Overview

Hollywood, 1951. Jack Shannon--hobo, rising star, wounded vet, studio publicist--is in exile. Blackballed by the majors for his unauthorized effort to solve the mystery of a sexpot actress' disappearance, he's now a stuntman--a drug-store cowboy working from Tinseltown's Poverty Row, where the budgets are tight and the jobs scarce. As the work dries up, Jack is in danger of losing his home, but salvation arrives in the figure of Karen Scott, a star who needs help as much as Jack needs money. Years ago, she found herself homeless in Hollywood. In her desperation, she agreed to appear in a stag film, and now, someone has mailed her a snippet of that long-forgotten film. She expects a blackmail demand to follow, and she's come to Jack for help. He handled this sort of thing as a publicist at Titanic Pictures, and she's willing to pay him big bucks. Jack has barely begun his investigation when the blackmail demand arrives: $50,000 in exchange for the negative. He reluctantly agrees to handle the pay-off for Karen, but when he arrives at the appointed spot, he finds a dead man seated behind the wheel of a car and is himself knocked out from behind. When he comes to consciousness, he discovers the blackmail money gone, no sign of the negative, and himself the major suspect in the murder.

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Reviews

""A timeless tale that takes you back in time to wander the darkest reaches of 1951 Hollywood, bringing then into the noirish now."" -- ""Thomas Lee Wright, screenwriter and Academy Award-nominated producer"" ""Like Phillip Marlowe, Lew Archer, and Harry Bosch, Jack Shannon has a distinctive voice, a voice resonant with his experience as the survivor of a brutal childhood, a participant in the assault on Omaha Beach and the Battle of the Bulge, and a Hollywood player exiled to Poverty Row. It is in this mesmerizing voice--cynical, ironic, self-deprecating, and funny--that Jack recounts the story of a blackmail attempt on a beautiful movie star leading the reader through a world full of deceptions and traps to a shocking conclusion."" -- ""Stephen Galloway, former Executive Editor of The Hollywood Reporter""

Author Information

Dan Bronson has had many careers: Associate Professor of English at DePauw University, Senior Story Analyst at Universal, Associate Story Editor at Filmways, Executive Story Editor at Paramount, Writer-Producer of HBO's The Last Innocent Man and NBC's Death of a Cheerleader, author of the memoir Confessions of a Hollywood Nobody and of the novel Someone To Watch Over Me, the first in the series of Jack Shannon Mysteries. Jack Daniel is a SAG-AFTRA voice actor who works in network and affiliate TV promo, movie trailers, commercials, corporate narration, radio imaging, and narration.

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