Murder in the Closet by Curtis Evans

Author:Curtis Evans [Evans, Curtis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crime, Educational, Gay Studies, GLBT, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9780786499922
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2016-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

Living “in style as only bachelors can,” Doug Swanson and his Rhodes colleague Dr. Antonio Conti, “one of the youngest and smartest professors of pathology in America,” share the lease of a “charming little farm house” in Grindle. Not only is Toni surpassingly brilliant, Doug never tires of telling us, but he is an awesome physical specimen as well. When Doug first introduces readers to Toni on the second page of the novel, as the two are preparing for the cocktail party which they are hosting, Toni has only “just emerged magnificent from the shower.” Later, after the party has commenced, Doug notes that Toni is “six foot four of splendid physique,” in contrast with himself, whom Roberta Tailford-Jones has derided in the past as “that microscopic runt.” Yet later Doug again takes time admiringly to observe Toni (through Roberta’s lascivious eyes, he tells us): “the muscular expanse of chest, the splendid teeth, the dark Italian hair.” After the party has ended and the guests have left, we find Toni, still under Doug’s close scrutiny, taking off “his shirt in the living room.” Toni has, it seems, “an unconventional habit of dressing and undressing anywhere but in the right place.”21 This is all just in Chapter One.

Modern readers might be pardoned at this point for assuming that Doug and Toni are snugly ensconced gay partners or at least that Doug is carrying a brightly flaming torch for Toni. Not so, however. We learn that Doug has what he sadly believes is an unrequited passion for the “gorgeously eupeptic” Valerie Middleton, a lovely young woman he naturally assumes is pursuing Toni, for what woman with intact senses would not be dazzled by the Italian-American’s magnificence? Still, Doug notes that the desirable Valerie “has a cool, clear laugh like a boy’s” and he later compares a handsome, stricken young man to a painting of the martyred, arrow-pierced Saint Sebastian, famously a gay icon, that “I had once seen in some gallery or other”; so Doug’s desires perhaps are queerer than he realizes.22

What seems beyond doubt is the similarity, as couples, between Doug and Toni and what we know of Rickie Webb and Bob Turner. Like Doug and Toni at fictional Rhodes University Hospital, both Rickie and Bob were involved with institutional research, their work, as we know, taking place at Philadelphia, for Smith, Kline and French Laboratories. Doug and Toni enjoy a comfortable bachelor existence in Grindle, their housekeeping and cooking provided for them by Lucinda, their “efficient colored factotum” (“Our tidy house and well-ordered meals were the envy of the entire married community,” boasts Doug), while Rickie and Bob had lived together for several years at their place on Locust Street, chaperoned, in a manner of speaking, by that “sweet-faced Quakeress,” Frances Bartholomew. Finally, while Rickie Webb was very far from a “nonentity,” as the self-effacing Doug terms himself at one point, at 5'6" Rickie did stand rather in the shade of the strapping Bob Turner, who measured just shy of six feet.

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