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charges, he forestalled extradition to Great Britain on a charge of murder on the high seas (punishable by execution) in the deaths of the three sailors on the
Tennyson
by first feigning what the court called “hysterical insanity” and then pretending to be a hopeless paralytic, which was about the time that his wife, Alice, decided to file for divorce. He maintained the show long enough to escape from a second-story window at Bellevue on May 26, 1919, leaping onto First Avenue and disappearing from the public scene for more than a decade. The papers all said he fled to Mexico, but he probably never left the country. By 1930 at the latest, he was back in the city, working as a writer and critic for a publisher of theatrical and movie periodicals. Frank de Trafford Craven, as he was known, “wrote good copy and acted, in other respects, like the second son of an earl,” said one of his coworkers.
    Duquesne’s cover story began to unravel in February 1932 when W. Faro Inc. released a 429-page biography called
The Man Who Killed Kitchener,
a tale so obviously fictionalized that its author, Clement Wood, wrote in the prologue that he employed an “interpretative” method, which was “infinitely truer than any bald statement of biographical facts can ever be.” The book is a genuine achievement in romantic balderdash that inflates the outlines of Duquesne’s life story into a glorious saga of world-historical import. “He was the champion swordsman of Europe before he was twenty,” Wood writes. “He was the most adventurous man on earth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He may have been the most adventurous man who ever lived. His prowess with sword and rifle, his many escapes from fortresses and jails regarded as impregnable, his amazing lone successful warfare against the widest and most powerful empire since Rome, his high-souled destruction of property and numberless lives in satisfaction of a vow he had made, these things read like ancient miracles or modern tabloid inventions. They are flat sober happenings of our own century.”
    Three months later, probably tipped off by the publishing house looking to boost lagging sales, police apprehended Frank Craven in his Broadway office, which resulted in a flurry of stories on the “ ‘cleverest and most dangerous’ agent of the Central Powers in the World War” (the
New York Times
) who had “lost none of his dapperness and jaunty effrontery in his past thirteen years as a fugitive” (the
New York Sun
). The
New York Mirror
ran a splashy excerpt (“The True Story of Duquesne, Boer Soldier of Fortune, Arch Enemy of the British Empire”) even as the
London Daily Express
quoted a British operative calling Duquesne “a good spy” who “certainly could not have had any hand in the loss of the
Hampshire
.”
    Confronted with a difficult case to prove so many years after the fact, His Majesty’s government declined to pursue extradition on the murder warrant. Likewise, a city magistrate dismissed all charges stemming from the Bellevue escape. Duquesne, his self-advertised reputation for narrow escapes shown to have basis in fact, was free to assail the newspapers for participating in a “slanderous frame-up against me by Great Britain.”
    After Adolf Hitler assumed power in January of the following year, Duquesne became a picturesque member of a cabal of drawing-room habitués in Manhattan connected to Nazi diplomatic circles, the upper echelon of the Bund movement, and native-led Fascist groups. The entertaining monologist renowned for his charm was growing into a crank, offering his espionage services for pay to a Fifth Avenue real estate broker who founded a blue-blooded society (the Order of ’76) that sought to save America from falling into the clutches of the Jews and the Communists. (“To this day the identity of this man has been withheld from most of the members,” wrote John Spivak in an investigative report headlined “Plotting the