Black Idol

On a December afternoon in 1929, Harry Crosby, playboy and party-goer, poetaster and patron of the arts, borrowed a friend’s apartment to entertain his mistress.

How they both came to be found dead of gunshot wounds is an enigma of twentieth-century Americana… or was until the remarkable Lisa St Aubin de Terán created this extraordinary factional narrative.

From the long dead lips of Josephine Rotch Bigelow we learn of her lover’s exotic odyssey – through the horrors of war and the dens of literary lions, a world of black silk stockings and the black idol opium – to that fateful Liebestod in the Hôtel des Artistes…