Kiwanis Club meets Longboat author of murder mystery based on real life

Michael Garey remembers the Kiwanis Club of Longboat Key's most recent guest speaker as a frequent lunchtime visitor to the Lazy Lobster restaurant. So frequent, in fact, that Garey wanted to meet the author on one of those visits to thank him for his business. 

But with the hustle of typical noon times at the popular spot Garey owns at the Centre Shops, it just never happened. And because reservations are not accepted for other than dinner, there was no easy way to pick up on his identity.

"When one of the servers comes up at the end of his lunch, I say, 'If he pays by credit card, bring me the credit card so I can get his name,'' Garey said. "So the server comes up to me after lunch, hands me a credit card.

"I'm like, 'Michael Jordan.' I got it."

Beyond Garey and the 15 or so club members on hand for Jordan's presentation, thousands of readers are also familiar with Jordan's first novel, a historical-fiction crime thriller entitled "The Company of Demons," which uses as its jumping in point a series of grisly homicides committed in Cleveland in the 1930s. 

The 2018 book, which he said he started in his 30s and resumed later in life after an initial rejection from publishers, won a Silver Royal Palm Literary Award from the Florida Writers Association. A lawyer by training, Jordan said he isn't a true-crime buff but rather a fan of wading through history with an eye toward how facts from the past can propel a fictional storyline. 

"That's part of the thing, the challenge to writing when you do historical fiction, because you get so much history," he said. "I'm writing fiction, I'm writing a novel, right? I'm not writing a history book. So you're tempted to throw in everything you research and find out and put it in the book, and you have to pull yourself back.''

"The Company of Demons" focuses on the never-solved real-life case of The Torso Murderer in the 1930s. At the time, legendary crime fighter Eliot Ness held the position in Cleveland of public safety director, which Jordan said he used to his advantage, sending fire inspectors into a suspect's home when there wasn't enough evidence for a criminal search warrant. 

"The Torso Killer did what is now more common for serial killers to do, and that's taunt the public and taunt the police," Jordan said. "He would send letters to saying: 'Eliot is incompetent. Catch me if you can. I'm smarter than anybody.'"

Jordan's book takes the unsolved nature of the crime and projects forward decades when a new crime evokes memories of the long ago homicides. 

"It is pretty horrific, and I'm not by nature attracted to serial killers — that's not why I wrote the book," he said "I wrote it because I was interested in the history of it. But when you dig into it, and it started to read the papers of the time and the documents that substantiate how brutal these murders were, you have to step away sometimes. I tried to put in the book enough that it's frightening, but I left out plenty that would make you ill."

Jordan said his next project is a historical thriller that focuses on the last days of World War II and the curious case of a German submarine intercepted off the Japanese coast by the U.S. Navy. The boat contained plans for advanced weapons and, some say, weapons grade uranium.