Penknife

Outside an East Village diner, in the early morning hours of July 18th, 1981, a writer named Jack Henry Abbott stabs waiter and fellow writer Richard Adan to death because Adan refuses him use of the diner’s bathroom. Abbott is no ordinary writer; from age 12-37 he’s lived all but 9 ½ months in prison or juvenile detention. At the time of the murder, he’s just been released from prison and within a matter of days his highly praised...

With Mailer’s help, Abbott is released from jail. His book, In the Belly of the Beast, is garnering rave advance reviews and is primed to be one of the biggest books of the summer. We take a close look at the night he threw away his literary career—and his life—by senselessly taking the life of another writer, Richard Adan. The killing’s ripple effect is widespread, affecting not just Adan, Abbott and their families, but his pen ...

When writer Joseph Harms hears of our idea to make a podcast about criminal writers, he leaves a series of disturbing messages pointing us in the direction of one of Abbott’s famous penpals: Jerzy Kosinski.  Harms claims that Kosinski killed a man, would regularly hide in people’s walls for days at a time and was somehow responsible for the Manson murders! Allegations such as these are way too juicy not to investigate. So that’s wh...

After defecting from Poland Jerzy Kosinski gets to work trying to make a name for himself in the States. He starts telling some incredibly tall tales about his childhood during the war and somehow manages to publish a few non-fiction books in English despite the fact that his grasp on the language is tentative, at best. In order to write his great book, Mailer sails across the Pacific to fight in World War 2. Well, he does a bit of...

In fall of 1965 a book called The Painted Bird is published and begins to make waves across the literary world. It’s the story of a boy separated from his parents for six years during WW2. It follows him while he wanders the Polish countryside witnessing and enduring unimaginably sadistic torture and abuse. And as if the plot weren’t shocking enough, it’s made all the more sensational by the fact that it’s true! Yes, the author, a ...

After spending the 1950s trying to follow up The Naked and the Dead with another hit, Mailer writes two poorly-received novels and mostly spends the decade getting stoned, drunk, angry and delusional. By 1960 he’s so far gone that he decides to run for Mayor of New York City. To celebrate his decision he throws a party that begins with him announcing his candidacy and ends with him stabbing his wife Adele in the chest with a ru...

Mailer’s violent ways continue both off and on the page. He fictionalizes the stabbing of his wife in an absurd, grotesque little novel aptly titled An American Dream. Not to be outdone, Jerzy Kosinki and his finest ghostwriter get to work on an even more grotesque little novel called Steps which will win him the National Book Award for fiction in 1969. That year's non-fiction winner is our guy Norman Mailer with his book The Armie...

If you’ve made it to Episode 8 and part of you still likes Mailer and/or Kosinski, that’ll change with this episode. Jerzy Kosinski admits to having committed rape when he was a young man in Poland, and his adult behavior is just as horrific. As for Norman Mailer, he takes it upon himself to try to save the patriarchy from Second-wave feminism by attacking Kate Millet in The Prisoner of Sex and then at the so-called “Town Bloody Ha...

On July 9th, 1981 Jack Henry Abbott, Norman Mailer and Jerzy Kosinki get together at an expensive Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village to celebrate the imminent release of Abbot’s book. A week later Richard Adan is dead and Kosinksi and Mailer have a choice to make: Stand by Abbott or throw him under the bus? Mailer endures the negative publicity and supports his friend while Kosinski turns on both Abbott and the political Left....

A Village voice exposé denounces Kosinski for using ghostwriters and casts aspersions on his entire literary career. Nine years later Jerzy Kosinski is a broken man. His writing career is over; he’s managed to write only one novel which was unanimously panned. One night after going to the movies, he drowns himself in his bathtub. Across town, Mailer’s easing into the role of one of the aging titans of American letters. One of Maile...

One morning in 1949 Kenneth Halliwell comes downstairs for breakfast and finds his father’s dead body awkwardly protruding from the stove. He turns off the gas, then steps over the body to boil water for tea. When he finishes his tea, he shaves and calls the neighbors to report his father’s suicide. Nearly two decades later, when Joe Orton’s mother dies, his response is to pick up an Irish laborer and screw him in a derelict house....

By 1953 Orton and Halliwell are both realizing they don’t have what it takes to make it as actors, but no matter, Halliwell is going to be a famous novelist and Joe, the less-educated and cultivated of the two, well, he’s going to be Kenneth’s secretary. In time though, Joe recognizes his own passion and talent for writing and the two men start writing collaboratively, determined to make it big. Shunning society and material comfor...

At his local library branch Joe Orton is enraged to find out that they don’t have a copy of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  In retaliation for this grave injustice he and Kenneth Halliwell begin a multi-year campaign of stealing books from the library, artfully doctoring them, then smuggling them back to their rightful places on the shelves.  Eventually the police and the local law clerk deploy undercover...

Beginning in 1964, conservative England is shocked and outraged by Joe Orton’s work.  In his radio play The Ruffian on the Stair and then in his stage plays Entertaining Mr. Sloane and Loot, Orton attacks church, state and family and taunts his enemies by putting sexual ambiguous characters on stage. For some of the first times ever, gays in the theater can’’t be stereotyped as effeminate queens or tragic cases. And while this brin...

In December 1966, Joe Orton begins keeping a diary that he maintains for the final eight months of his life.  Along with plenty of cottaging in public lavatories the diaries chronicle the death of his mother, the success of Loot, and the writing of both a film for the Beatles and his final masterpiece, What the Butler Saw. They also cover his sex tourism trips to North Africa and the breakdown of his relationship with Kenneth Halli...

Kenneth Halliwell’s mental health is deteriorating.  After he and Joe return from Tangier in July of 67, a producer friend of Joe’s calls Kenneth a “middle-aged nonentity” to his face. This stings particularly because after failing as an actor, a writer and finally as a collage artist, Kenneth can’t really deny it.  His value, he believes, is in his contributions to Joe’s career, but he’s felt for some time now that he’s losing Joe...

The story doesn’t end with Joe and Kenneth’s deaths. In fact, the most shocking part comes here: Joe Orton was a pederast. Despite the fact that Orton’s story has been told numerous times in a biography, documentaries and a biopic, and that the diaries are chockfull of what today would be called the sexual exploitation or assault of pubescent boys, this aspect of his life has always been obscured. Until now…Listener discretion is a...

In 2019 the Leicester City Council granted preliminary approval to place a statue of Joe Orton in the city’s cultural quarter. With the help of celebrities such as Ian McKellen, Stephen Fry and Alec Baldwin, the Joe Orton Statue Appeal raised over ₤100,000 in a short time. But in 2020 statues of problematic historical figures were toppled throughout England and Leicester found itself embroiled in a controversy over whether or not t...

Early morning October 17, 1911. Two teenagers climb a hill outside of Leipzig, Germany with the intention of killing each other in a duel. Rudolph Ditzen fires his gun and hits his mark but his friend Hans misses. Ditzen turns the gun on himself but survives and stumbles down the hill covered in blood. Years later Rudolph Ditzen will publish his first novel under the pseudonym Hans Fallada. By then he’d already killed a man, attemp...