Everything starts changing for him as a result of that.” “Noel goes into that world and suddenly he’s awake all night and asleep all day. I wanted to do a neat reversal of what it is like to hide part of your life,” says Picano. In this case he was hiding his straight life. “For many years before, men older than me had had to hide their lives, lead two lives, and I wanted to show people what it’d be like to do that. 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. Cummings, a widower, identifies as straight but is increasingly drawn to the lifestyle he is assuming.
After he witnesses a murder, academic Noel Cummings is recruited by police to act as a lure for the killer. What he came up with was a layered and lurid thriller about an elusive serial killer stalking Manhattan’s gay scene.
“I worked in bars and clubs, lived their lives, so I could get all the information I needed to make it realistic. So he “went underground and did it myself”, he says.
