Did you know that, in the Spring of 1940, the once famous author F. Scott Fitzgerald was recruited by an agent of the French Resistance to assassinate the premier of Vichy, France? Fitzgerald had hijacked the ‘Jazz Age’ and made it his own in the Roaring 20s, but now as as a struggling, impecunious alcoholic, his only real comforts are multiple Coca-Colas and the elusive embrace of his paramour, gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. Hemingway has become the real ticket, making the big money, but when our narrator Henri Duval, a double agent for the Vichy government and the French Resistance, surfaces at the legendary Garden of Allah hotel on Sunset Boulevard across the street from the famous Schwab’s Pharmacy, he hatches a harebrained scheme that might just change the entire course of history and restore Fitzgerald to his rightful position on the top of the literary heap. As we peruse Duval’s secret correspondence to his colleague in Washington D.C., we eavesdrop on wild nights with the Marx Brothers, intrigues engineered by dangerous Kewpie dolls, passionate amours with Marion Davies, and run-ins with William Randolph Hearst. The action culminates in a mission to Paris and the seat of the Nazi-occupied French government in Vichy, by way of Manhattan and a visit with editor Maxwell Perkins, enroute to a clandestine meeting with Charles de Gaulle at Heathrow Airport in London and an appointment with destiny and the premier of Vichy France, Marshal Phillipe Pétain.
Sobre o autor
Murray Sinclair is best known for his hard-boiled Ben Crandel series, a trio of Los Angeles-based mystery novels about a down-on-his luck writer set in the criminal underbelly of early 1980s Hollywood. The stories touch on the adult entertainment industry, political corruption, Neo-Nazis (circa 1980), and the moral majority led fearlessly by corrupt evangelists. The first of the three, Tough Luck L.A., received the Special Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Paperback Original. In 1988, Tough Luck L.A. and its sequels, Only in L.A. and Goodbye L.A., were among the few new books published by Black Lizard Books, the legendary crime fiction press whose selections are widely regarded as hard-boiled canon. In 2019 the series was reissued by The Mysterious Press.
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