From the Vault: A Review of John Peyton Cooke's Torsos: A Novel of Dark Intent.
Being the seventh in an occasional series (and the second in 2007) wherein I dust off a book review that I wrote over ten years ago for a buddy's zine. As with the last one that I slapped up, I'm moving out of the inventory file and into pieces that actually saw the light of day; again, I'm reasonably sure that there'll be no publishing-type hassles.
This is my review of John Peyton Cooke's third book, an interesting, mostly successful novelization of the Cleveland Torso Murders, the perpetrator(s) of which is(are) still unidentified. Let's hear it, then, for....
Bits and Pieces:
Torsos: A Novel of Dark Intent (Mysterious Press; 1993)
Torsos, a fictionalized account of the first modern serial killer, dubbed "the Torso Killer" by the newspapers, is the third novel from John Peyton Cooke. The Torso Killer stalked the poor sections of Cleveland, Ohio in the 1930s; Cooke does a respectable job of tapping the vein mined so successfully by James Ellroy: writing a noir crime novel that convincingly blends period detail and actual historical figures. While his writing is not up to Ellroy at his best (The Black Dahlia, White Jazz, American Tabloid), Cooke does show promise of developing his own unique variant on the genre. (He was only 26 when Torsos was first published in England.)
Hank Lambert is a homicide detective (and one of the few honest cops on the corruption-riddled Cleveland police force) who catches the squeal for a grisly discovery: the naked, emasculated and decapitated bodies of the Torso Killer's first two victims. Though the severed genitals are found near the bodies, the heads are not. Lambert, teamed initially with a senior partner, soon becomes the leading detective on the case after his partner is demoted to traffic duty by Cleveland's new director of Public Safety, Eliot Ness. Ness, who came up with the idea of two-way radios in every police car to facilitate closer, easier and faster communication between patrolling officers and their precinct, is a reform-minded crusader with an eye on a future political career. Ness's first act as Director of Public Safety is to sweep the Cleveland police department of all corrupt cops; Lambert feels that, in the case of his partner, at least, Ness is a little over-zealous.
New bodies, some of them only headless torsos, turn up with alarming frequency as the years go by with no new leads unearthed. Lambert, who has a wife and children and who is also in the closet, happens to get the closest thing resembling real leads on the case by virtue of the fact that he occasionally pays male hustlers for sex. Lambert soon forms a relationship with an angelic-looking, 19 year-old hustler named Danny Cottone, who knows two of the Torso Killer's victims, and, eventually, unwittingly turns tricks for the killer himself. Ness, who had no police training and seldom carried a gun, takes over the investigation in an effort to "make good" for his political patrons. With Ness taking an active role, the case gets more newspaper coverage, but no fresh angles: heat is brought to bear on the case, but no light.
Torsos presents a killer patterned after the best guesses of Ness and subsequent criminologists (such as Colin Wilson): one who is well-off, owns his own house, possesses great strength, and is homosexual. Ness was convinced that the killer's sexuality was what caused him to kill (much in the same way he believed that Leopold and Loeb's homosexuality made them amoral killers), and that he was the scion of a well-to-do family. (In this instance, the Torso Killer is reminiscent of Jack the Ripper: one hotly-contested theory, first propounded by Dr. Thomas Stowell in a 1970 issue of The Criminologist, is that Jack the Ripper was Prince Albert ["Eddie"] Victor, Duke of Clarence: grandson of Queen Victoria and eldest son of King Edward VII of England, who was apparently homosexual and was rumored to have died horribly of syphilis.) Killer of anywhere from twelve to forty people, depending on which source you believe, the Torso Killer preyed primarily on young men from the dregs of society: either homeless transients, or part of the criminal underworld. (This is one reason why identification of the victims proved to be so difficult.) With the Great Depression just beginning to come to an end, the Torso Killer had a distressing number of potential victims to choose from.
Cooke does a mostly successful job of dramatizing this engrossing (and gross) case. His language is raw, as befits the subject matter, and he paints convincing pictures of both police work driven more by political considerations than genuine concern for human life and of the marginalized homosexual underground which, thanks to the Depression, had far more members than many people would care to admit. While Torsos does get a little sluggish in spots, these spells don't last for long. Cooke also manages to produce both a well-written "normal" sequence of gay sex as well as an episode of extremely bizarre sex that owes much to the writings of the Marquis de Sade: even readers of Gary Jennings, William S. Burroughs and Philip José Farmer are likely to be shocked. Thanks to the fact that this is a work of fiction, Cooke is able to do something that criminal investigation could not: provide a definite end to the Torso Killer's career. In this instance, perhaps, Torsos is more satisfying than real life.
-- Ron Dingman
6 May 1995
This is my review of John Peyton Cooke's third book, an interesting, mostly successful novelization of the Cleveland Torso Murders, the perpetrator(s) of which is(are) still unidentified. Let's hear it, then, for....
Bits and Pieces:
Torsos: A Novel of Dark Intent (Mysterious Press; 1993)
Torsos, a fictionalized account of the first modern serial killer, dubbed "the Torso Killer" by the newspapers, is the third novel from John Peyton Cooke. The Torso Killer stalked the poor sections of Cleveland, Ohio in the 1930s; Cooke does a respectable job of tapping the vein mined so successfully by James Ellroy: writing a noir crime novel that convincingly blends period detail and actual historical figures. While his writing is not up to Ellroy at his best (The Black Dahlia, White Jazz, American Tabloid), Cooke does show promise of developing his own unique variant on the genre. (He was only 26 when Torsos was first published in England.)
Hank Lambert is a homicide detective (and one of the few honest cops on the corruption-riddled Cleveland police force) who catches the squeal for a grisly discovery: the naked, emasculated and decapitated bodies of the Torso Killer's first two victims. Though the severed genitals are found near the bodies, the heads are not. Lambert, teamed initially with a senior partner, soon becomes the leading detective on the case after his partner is demoted to traffic duty by Cleveland's new director of Public Safety, Eliot Ness. Ness, who came up with the idea of two-way radios in every police car to facilitate closer, easier and faster communication between patrolling officers and their precinct, is a reform-minded crusader with an eye on a future political career. Ness's first act as Director of Public Safety is to sweep the Cleveland police department of all corrupt cops; Lambert feels that, in the case of his partner, at least, Ness is a little over-zealous.
New bodies, some of them only headless torsos, turn up with alarming frequency as the years go by with no new leads unearthed. Lambert, who has a wife and children and who is also in the closet, happens to get the closest thing resembling real leads on the case by virtue of the fact that he occasionally pays male hustlers for sex. Lambert soon forms a relationship with an angelic-looking, 19 year-old hustler named Danny Cottone, who knows two of the Torso Killer's victims, and, eventually, unwittingly turns tricks for the killer himself. Ness, who had no police training and seldom carried a gun, takes over the investigation in an effort to "make good" for his political patrons. With Ness taking an active role, the case gets more newspaper coverage, but no fresh angles: heat is brought to bear on the case, but no light.
Torsos presents a killer patterned after the best guesses of Ness and subsequent criminologists (such as Colin Wilson): one who is well-off, owns his own house, possesses great strength, and is homosexual. Ness was convinced that the killer's sexuality was what caused him to kill (much in the same way he believed that Leopold and Loeb's homosexuality made them amoral killers), and that he was the scion of a well-to-do family. (In this instance, the Torso Killer is reminiscent of Jack the Ripper: one hotly-contested theory, first propounded by Dr. Thomas Stowell in a 1970 issue of The Criminologist, is that Jack the Ripper was Prince Albert ["Eddie"] Victor, Duke of Clarence: grandson of Queen Victoria and eldest son of King Edward VII of England, who was apparently homosexual and was rumored to have died horribly of syphilis.) Killer of anywhere from twelve to forty people, depending on which source you believe, the Torso Killer preyed primarily on young men from the dregs of society: either homeless transients, or part of the criminal underworld. (This is one reason why identification of the victims proved to be so difficult.) With the Great Depression just beginning to come to an end, the Torso Killer had a distressing number of potential victims to choose from.
Cooke does a mostly successful job of dramatizing this engrossing (and gross) case. His language is raw, as befits the subject matter, and he paints convincing pictures of both police work driven more by political considerations than genuine concern for human life and of the marginalized homosexual underground which, thanks to the Depression, had far more members than many people would care to admit. While Torsos does get a little sluggish in spots, these spells don't last for long. Cooke also manages to produce both a well-written "normal" sequence of gay sex as well as an episode of extremely bizarre sex that owes much to the writings of the Marquis de Sade: even readers of Gary Jennings, William S. Burroughs and Philip José Farmer are likely to be shocked. Thanks to the fact that this is a work of fiction, Cooke is able to do something that criminal investigation could not: provide a definite end to the Torso Killer's career. In this instance, perhaps, Torsos is more satisfying than real life.
-- Ron Dingman
6 May 1995