Overview

The narrative of Details Are Unprintable primarily unfolds over a seven-month period from October 1943 to April 1944—from the moment the body of twenty-two-year old Patricia Burton Lonergan is discovered in the bedroom of her New York City Beekman Hill apartment, to the arrest of her husband of two years, Wayne Lonergan, for her murder, and his subsequent trial and conviction. But this story goes back in time to the 1920s, when Wayne Lonergan grew up in Toronto and then forward to his post-prison life following his deportation to Canada. It is the chronicle of Lonergan in denial as a bisexual or gay man living in an intolerant and morally superior heterosexual world; and Patricia, rich and entitled, a seeker of attention, who loved a night out on the town —all set against the fast pace of New York’s ostentatious Café Society and Broadway gay bars in which gay men were regularly entrapped by undercover police operatives. Part crime novel and part a social history of New York City in the 1940s, readers will be transported to the New York World’s Fair of 1939 when Patricia’s father William first encountered Lonergan; the Stork Club, 21 Club as well as the El Morocco to experience with Patricia a night of drinking champagne cocktails and dancing; and the muggy New York courtroom where Lonergan’s fate was decided. What truly happened on that tragic night in October 24, 1943? Should Lonergan’s confession be accepted at face value as the jury did? Or, was he indeed a victim of physical and mental abuse by the state prosecutors and the police as he maintained for the rest of his life? These and other key questions will be considered and answers offered.

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9781493050918

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"""Allan Levine's extraordinary reconstruction of a high-society murder case that drove World War Two from the tabloid front pages in 1940s New York City offers a fascinating exploration of the New York social scene and the place of homosexuality, closeted or not, within it. It's also a page-turning legal procedural that gracefully gives lay readers a vivid narrative of a hard-fought trial, as well as post-trial developments that unfolded during a revolution in the rights of criminal defendants."" --Daniel Richman, former federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York"

Allan Levine's extraordinary reconstruction of a high-society murder case that drove World War Two from the tabloid front pages in 1940s New York City offers a fascinating exploration of the New York social scene and the place of homosexuality, closeted or not, within it. It's also a page-turning legal procedural that gracefully gives lay readers a vivid narrative of a hard-fought trial, as well as post-trial developments that unfolded during a revolution in the rights of criminal defendants. --Daniel Richman, former federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York

Author Information

ALLAN LEVINE is an award-winning internationally selling author and historian based in Winnipeg, Canada. He has written thirteen books including Toronto: Biography of City (2014) and King: William Lyon Mackenzie King: A Life Guided by the Hand of Destiny (2011), which won the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction. His book, Coming of Age: A History of the Jewish People of Manitoba (2009 won the McNally-Robinson Book of the Year and the Best History Book Award at the Canadian Jewish Book Awards in 2010, and was the co-winner of the J.I. Segal Prize in Canadian Jewish History. His next book, Seeking the Fabled City: The Canadian Jewish Experience will be published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House of Canada in October 2018.

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