Now Available from Lyons Press
Details Are Unprintable
Wayne Lonergan And The Sensational Cafe Society Murder
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 of 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. Part True Crime and part a social history of New York City
in the 1940s, this book transports readers to the New York World’s
Fair of 1939 when Patricia’s father William Burton first encountered
Lonergan; the Stork Club, 21 Club, and 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.
“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
Excerpts:
Book Launch, October 7 2020 with McNally Robinson
Interviews:
Reviews:
Buy the Book
Read Allan’s new series about Crime in the Lower East Side a
century ago in Tablet magazine
Chronicled and mythologized in scholarly and popular history books,
novels, films, and plays, New York’s Lower East Side in the late
19th and early 20th centuries was overcrowded, and teeming with
peddlers, tailors, sweatshops, and barely livable tenement houses.
By 1910, an estimated 540,000 Jews resided within the neighborhood’s
1.5 square miles. The poverty, hardships, and daily struggle to
survive drove some Jewish immigrants to seek other ways to make a
living, even get rich. Hence, the Lower East Side also had a vast
collection of crooks, pimps, prostitutes, thieves, pickpockets,
gangsters, fraudsters, forgers, arsonists, and hoodlums. Offered
here is an ongoing series of portraits of some of these nefarious
characters, who also left their mark on the Lower East Side’s
historical legacy.
A Jew on Death Row: The Tragic Case of Pesach Rubenstein
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/pesach-rubenstein-death-row
The Lower East Side Madam: Rosie Hertz
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/lower-east-side-madam-rosie-hertz
The Hectic, Violent, and Relatively Short Life of Big Jack Zelig
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/death-gangster-big-jack-zelig-lower-east-side
‘Marm’ Mandelbaum: Queen of the Fences
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/marm-mandelbaum-queen-fences
The Gangster Who Defended the Unions—With a Lead Pipe: Dopey
Benny
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/gangster-defended-unions-dopey-benny-fein-lower-east-side
