On April 28, 1962, police knocked on the door of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell’s London apartment. Both were aspiring writers; Halliwell was the elder of the two, and was Orton’s mentor, in addition to his partner.
“We are police officers,” one of the cops said, according to John Lahr’s biography of Orton, Prick Up Your Ears, “and I have a warrant to search your flat as I have reason to believe you have a number of stolen library books.”
“Oh dear,” Orton replied.
Well, after all, they were guilty. For years, Orton and Halliwell had been stealing books from the library—Orton used a “satchel,” Halliwell a “service gas-mask case”—“defacing” them, and then returning them, slightly (or significantly) altered, as if nothing had happened, writes Lahr.
Most of the defacements were funny, some were beautiful, all of them were weird. They pasted a monkey’s head onto the cover of the Collins Guide to Roses, and another onto a portrait of Henry VIII. They inserted cats, and art, and men embracing. “I did things like pasting a picture of a female nude over a book of etiquette,” Orton remembered, “over the picture of the author who, I think, was Lady Lewisham. I did other things, very strange things . . . I used to write false blurbs on the inside of Gollancz books,” whose blank yellow flaps were too tempting. He wrote a “mildly obscene” blurb for Dorothy Sayers’s Clouds of Witness, the second Lord Peter Wimsey book, that references a little girl’s underwear and a “seven inch phallus” and concludes: “This is one of the most enthralling stories ever written by Miss Sayers. It is the only one in which the murder weapon is concealed, not for reasons of fear but for reasons of decency! READ THIS BEHIND CLOSED DOORS. And have a good shit while you are reading!”
“I used to stand in corners after I’d smuggled the doctored books back into the library and then watch the people read them,” Orton said. “It was very funny, very interesting.”
“Rejected by the literary world, they made a spectacle of published books and the public that evaded them,” Lahr explains.
They turned the library into a little theatre where they watched people's reactions to their productions. It was one way of getting into print and making their statement. There was sorrow in their anger, but also hilarity. In its ruthlessness, the caper displayed the solitary’s groping to connect and the prankster’s wish to turn the world into his playground.
The librarians caught on, but they couldn’t prove the pair’s guilt, until the local legal clerk, Sidney Porrett, took an interest. “I played them a slightly dirty trick,” he said. “I thought ‘OK, I’ll let my ethics slip a little bit.’ I wanted to get them aggravated. They were a couple of darlings, make no mistake.”
The dirty trick in question was to send a notice to their apartment by post, alerting the recipient that their car had been found abandoned. Halliwell responded snootily, as there was no such car, but because he responded, Porrett was able to match the typeface from his letter to the blurbs on the library books.
29-year-old Orton and 35-year old Halliwell pleaded guilty to five counts of “theft and malicious damage.” The damage done to the 72 library books was estimated at £450. They were each sentenced to six months in separate prisons.
Unfortunately, the story ends in tragedy; in the years after their release, Orton found success as a playwright—in some places he even credits his incarceration for improving his writing. Halliwell did not, and sunk into a depression; in 1967 he murdered Orton and killed himself as well.
