Judge Is Still Missing, but Novel Tracks Him Down
One day last week, the novelist Peter Quinn (“I’m actually a lapsed historian”) was walking west on 45th Street, beyond Eighth Avenue, when he stopped outside the old home of a vanished Broadway restaurant called Billy Haas’s Chophouse.
“This is it,” he said, nodding at the graceless apartment building that had, in the local manner, risen to take its place. “He comes out here” — Mr. Quinn pointed at the curb — “and a tan cab is heading west. He’s wearing a double-breasted coat. He’s just had dinner with William Klein, a lawyer for the Shubert brothers, and a showgirl named Sally Ritz. He tips his hat, climbs in the cab — and that’s it.”
Mr. Quinn, who is 62 and bearded, is a Bronx-born man of Irish descent and a member of that cadre of New Yorkers known as Craterites. While most of these unfortunate souls — obsessed with the cold case of Joseph Force Crater, a State Supreme Court justice who vanished 80 years ago this week — are content to scratch their heads at the mystery, Mr. Quinn has dared to imagine its solution in the pages of “The Man Who Never Returned,” his new book.
“I solved the case in my head,” he had said earlier in the day, sitting in a hallway of the New York Public Library, just below the carrel-filled study where he wrote a good portion of the book. Arranged on his lap were three accordion files of Craterite gold: the original police circular announcing the disappearance; scores of day-by-day investigative reports; and countless letters from bounty-seekers in Havana, Shanghai, even the South Pacific — all claiming to have seen the missing man....
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“This is it,” he said, nodding at the graceless apartment building that had, in the local manner, risen to take its place. “He comes out here” — Mr. Quinn pointed at the curb — “and a tan cab is heading west. He’s wearing a double-breasted coat. He’s just had dinner with William Klein, a lawyer for the Shubert brothers, and a showgirl named Sally Ritz. He tips his hat, climbs in the cab — and that’s it.”
Mr. Quinn, who is 62 and bearded, is a Bronx-born man of Irish descent and a member of that cadre of New Yorkers known as Craterites. While most of these unfortunate souls — obsessed with the cold case of Joseph Force Crater, a State Supreme Court justice who vanished 80 years ago this week — are content to scratch their heads at the mystery, Mr. Quinn has dared to imagine its solution in the pages of “The Man Who Never Returned,” his new book.
“I solved the case in my head,” he had said earlier in the day, sitting in a hallway of the New York Public Library, just below the carrel-filled study where he wrote a good portion of the book. Arranged on his lap were three accordion files of Craterite gold: the original police circular announcing the disappearance; scores of day-by-day investigative reports; and countless letters from bounty-seekers in Havana, Shanghai, even the South Pacific — all claiming to have seen the missing man....