay character. Think of Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, to which Papillon owes a great deal. While published as an autobiography, Papillon was later revealed to be a semi-hoax. Its author Charrière, a noted exaggerator, had first submitted the tale as a novel. The publisher convinced him it would do better as a memoir. And he was right. It sold millions of copies around the globe. I read it when I was twelve years old and never forgot it. Papillon is a breathtaking roller coaster ride.

The 1973 movie, starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, was marketed as a kind of exotic buddy film. But Maturette, played beautifully by Robert Deman (above) remained and was even given some tender moments with McQueen. One wonders if such a film were made today whether those butterfly moments would be shown at all.

Darwin Porter, who recently wrote a scandalous bio of Steve McQueen, alleging all sorts of sexual indiscretions in the actor’s past, burst out in 1976 with his own very gay novel, Butterflies in Heat, published by Manor Books as a paperback original. An immediate bestseller, this racy tale of sex and drugs and male prostitution in Key West, Florida seemed to sum up the “anything goes” attitude of the era, although, ironically, it was set in 1959.

Porter wrote it at the ripe age of 22, although it’s not clear if the indiscriminate stud at its core, Numie Chase, was based on him or not. Numie has four lovers: a black transvestite, an aging fashion diva, a lonely and confused gay man and a girl who should know better than to get mixed up with a male hustler. Often compared with Midnight Cowboy or Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth, this novel has more in common with Henry Fielding’s picaresque novel Tom Jones.

For months After Dark magazine chronicled its evolution from page to screen, giving updates on whether or not Matt Collins, the sexy male super model of the moment, was going to star in it. Eventually he did. It was made into the film The Last Resort in 1977, starring Eartha Kitt, in one of her least-memorable roles as a blond-wig-sporting cabaret artiste. Her part was based on the black drag queen in the novel. Ironically, Gloria Swanson had placed an ad in Variety declaring that despite endless rumors, she was not starring in the film.

But after the producer died, the rights to The Last Resort got mixed up in legal wranglings and the film was never released in theaters. Eventually, it hit the video stores with a thud. The title was changed to Tropic of Desire and is still only available on VHS. It’s now considered one of the great bombs of the 70s, and like Myra Breckinridge and Sextette, has a certain cachet among film buffs. In 1997, a Florida publisher reissued the novel in a “silver edition” featuring a very well-endowed model on the cover. From what I’m told, it flew off the shelves.

There was another lepidopterian story published in 1976 in Canada that went on to lasting fame. Margaret Gilbrood’s poignant short story collection, The Butterfly Ward, featured a story called “Making It” that chronicled her experiences as a mixed-up young girl with mental problems who befriends a female impersonator in Toronto. The story, based on her own experiences living with Craig Russell, captured the essence of the burgeoning gay scene and was soon made into the hit indie film, Outrageous.

For many gay men in the late 70s, who were just discovering their sexuality, Outrageous hit a nerve. It was the most outspoken, flamboyant, and, in my opinion, hilarious gay film of the decade. But it was more than just a film about coming out, or freedom of self-expression. Using the themes Gilbrood (later known by her married name, Gibson) explored in her stories, Outrageous showed how camp humor, drag and gay sensibility could help the heterosexual world cope with its own hang-ups. This may seem naive and too politically-inclined today when so much of the gay world is seeking acceptance by and assimilation into the so-called normal world. But that 70s spirit celebrating anarchy, and revolution against the norm was a key aspect of what made gay liberation so exciting.

It is no coincidence then that David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly (1988), starring John Lithgow and B. D. Wong, should deal with a clandestine love affair between a French diplomat and an opera singer who is in reality a cross-dresser. The attaché is in the dark about his lover’s gender. Or is he? The play makes us think about sexual role-playing and gender identification. And while the title certainly comes from Madame Butterfly, the play Belasco staged that inspired Puccini to write his famous opera, M. Butterfly also mines the many meanings of this most beautiful of insects in a way the opera never did. It was made into a memorable film starring Jeremy Irons and John Lone in 1993. (Shot from the film, below.)

Today there are gay-themed butterfly books everywhere you look. Rigoberto Gonzalez had a big success with Butterfly Boy, a memoir of his being a mariposa in Hispanic society. Pop novels such as The Butterfly’s Wing by Martin Foreman and Butterfly Tattoo by Deidre Knight explore gay romance. As does the mystery Black Butterfly by Mark Gatiss. There was even a lesbian take on Thelma and Louise called Butterfly Kiss.

It seems that all it takes nowadays to “flitter and be gay” is a lepidopterist title and a certain in-your-face daring. Perhaps we think of “butterflies as free” because they don’t give a hoot about fitting in. They are, as we learned in La Cage Aux Folles, their own “special creations.”

Completely forgotten today, but once one of the most popular and prolific authors of his time, Robert Hichens deserves to be rediscovered and celebrated. His novel, The Green Carnation, a witty send-up of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, is a true camp classic. Published anonymously in 1894, it earned Wilde’s respect, if not exactly his approval. Unfortunately its author’s name today is overshadowed by another Robert Hichens who was the quartermaster on the Titanic and is still a figure of great controversy. On Wikipedia, the writer Hichens is now awkwardly called Robert Smythe Hichens to differentiate him from the other, although as far as I know he never used his middle name in any of his books. Little is known about his life. His online bio is merely his bibliography of over 40 works. Obviously no one else cares to post a more detailed biography for him.

He was born at Speldhurst, Kent, November 14, 1864, and educated at Tunbridge Wells and Clifton College, then became a student at the Royal College of Music, London. He was drawn, however, to journalism, and soon became the music critic of London World, replacing George Bernard Shaw. Hichens wrote his first novel, The Coastguard’s Secret, at the age of seventeen. He followed this with approximately one novel a year, many of them quite popular. His style was slightly purple, as far as the prose, but his themes captured the yearning on the part of his generation for adventure and psychological intrigue. He often wrote about people in extreme situations, on the brink of insanity or murder. His novel Bella Donna (1904), set in Egypt, was a compelling tale of a beautiful woman who poisons her husband to death. It was first made into a film starring Pola Negri, then remade in 1946 as Temptation with Merle Oberon.

Perhaps the quality of his work is not on the same level as other writers I’ve singled out for reconsideration, including Patricia Highsmith (who also often wrote about murder) or Theodora Keogh, or even the British gardening author and novelist Beverley Nichols who had a lot in common with him, but Robert Hichens had more success than any of them.

His book The Garden of Allah, which was a phenomenal bestseller in 1904 when it was published, was turned into a theatrical extravaganza on Broadway and London. In 1919 it was staged at the Powers Theatre for three nights with a “company of 100 Arabs, Algerians, Armenians with their camels, horses, donkeys, goats and other livestock.” The tale was filmed numerous times, most notably in 1927 as a silent starring Alice Terry. David O. Selznick revived it in 1936 as a Technicolor vehicle for Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer.

Hichens’ specialty was the romantic melodrama, usually set in the Middle East, with exotic occult themes. Hichens had a passion for Egypt, and wrote an acclaimed book about its architecture and monuments with illustrations by Jules Guerin. Today the book is considered a collector’s item primarily for its evocative depictions of the Nile and atmospheric ruins. It has its odd revealing moments in captions such as “The half-naked workmen toiling and sweating in the sun.”

One of his most intriguing works is An Imaginative Man (1895), a tale of madness and dissolution in which a young man, racked with jealousy over another man, kills himself by throwing himself off the Sphinx, dashing his brains against the ancient rocks surrounding it.

Hichens also wrote a classic tale, “How Love Came to Professor Guildea,” that some consider to be one of the finest supernatural short stories ever written. In later years, he turned to detective fiction, perhaps to reach a wider audience or to cash in on the vogue for mysteries.

One of his best-known works was published in this period: The Paradine Case (1933), which reflects Hichens’s themes perfectly, as well as the man. It’s based in part on the murder of James Maybrick, the alleged author of “the Jack the Ripper diary,” which was the subject of intense scrutiny a few years back. That proved to be a modern-day hoax; the ink used by its supposed author was found to have chemical components that had not existed in the 19th century. But Maybrick, who had no connection to the later scam, was a fascinating character nonetheless. His wife, Florie, had been accused of poisoning him to death in 1889 with arsenic she’d removed from flypaper traps and then served to him in meat juice. Some believe she was falsely accused since Maybrick was already an arsenic addict. She was convicted nonetheless and sentenced to life imprisonment, although she was released in 1903, and wrote a book entitled Mrs. Maybrick’s Own Story: My Fifteen Lost Years.

Hichens seized upon the love triangle that led to Maybrick’s murder for The Paradine Case, which was quickly snatched up by David O. Selznick and turned into a vehicle for the comeback of Greta Garbo. She decided, however, that she didn’t want to make her return to the screen as a murderess and the part was offered to Ingrid Bergman, who eventually decided against it. Alfred Hitchcock was hired to direct it as the last movie in his contract with Selznick. It proved to be one of the costliest he ever made, coming in at over $4 million and only taking in half that amount. It is now considered one of his lesser pictures, but retains a devoted fan base. I, for one, think it is one of his best because it does not rely on showy stunts or elaborate scenery. It takes place almost entirely in a courtroom and relies on brilliant camera work to create suspense.

Selznick insisted on casting his new discovery Alida Valli, (above), a sultry Italian beauty whom he was grooming as the next Garbo. Hitchcock, who was fond of her, later said that she was too impassive and lacked enough fluency in English to put over the very talky script. Watching it again recently, I felt that the real problem in her performance was nerves. You can actually see her skin tremble in certain closeups. Gregory Peck, too, was miscast. While certainly a wonderful actor and a big draw at the box office, he just doesn’t come across as an aristocratic English lawyer. Hitchcock had wanted Laurence Olivier. The picture was stolen by the always astonishing Ann Todd, and Ethel Barrymore, who won an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Charles Laughton’s browbeaten wife.

While Hichens certainly was inspired by the notorious Maybrick case, he also used elements of an even more sensational trial, that of the wife of Prince Aly Kamel Fahmy Bey, who in 1922 fatally shot her husband at the Savoy Hotel. Marie-Marguerite Laurent had married the volatile Egyptian playboy and converted to Islam. He kept trying to subjugate her and forced her to perform unusual sexual practices. It came out during the trial that he had engaged so often in anal intercourse that she required an operation to repair the damage. It also came out that he was having a clandestine affair with his male secretary.

The trial was a sensation. The defense painted the victim as an evil monster whose “Oriental” perversions were the real culprit. Laurent was acquitted. The homoerotic element is still apparent in the novel as the valet (called Latour in the film) is slavishly devoted to his master, the blind soldier. This relationship is further developed in the movie. Louis Jourdan, as Latour, is stunningly handsome, and Hitchcock made the most of his looks. He is played as a moody pretty boy who worshiped his master, almost to the point of obsession. The man driving the trap and pony, which takes Gregory Peck to the manor house where Jourdan still lives, pointedly refers to him as “a queer one.” While a common expression, the use of it here does not strike me as accidental. Selznick and his various writers (including Ben Hecht, who doctored the script) wanted to emphasize the strange erotic tie Latour had to his blind superior.

Alida Valli, too, reflects the aura of the Fahmy case. She is the Continental femme fatale. At first she appears to be falsely accused, a mere innocent. But as the film progresses, one begins to see her part in the murder. Was she envious of Latour’s close ties to her husband? Did she kill her husband out of spite, in a jealous rage? By the end she has more in common with the murderess Marie-Marguerite Laurent than Mrs. Maybrick. Gregory Peck even says to her at one point, “When this is all over, you’ll be lunching at the Savoy again.” Audiences seeing this film in 1947 when it was released, especially in London, would surely have remembered the notorious case on which it was based and would have laughed at this telling line.

Hitchcock apparently had his own reasons for being drawn to The Paradine Case. In his youth he had known a beautiful girl named Edith Thompson (below) who had been convicted of conspiring with her handsome, young boyfriend Frederick Bywaters in murdering her husband, Percy. It was a case that fascinated Hitchcock, and might have been instrumental in many of the themes he explored in his films. She was executed for the crime…by hanging.

Latent homosexual themes were not unusual in Robert Hichens’s novels. This tendency was most evident in the Wildean satire that came out in 1894, entitled The Green Carnation. Dealing with the decadent aesthetic movement in London society, it was a thinly disguised roman à clef based on Oscar Wilde and his relationship with Bosie, the much younger Lord Alfred Douglas. The book was subtle and sly, but pulled few punches. In describing the circle of men who sported green carnations in their lapels, in deference to Esme Amarinth, the character obviously based on Wilde, Hichens writes: “All the men who wore them looked the same. They had the same walk, or rather waggle, the same coyly conscious expression, the same wavy motion of the head.”

The publisher, Heinemann, suggested that Hichens not use his name on the book. It was published anonymously. This led to speculation, just as the publisher intended, that it had been written by an insider in Wilde’s circle. Some accused Ada Leverson, “the Sphinx,” of having penned it. Others, Reginald Turner, Wilde’s best friend. Still others openly accused Oscar Wilde of writing it to further his already scandalous reputation. Wilde guessed the authorship and sent Hichens a telegram warning him to skip town before he sought his revenge. The comment was a lampoon. But Wilde was annoyed enough that he sent a letter to the newspaper stating categorically that he could never have written a book that was so “middle class.” It was a pompous boast that underscores his arrogance and insecurity. He had already confessed to Ada that he thought the book was surprisingly clever.

It is clever. And wonderfully funny. Hichens had the “perfidy,” to use Bosie’s term, to steal his friends’ best lines and use them in the text. You can’t help when reading The Green Carnation to feel as if you are sitting right next to Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas at one of their intimate dinners. In fact, Hichens had gathered his material while on a trip up the Nile with E. F. Benson and Reggie Turner during which he met and befriended Douglas. Later in London he was introduced to Wilde and wrote down everything the man said to him. It all makes for a lively novel and one of the rare documents that truly captures the wit and charm of Wilde in his prime. Sadly, it was just a year later that Wilde was arrested and disgraced. Hichens, who perhaps felt that his book was contributing to Wilde’s scandal, asked his publisher to recall the novel from stores. It was not until 1949 that he consented to have it reprinted (below) by the Unicorn Press. Before doing so he wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas and asked for his permission. It was a gracious act and Douglas gave his consent without any reservations. In the new edition, Hichens used his own name and wrote a revealing introduction that recounted how he had come to write it. The book was out of print for decades afterward and only recently has been reprinted again.

Despite these tidbits gleaned from his books, there is scant information about Hichens, the man. He never married. In 1947 he wrote his memoirs, Yesterday. But he was extremely discreet, even disingenuous, about his personal life, which is not surprising when you consider what had happened to Oscar Wilde. It seems obvious that Hichens was indeed homosexual. Rupert Croft-Cooke, in his chatty biography of Bosie, calls Hichens, an “intelligent queer.” Hichens made a great deal of money during his long career and lived in luxury in Switzerland and along the Mediterranean until his death at 85 in 1950. Details of his personal life are sparse. He had a long-standing friendship with the Swiss author, John Knittel (both below).

So is it worth reading Hichens’s exotic romances today? I think so. One has to read them in the light of historical research, perhaps — literary archeology. The themes are dated; the style antiquated. But they reflect the cunning of a clever wordsmith, and are intriguing touchstones that reflect the spirit of their times.