Detective Fiction, Cozy Mysteries & Amateur Sleuths, Thrillers, Arts & Entertainment - Fiction
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Overview
Like the hero in a classic Hitchcock thriller, the innocent movie buff at the center of this witty and suspenseful novel finds his ordinary life suddenly transformed when he’s plunged into a harrowing game of intrigue, duplicity, and danger. Spurred into a frantic race from New York to Hollywood to Barcelona and back, he’ll encounter enough hairpin twists, shocking surprises, white-knuckle tension, and sinister characters to give even the master of suspense himself a serious case of vertigo. But in this scenario, the mayhem and murder are all too real.Self-proclaimed movie geek and divorced thirtysomething Roy Milano lives alone in a cramped Manhattan apartment, toiling as a freelancer to make ends meet. It’s a life perfectly suited to the creator of Trivial Man, Roy’s self-published newsletter—filled with tidbits of little-known Tinseltown lore for the delight of other fringe-dwelling cinemaphiles. And it’s a tantalizing phone call from one such kindred spirit that thrusts Roy headlong into his waking noir nightmare.
“I’ve got The Magnificent Ambersons,” declares Alan Gilbert, host of a homemade cable-TV show about the silver screen, who now claims to possess the rarest of the rare: the long-lost and never-released complete print of Orson Welles’s classic follow-up to Citizen Kane. But when Roy arrives at his fellow movie maven’s abode to sneak a peek at celluloid history, the front door is ominously open, Alan Gilbert is dead, and The Magnificent Ambersons is nowhere in sight. Even though the cops arrest a local drug addict for the murder, Roy knows they’re wrong—because the theft of the movie masterpiece points to a different kind of junkie. The kind Roy knows only too well . . . and the kind he’s certain only he can catch.
But Roy Milano is no Sam Spade, even if he does run into more gun-toting goons, sucker punches, and double-crosses than Bogey on a busy day. And the suspects prove to be anything but usual—including a bodybuilding film fanatic obsessed with bizarre rumors about an A-list actress, a rotund reporter who holds Hollywood in thrall via red-hot Internet dispatches from his parents’ basement, and a starstruck street punk with a thousand voices. And then there’s the transatlantic love triangle that finds Roy caught between his very own eager Gal Friday and a sultry Spanish siren with a stunning secret. But when the bodies start to fall faster than a box-office bomb, Roy must cut to the chase in his perilous quest to save the Holy Grail of cinema—and unmask a killer—before everything fades to black.
From the Hardcover edition.
Editorials
The New York Times
Like every other character in this witty spoof, Roy Milano, a New York film buff who airs his arcane knowledge via a self-published newsletter called Trivial Man, is a beloved movie cliche. Cast as the Hitchcockian hero who embarks on a quest for knowledge and becomes a pawn in a deadly game of intrigue, Roy plays his role with disarming guilelessness … Although the plot eventually implodes from its pileup of improbabilities, the farcical spirit of the adventure makes it worth its weight in popcorn. — Marilyn StasioPublishers Weekly
In 1984, writing under the pseudonym Margaret Tracy, Klavan won the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original for Mrs. White. Now-two decades later and best known as the librettist for the Obie Award-winning musical Bed and Sofa-Klavan has produced this wry, whimsically romantic crime novel. Brimming with engaging tidbits of movie trivia, it is narrated in the self-effacing voice of its bumbling, endearing hero, Roy Milano, publisher of Trivial Man, a cultish movie trivia newsletter sold through bookstores and video outlets around the Big Apple. (To make ends meet, Roy freelances as a typesetter.) Receiving a call from the host of a cable TV film trivia show who claims he has the never-released uncut original of Orson Welles's masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons, Roy rushes across town to find the host murdered and the film missing. Obsessed with finding this long-lost magnum opus and believing the murderer intends to deliver it to Ben Williams (aging action film star of the Cause Pain series, who wants to remake Orson Welles's Citizen Kane), Roy-with a simpatico female companion-follows the trail to L.A. and stumbles on another murder. From L.A., Williams sends Roy to Barcelona to find Erendira, the beautiful actress who Williams claims has stolen the film. In Spain, Roy discovers evidence linking Erendira intimately to Orson Welles. Then Williams is murdered and Roy returns to L.A. to negotiate more twists than a Mulholland Drive tour bus driver. This tongue-in-cheek whodunit marks the long overdue second coming of a gifted novelist. (Feb. 3) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.Library Journal
A movie buff and the producer of "Trivial Man," an online newsletter for celluloid cognoscenti, Roy Milano suddenly finds himself in the center of a harrowing, jet-setting chase to recover the never-released complete print of Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons, highly sought after as the pinnacle of the director's stunning career. Milano turns self-appointed sleuth and chases the coveted film from New York to Barcelona to Hollywood, leaving a trail of corpses and broken hearts in his wake. Filled with intrigue, ing nues, red herrings, chases, and hairpin turns, this entry into the Hollywood detective arena is clearly intended to introduce a series. Though the plot line is a bit thin for die-hard mystery readers, the story is peppered with enough movie trivia and snappy dialog to capture the attention of movie buffs and leave them eager for a sequel. Klavan's Mrs. White, written under a pseudonym, was an Edgar Award winner for best paperback original. For fiction collections with strong movie tie-ins. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/03.]-Susan Clifford Braun, Aerospace Corp., El Segundo, CA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.Kirkus Reviews
Librettist Klavan's first novel under his own name (previously: Margaret Tracy, Mrs. White, 1983) stars a trivia buff in a madcap search for the Holy Grail of missing movies. Because Alan Gilbert, the self-anointed guru of the public-access show My Movies, can't resist inviting Ray Milano, the rival author of the Trivial Man newsletter, to his place to see his earth-shaking latest acquisition, Ray's on hand to discover his corpse, phone the police, and, in the first of many bonehead decisions, not mention that Alan's missing find was a complete 148-minute print of The Magnificent Ambersons, snatched from the absent Orson Welles in 1942, slashed by an hour, and released at the bottom end of a double bill. It seems obvious that the cops have the wrong suspect in crack-addled Lorelei Reed, but nothing else is obvious, especially after Gus Ziegler, the buff cinematographer who's evidently swiped the priceless print from his partner, turns up equally dead, and both Ben Williams, the action star of the Cause Pain franchise, and his wife, untalented Hollywood star Rosie Bryant, offer to hire inexperienced Ray to run errands that'll take him from LA to Barcelona, where he'll read of Welles's Brazilian romance with one suspect's grandmother, to Boston, where he'll have to deal with the kidnapping of young Orson Kripp, before extracting a confession that brings the curtain thudding down. The hectic, overstuffed caper is larded with nuggets of irrelevant movie trivia readers may well find fascinating-or grating. Agent: Robert Gottlieb/Trident MediaBook Details
Published
February 3, 2004
Publisher
Random House Publishing Group
ISBN
9780345472083