Felice Picano’s controversial story of a serial killer in New York was a huge hit in 1979 – but may also have provoked an armed attack on his home. Forty years on, he talks about his novel
Thursday December 19th, 2019 - TheGuardian.com - interview by Alison Flood
Felice Picano set out to write The Lure, his seminal gay thriller, after reading about a series of killings in Greenwich Village in the 1970s. The murders, which were mainly of gay male entrepreneurs, and the police’s failure to find the culprit, were being covered by the Village Voice newspaper. But then the news stories suddenly stopped. When Picano met the reporter, he said he had been receiving death threats.
“So I thought I should follow it up – it was my neighbourhood,” says the author now, 40 years on. As he writes in a new introduction to the 1979 thriller, which is being brought back into print in the UK by Muswell Press, he had wanted to “detail a section of the gay community as I knew it; sort of the way Balzac detailed, piece by piece, much of early 19th-century French society.”
What he came up with was a layered and lurid thriller about an elusive serial killer stalking Manhattan’s gay scene. After he witnesses a murder, academic Noel Cummings is recruited by police to act as a lure for the killer. Cummings, a widower, identifies as straight but is increasingly drawn to the lifestyle he is assuming. As Out magazine put it: “For heterosexual readers for whom a flagrantly gay novel would, even in the late 70s, have been too much of a provocation, the title character Noel Cummings was a great distancing device that slowly reeled them in to New York’s gay underbelly … Only mid-novel, once Cummings is engaging in drug-infused gay orgies, does one appreciate the skill with which Picano has seduced straight readers.
Read the entire interview at TheGuardian.com