From Edgar Award finalist comes a thrilling examination of the murder that captivated Jazz Age America, with echoes of the decadence and violence of The Great Gatsby.
Polchin knows the era, and brings to his account a wealth of colorful supporting details . . . The case feels, a century later, as relevant as ever.
—New York Times Book Review
"The criminal probe at the center of Shadow Men is absorbing."
—The Wall Street Journal
Polchin combines a novelist’s gift for narrative and a journalist’s eye for detail in this riveting work of true crime. . . . It’s an entertaining account of an obscure yet fascinating crime.
—Publishers Weekly
Shadow Men cements his place in the new true crime canon.
—Molly Odintz, CrimeReads
Polchin’s investigation yields a compelling social history that makes clear the power of the press, wealth, political clout, and influence in determining legal outcomes and obfuscating the heart of scandalous affairs
—Kirkus
Polchin . . . unravels this sordid and complex tale of prejudice, injustice, and press sensationalism with clinical precision, deep research, and riveting storytelling.
—Dean Jobb, Washington Independent Review of Books
This true crime book slowly reveals the underworlds of the 1920s, including what being queer in the Jazz Age was like.
—Danika Ellis, Book Riot
Polchin’s engrossing account of this forgotten cause célèbre exposes how easily wealth, power, and privilege can tip the scales of justice.
—Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
Readers today will—as were readers in the 1920s—be confounded by the crime’s lack of a resolution, which presages modern-day issues of money, political power, gambling, homophobia, media coverage, and accountability—or lack thereof—in America.
—Book List
Shadow Men unwinds a complex murder investigation about the moral decadence of the Jazz Age, the façade of privileged class mores, and the power of William Randolph Hearst’s empire of yellow journalism to shape public perception. Polchin brilliantly balances historical detail and forward momentum in a true crime tale that exposes the great inequities in our justice system, the shadows of which still loom today.
—John Copenhaver, award-winning author of Hall of Mirrors
James Polchin's triumphant Shadow Men weaves a Jazz Age whodunit out of Hitchcock, a richly laden escapade of gentlemen's intrigue and the roughest of rough trade blackmail. This devilishly plotted potboiler exposes a champagne underworld of confidence men, blowoffs and suckers in a 1920s America that only gets queerer and queerer.
—Robert W. Fieseler, Author of the Edgar Award Winner Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation
On the morning of May 16, 1922, the body of a young man was found on a desolate road near the Kensico Reservoir in Westchester County, a suburb of New York City. Killed by a single bullet to the chest, it took the coroner three days to track the man's prints to naval records in Washington, D.C. The victim, nineteen-year-old Clarence Peters, would be termed by the press as a "penniless ex-sailor" and his murder soon went from local story to national scandal.
The day after Peter's identity was made public, Walter S. Ward, the thirty-one-year-old executive and millionaire heir of the Ward Baking Company, which pioneered industrial bread making and would later produce the iconic fluffy white loaf known as Wonder Bread, issued a statement through his attorney admitting he shot Clarence Peters. This confession only added to the mystery. Ward claimed to have run afoul of the "shadow men," those who entrapped others in compromising positions and then blackmailed them to remain silent.
In Shadow Men: A Tangled Story of Murder, Media, and Privilege that Scandalized Jazz Age America, James Polchin tells the story of a diverse cast of characters who either by choice or circumstance were drawn into the case, from minor figures such as small town butchers and shoemakers in Massachusetts, Black doormen and maids in Harlem, and queer conmen in the shadows of Times Square, to the well-known and powerful, like the New York State governor and future presidential candidate Al Smith, Joseph Medill Peterson, the ambitious editor of New York Daily News, and even the British detective writer Arthur Conan Doyle.
Capturing the extraordinary twists and turns of the case, Shadow Men conjures the excess and contradictions of the Jazz Age, the social tensions of class privilege and criminality, and the growing power of the press to define the lines between private life and public reputation. At its center, Shadow Men reveals the true-crime origins of the media-led voyeurism that reverberates through contemporary life, and reckons with the elusive nature of crime stories--what they reveal and what remains hidden.