“Shadow Men” opens on a note of uncertainty: “We don’t know why Duncan Rose was late to work that May morning in 1922.” As it turns out, it doesn’t really matter what detained him; like a cold-opener on “Law & Order,” he’s just a device to get us to the main event — a dead body on the side of the road in Westchester County.
The victim was Clarence Peters, a 19-year-old apprentice sailor who had been dishonorably discharged for stealing. But something seemed off: The bullet that killed Peters had only pierced his shirt, not his outer garments. The body, the police concluded, must have been moved from the scene of the crime — and possibly dressed.
Just a few days later, a man named Walter Ward confessed, crying self-defense. Ward, a handsome guy who was also wealthy — his family owned the Ward Baking Company, one of the largest chain of bread factories in America — claimed that he was the victim of blackmail by a group of “shadow men” to whom he had already paid $30,000.
The question that preoccupies James Polchin, a clinical professor at New York University who previously wrote “Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall,” is: What secret could Ward possibly have been guarding at such a high cost?
The police took inventory of what they found on Clarence Peters’s body, including a pair of dice, a pack of playing cards, four cuff buttons, a new pack of Chesterfield cigarettes and a “ladies’ handkerchief” embroidered with two small lavender pansies in the corner. Mostly normal possessions for a teenager who liked to smoke and gamble — but what if the handkerchief had a deeper meaning? It could have been a gift from a female friend. But could it also have been a nod to his hidden sexuality? Ward, who was married to a socialite named Beryl and had two children, had been rumored to frequent men-only parties at several hotels.
The case was the stuff of tabloid dreams. It had everything: murder, blackmail, money, class, secrets, even the occult. And the public, in the time of Prohibition, anti-vice crusades and so-called purity campaigns to combat germs, couldn’t get enough of it.
Polchin knows the era, and brings to his account a wealth of colorful supporting detail. While in the Westchester County jailhouse, for instance, Ward (who, despite a lack of experience, was the head of New Rochelle Police Commissioners) was placed in the same relatively luxurious “jail apartment” that another scion, Harry K. Thaw, had inhabited some 15 years earlier, after shooting the architect Stanford White at Madison Square Garden.
We also hear about the dapper William Fallon, a well-known criminal attorney, who in college “devised a three-mirror system that allowed him to cut his own hair, a trick that gave him complete control over the way he looked from almost every conceivable angle.”
When asked about the case, Arthur Conan Doyle himself declared that it would be an “ideal Sherlock mystery” but that he would “confine his attention to the Ward family alone, leaving the actual murder to unravel itself after the blackmail mystery was solved.” Polchin then devotes an entire chapter to Conan Doyle’s descent into spiritualism and séances (he claimed to have contacted Peters from beyond the veil) and a rift with Harry Houdini. Engaging, sure, but the world-building comes at the cost of narrative momentum.
This is frustrating because, with its layers of taboos and public spectacle, the case feels, a century later, as relevant as ever. And yet, for all its lurid trappings, the sensationalistic story ends up feeling a bit dry — and we never find out exactly what this important family was hiding.
Polchin diplomatically declines to take much of a stand about what he thinks really happened. “We are left to speculate, read between the lines, pull together known facts and come up with our own theories,” he writes.
The author posits that the case could have helped inspire “The Great Gatsby.” Interesting to ponder, but to a reader, somewhat unsatisfying. Polchin’s research is certainly extensive, and he’s a likable and knowledgeable guide to the era. Ultimately, though, I craved stronger opinions and a few conclusions.
Polchin gives the final word to F. Scott Fitzgerald, quoting “Gatsby”: “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Sure, but what does the author think?
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