Dez Keener never wanted any part of it—not Ruthie the Death-Car Girl, not Uranium Joe Hirshhorn, not the so-called Lost Pollock. All he wanted was to get his girl out of Cuba, for R.J. Reynolds not to have discontinued his brand of cigarets—Viceroy Filter Kings. Maybe someday a place in the Catskills. Dez never figured on Alma Malone, four times married and thrice divorced, 25 years old with a Kansan lilt, a rap sheet, and an 11-year-old boy back in Salina. Alma never figured, when she left the Westfield Prison Farm, that she’d wind up entangled with Uranium Joe, or in love with Dez Keener, or trying to ditch a Rambler in an alley behind a Cleveland peepshow, a bank caper gone wrong in the rearview.

RECTO/VERSO is a retelling of the true story behind Barbara Loden’s seminal 1970 film Wanda, an exhaustively researched story set amid real historical events. Against the Beat backdrop of the late-fifties Village, the places, the personages, the very weather itself are all matters of historical record. As in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, “even brief and seemingly inconsequential passages rely on historical evidence.” What emerges is fiction—compelling characters drawn against the photographic noir of midcentury New York—which might very well have happened.