The Book of Lies

by Felice Picano

  There are rumors that De Petrie has made the final cut of those few Olympian authors being considered annually in Stockholm. And that Von Slyke is furious at the news, since he’s the one who’d been doing all the international publicity. And that Axenfeld is, unsurprisingly, amused at the brouhaha. There are rumors that De Petrie has actually begun to write another book. It would be the first new one in years, decades, he’d himself admit. Of course, no one has any idea what its subject may be, although those in the know assume it will be autobiographical, another memoir. Naturally I’ve got my own ideas of certain material it might include. In fact, I once went so far in a phone conversation to allude to it. In the airiest of terms, of course, and to as amusingly as possibly bestow upon him the greatest possible freedom to work it up as he saw fit.

  Don’t consider this fawning, or even any sacrifice on my part. The controversy continued on and off in the pages of the literary journals and in certain ‘academic rooms’ on the Internet, then died down. After several years of trying, I’ve still not found an interested editor or foolish enough publisher for the manuscript and I’m beginning to think I never shall.

  Still, there are days I still can’t help feeling it would make a book. Even a not too inconsequential book, this Book of Lies. What do you think?

  BIBLIOGRAPHY AND APPENDICES

  Aaron Axenfeld 1944-

  Second Star from the Right (novel, 1978)

  Different in Kind (novel, 1982)

  Envoi to Obscurity (non-fiction, 1985)

  At Imperial Point (novel, 1995)

  Plaid Flannel (stories, 1999)

  From the Icelandic (novel, 2001)

  Dominic de Petrie 1944-

  Who is Christopher Darling? (novel, 1975)

  Singles (novel, 1976)

  A Choice of Faces (poetry, 1977)

  Prowl (novel, 1979)

  Gay Tragic Romances (stories, 1980)

  A Summer’s Lease (novella, 1981)

  Advice to a Jewish Prince (novel, 1983)

  The Last Good Year for Cadillacs (memoirs, 1985)

  Chrome Earrings (memoirs, 1989)

  Saturdays – and Rain! (memoirs, 1995)

  The Adventures of Marty (novel, 1997)

  Agent for the Deceased (memoirs, 1999)

  Death and Art in Greenwich Village (memoirs, 2000)

  Absolute Ebony (novella, 2001)

  Conversations in the Dark (memoirs, 2002)

  Mark Dodge 1948-86

  Buffalo Nickel (novel, 1975)

  Keep Frozen (novel, 1977)

  We All Drive Fords (novel, 1984)

  Framed by Life a.k.a. Man in a Jar (autobiography, 1993; in Reuben Weatherbury (ed.), The Purple Circle Reader)

  Rowland Etheridge 1938-95

  The Love Tribe (novel, 1968)

  The Eleventh Commandment (novel, 1975)

  The Thirteenth Trump is Death (novel, 1977)

  Singular Sensation (play, 1979)

  Desperately, Yours (novel, 1981)

  Mustang Sally (play, 1984)

  Beauregard in Brooklyn Heights (play, 1985)

  On Buzzard’s Bay (novel, 1992)

  Mitchell Leo 1941-88

  Signals in the Sky, with Frankie McKewen (non-fiction, 1971)

  The Younger (novella, 1977)

  Refitting Tom Devere (novel, 1981)

  After the Piano Recital (novel, 1983)

  Serial Childhood (novel, 1985)

  Frankie McKewen 1943-88

  Signals in the Sky, with Mitchell Leo (non-fiction, 1971)

  I am You and You are Me (non-fiction, 1975)

  In the Spirit of Chief Pontiac (non-fiction, 1976)

  Switch Hitters (non-fiction, 1978)

  Whitmans Sons and Sappho's Daughters (non-fiction, 1979)

  A Boy from Quad Cities (novel, 1991)

  Cameron Powers 1946-87

  Along the Via Appia (travel, 1981)

  ‘Miss Thing' and the '41 Bugatti (stories, 1999)

  Damon von Slyke 1941-

  Representation in Indigo (play, 1966)

  Systems for Approaching Emmeline (novel, 1974)

  Instigations (novel, 1981)

  Heliotrope Convertible (novel, 1983)

  Pastiche Upon Some Themes Alluded to by Gustave Flaubert (novel, 1985)

  Rejection: A Masquerade (non-fiction, 1986)

  Verbatim (novel, 1987)

  The Japonica Tree (stories, 1989)

  Leaving Riverside Drive (novel, 1994)

  DOS: Manuscript in Distress (novel, 1996)

  Spun Sugar, including ‘Fantasietta on a Sad Pierrot’ (early stories, 1997)

  Epistle to Albioni (novella, 1999)

  Canticle to the Sun (novel, 2001)

  Jeff Weber 1945-89

  Picking Up Men in Lower Manhattan (poetry, 1976)

  Ode to a Porno Star (novel, 1978)

  Sights and Offenses (stories, 1979)

  The Odds in Ocean Park (non-fiction, 1985)

  Cheyenne August (novel, 1988)

  ‘In the Tree Museum’ (story, 1993)

  Books about the Purple Circle

  Reuben Weatherbury (ed.), The Purple Circle Reader, Vol. 1, 1993; Vol. 2, 1999

  Thaddeus Fleming, Gauntlet to the Ground: The Purple Circle, 1978-1982, 1997

  Erling Cummings, Nine Lives, 2001

  Irian St George, On the Edge of the New: Dominic De Petrie and the Purple Circle, 1999

  Appendix 1: Len Spurgeon and the Purple Circle

  (the works he influenced)

  1 1966-74 Sex etc. with Frankie McKewen – Iowa/Berlin – A Boy from Quad Cities

  2 1976-7 Lover of Mark Dodge – SF & NYC – Keep Frozen

  3 1978-9 Lover of Jeff Weber – NYC – story ‘In the Tree Museum’

  4 1980-81 Lives with A. Axenfeld – Fla – From the Icelandic

  5 1981-2 Lives with Cameron Powers – NYC – Along the Via Appia

  6 1982-3 Lives with Rowland Etheridge – NYC – Beauregard in Brooklyn Heights

  7 1983-5 Tea with the Leo-McKewens – NYC – After the Piano Recital

  8 1984 S/M sex with Damon Von Slyke – NYC – story ‘Master and Man’

  9 1985-91 Lives with Dominic De Petrie – Cape Cod, Mass. – ‘A Fable’

  Appendix 2: Deaths

  Mark Dodge – November 1986

  Cameron Powers – June 1987

  Frankie McKewen – March 1988

  Mitchell Leo – June 1988

  Jeff Weber – July 1989

  Len Spurgeon – May 1991

  Rowland Etheridge – September 1995

  Appendix 3: Course Reading

  The Yellow Room and Other Stories, Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

  My Antonia, Willa Cather

  Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Ogalala Sioux, John Gneisenau Neihardt

  Go Down, Moses, William Faulkner

  In Cold Blood, Truman Capote

  Five Plays, Tennessee Williams

  Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin

  Mr Sammler's Planet, Saul Bellow

  Geography, Elizabeth Bishop

  The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston

  Afterword

  If there was a moment when crucial life decisions were made for me so starkly that at the time, I said, “I can’t believe this is happening,” it was one Thursday afternoon at Fire Island Pines in early July some four and a half decades ago.

  An ordinary day, or so I thought. I’d just been to the Pines harbor’s little commercial center and picked up my mail, delivered by ferry six days a week, as I often did. I was opening up a letter from a woman friend of mine who worked in publishing, and I was shaking out its contents. There I found an early copy of the New York Times Books of the Times Sunday section bent open to the penultimate pages where circled in red was my novel Eyes, high on the paperback best seller list. At that very moment, the young man who I’d been seeing for half a year in Manhattan but more ofte
n at the Pines, found me on the boardwalk and sidled us into a more private lane. He was very agitated and he said, “I’ve made a decision. It has to do with me, my strengths, and mostly my weaknesses, and I’m returning to Larry.” Larry being the man he’d been living with for a few years and from whom he’d taken a “break” with me. “I can’t explain it more now,” he added. “But I was up all night and I didn’t make this decision lightly.” He then sped off.

  So, there I stood on Fire Island Boulevard at noon, with a list in my hand containing my first best-selling book and a sudden broken relationship with someone I really cared for and I thought: “I can’t believe this is happening. Who is writing this novel, anyway?”

  I bring this incident up because if something that ridiculously black and white, and so tackily early 20th Century in theme – love versus career – can happen in my life, then surely a lot of what I write about that some might call coincidental or even “way out in left field” is justifiable. Which brings us to my novel The Book of Lies.

  The idea for the book came about several years after four of the members of the Violet Quill Club had died of HIV related diseases: Michael Grumley, followed in a few months by his husband, Robert Ferro, followed a few months later by George Whitmore, who was followed later that same year by Christopher Cox. With each of them I had had some kind of important, mostly unsexual, relationship. I was the only one of the VQ to continue seeing Cox, after he and Edmund White broke up, for example. Cox worked as an editor at Ballantine Books under my wonderful former editor from Delacorte, Linda Grey. He and I had lunch every few months uptown. He visited me at Fire Island Pines, and I regularly visited and helped him when he was dying of Pancreatic Cancer at St. Vincent’s Hospital, where I fielded the regular phone calls from his old friend Susan Sarandon, who was stuck in South America making a movie and who helped Cox financially and in other ways in those last days.

  But the incident that actually turned me toward the book was one that’s not even in the book and which you are hearing about for the first time. One Hallowe’en evening in the early 1980s I got a call from Robert asking if I was around for dinner out that night and/or if I had plans for later on. I said I’d join them for dinner, and said, I’d thought of going down to Christopher Street to see the post-official-parade gay parade there. Robert & Michael drove in from Gaywyck Sur Mer in Sea Girt, New Jersey and we had dinner at OhHoSos in Soho and then Robert drove us near Christopher Street. It was quite cold out that night, and all three of us were appropriately dressed in jeans, sweaters, leather boots with leather bomber jackets. Robert casually went to the back trunk of his Pontiac Firebird, opened it, and pulled out three Marilyn Monroe wigs. He plopped them on our heads, where they served to warm us like hats, so with wigs and dark glasses on, we three strode into the mass of mostly gay guys in costumes and soon were meeting and greeting friends. I almost immediately ceased to think about the wigs and myself in the wig, until we stopped at the Häagen-Daaz shop open to the street and we ordered sundaes. Suddenly I saw us in the mirror and burst out laughing. But before I could do any more than that, playwright Doric Wilson who I’d published, appeared and we were socializing again. Maybe two hours later, as the mass of folks began to thin, we left, returned to the car, where Robert took the wigs off us and put them in the trunk of the car to return to a shop the next day. They dropped me off at my place on 11th Street and drove up to their flat on West 95th.

  All of it completely casual. I remember recalling it and thinking, “that’s how we were: nuts, but casual about being nuts.” Creative, but soigné about our creativity. That was the ambience I wanted to recreate in the novel. And I feel that I successfully achieved that.

  Of course, there were so many red herrings in the book to keep anyone from seeing that. To begin with, it’s a mystery story. That came about because ever since my 1979 novel, The Lure, was published to controversy and acclaim, people had been asking for a sequel. Obviously, no sequel is likely. But by being an academic mystery, a true whodunit, The Book of Lies, satisfied me (if no one else) that I had written a sequel to The Lure. But of course, it is a double mystery, because the book’s narrator is hiding an important fact himself. So, while the reader may think s/he may have the answer to the overt mystery, s/he will surely be caught out by the shock of the second one. Partly, I was having fun. Quoting noir and thriller movies like mad, and no one caught on! That first drive through Laurel Canyon with another car right on our narrator’s car’s tail comes from Doris Day’s perilous nighttime drive through – you guessed it – rain-soaked Laurel Canyon with the body of the husband she has just killed in the trunk of the car in the film, Midnight Lace. Our narrator’s entry to Van Slyke’s house where he is to stay while the author is out of town, echoes Phillip Marlowe’s visit to the Hancock Park mansion where he meets the femme fatale of Farewell, My Lovely. Etc. etc.

  Then there was the problematic case of there being “too many authors” in The Book of Lies. If it really was about the Violet Quill club – which it sometimes pretended to be and sometimes didn’t – then how come instead of seven authors, there were nine?! Especially in the UK, where the book was first published and I believe better appreciated, readers and even a few scholars went out of their way to compare the “American Bloomsburys” – as we in the VQ are called there – to the writers in the book. There were clever comparisons, intertextual analyses, because sly me, I provided individual pieces of each fictional authors’ writings. They ate up the Post-Modern aspects of the book, but no one ever figured out who on earth the other two were.

  So – spoiler alert – I’ll tell you now. Not that you would ever put two and to together, because one of the nine was a not very well known – i.e. very moderately known – mystery author and dear friend of mine in Greenwich Village, Joseph Matheson.* And the second was totally unknown, a writer manqué, sometimes boyfriend, and sometimes just a weekend dance partner of mine, Ray Ford, who looked like a Leyendecker Arrow Shirt ad from the 1920’s and who I adored. Joe and Ray got into the book because I staunchly believed that they were cheated out of being successful authors during their lifetimes. By the time I was writing the novel, both had died. So, this was my way of correcting that essentially stupid bad writer (see paragraphs 2 & 3) Fate, and giving a little of the success from my own life – which I’d never asked for and got anyway – to two wonderful guys who really did desire it and who never got it, but instead got fatal illnesses and unfortunate ends.

  One critic called the book “disingenuous,” to which I did and will continue to reply, “It’s titled The Book of Lies! Not the Book of Truths or Almost Truths. So, of course, it’s disingenuous.” I hope you enjoyed being lied to. I enjoyed doing it.

  — Felice Picano

  West Hollywood, April 2020

  *The Love Tribe (1968), Alicia’s Trump (1980) Death Turns Right (1982) Under the Sign of the Virgin (1983)

  About ReQueered Tales

  In the heady days of the late 1960s, when young people in many western countries were in the streets protesting for a new, more inclusive world, some of us were in libraries, coffee shops, communes, retreats, bedrooms and dens plotting something even more startling: literature – high brow and pulp – for an explicitly gay audience. Specifically, we were craving to see our gay lives – in the closet, in the open, in bars, in dire straits and in love – reflected in mystery stories, romance, paranormal and more. Hercule Poirot, that engaging effete Belgian creation of Agatha Christie might have been gay … Sherlock Holmes, to all intents and purposes, was one woman shy of gay … but where were the genuine gay sleuths, where the reader need not read between the lines?

  Beginning with Victor J Banis’s “Man from C.A.M.P.” pulps in the mid-60s – riotous romps spoofing the craze for James Bond spies – readers were suddenly being offered George Baxt’s Pharoah Love, a black gay New York City detective, and a real turning point in Joseph Hansen’s gay California insurance investigator, Dave Brandstetter, whose world weary Raymond Cha
ndleresque adventures sold strongly and have never been out of print.

  Over the next three decades, gay storytelling grew strongly in niche and mainstream publishing ventures. Even with the huge public crisis – as AIDS descended on the gay community beginning in the early 1980s – gay fiction flourished. Stonewall Inn, Alyson Publications, and others nurtured authors and readers … until mainstream success seemed to come to a halt. While Lambda Literary Foundation had started to recognize work in annual awards about 1990, mainstream publishers began to have cold feet. And then, with the rise of ebooks in the new millennium which enabled a new self-publishing industry … there was both an avalanche of new talent coming to market and burying of print authors who did not cross the divide.

  The result?

  Perhaps forty years of gay fiction – and notably gay and lesbian mystery, detective and suspense fiction – has been teetering on the brink of obscurity. Orphaned works, orphaned authors, many living and some having passed away – with no one to make the case for their creations to be returned to print (and e-print!).