On a recent sunny afternoon in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Jonathan Peterson stood in a dusty aisle of the Crescent City Bookshop. He was wearing a smartly tailored tweed jacket in a puce houndstooth check. “Made for me by a rather angry old tailor in a bad part of Thunder Bay,” he explained. “Of course, I spilled grape juice all over it the first time I wore it.” Indeed, a faint purple stain could be made out over the entire front of the jacket. Peterson picked up a first edition of The Talented Mr. Ripley and promptly tripped over his own feet. The book slipped from his fingers and dropped into a bucket of mop water. He stared mournfully at the mess. “Well, I guess I’m buying that one,” he said.
Peterson was searching for books on Buster Keaton. It was an early ambition of his to recreate Keaton’s most famous stunts. “I originally wanted to do it in Los Angeles, but it turns out there are no longer the open spaces that Keaton had to work with in, say, 1924, when he made Sherlock Jr. So I decided to move the whole project to the desert in Nevada.” The problem was that he was far too uncoordinated to steer a motorcycle while sitting on the handlebars or walk on top of a moving train while maintaining a stoic Keaton-like expression. There were other obstacles. “I kept running into this guy who was trying to recreate Hunter S. Thompson’s drive from L.A. to Las Vegas. He wanted to press me into the role of the hapless hitchhiker picked up by Dr. Gonzo near Barstow. Since he was very serious about doing the whole thing on mescaline, I couldn’t really reason with him.” Peterson paused to thumb through a well-worn biography of Marshal Pétain. “Looking back, I should have chosen to move the entire project to Canada, which is where Keaton himself went to recreate stunts from The General in later life. But I got distracted by the idea of finding the precise settings of all of John Cheever’s short stories.”
That project took him almost three years, but these days he has become interested in Keaton again. “I’ve become convinced that Keaton’s best films betray an esoteric structure that can only be revealed to those who have made a thorough study of both the Kabbalah and the menu at Musso and Frank on Hollywood Blvd,” he opined. “A healthy application of gin fizz and a jello salad doesn’t hurt either in this line of study.” A title high on the shelf in the rare books section caught his eye. With sudden and unexpected agility, Peterson climbed up a stepladder and squealed with delight. The find was an original 1942 Pep Comics #26. “This issue features the first appearance of Veronica in the Archie comics,” Peterson chortled. “This may push my research in an entirely new direction.” With a jaunty spring in his step, Peterson paid for his comic and the sodden Highsmith and headed out into the bright southern sun.