Shadow Men

The Great Gatsy meets Last Call, and set against the rapid social transformation of the post-World War I era in New York, Shadow Men is a deeply reported narrative nonfiction of queer exploitation and class privilege told through a murder mystery that captivated a nation

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 vice president and millionaire heir of the Ward Baking Company, whose factory in Brooklyn produced the iconic fluffy white loaf known as Wonder Bread, issued a statement through his attorney admitting that he was the one who committed the murder. 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: Blackmail, Murder, and a Sensational Scandal at the Dawn of the Jazz Age, 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, and Black doormen and maids in Harlem, 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.

In placing the queer aspects of this crime within a host of complex social tensions in the 1920s about class privilege, criminality, and the growing power of the press to define ideas of private life and public reputation, Shadow Men reckons with the elusive nature of crime stories themselves—what they reveal and what remains hidden.