From Publishers Weekly
Holmes is an award-winning Broadway playwright and composer (The Mystery of Edwin Drood; Accomplice), so it's only appropriate that his hugely entertaining first novel should be set in the world of show business. It purports to be the account of one K. O'Connor (we never learn her first name), a smart, pretty and accomplished young journalist who has been commissioned to write a book about a celebrated comedy team of the '60s, Vince Collins-who sang smoothly and was a ladies' man, and Lanny Morris, who clowned around (Martin and Lewis, anyone?). At the height of their career, a dead girl was found in their hotel room, and although neither of them was accused (they had airtight alibis), the incident put an end to their act, and as the book begins, they haven't seen each other for years. O'Connor sniffs around Collins, reads some chapters Morris has set down for a book of his own and begins to wonder just where the truth does lie. Holmes has a wonderful feeling for period detail, and the '60s and '70s spring vividly back to horrific life through the brilliant narration of the romantically susceptible O'Connor. For much of its course the novel is witty, sexy and suspenseful, but eventually it morphs into a more conventional whodunit, with one of those windups in which a complicated plot is sorted out in improbable dialogue between accuser and perpetrator, and the giddy pleasures of the first two-thirds are somewhat overshadowed. That's not enough, however, to spoil what is for most of the way a glittering ride.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Although this is Holmes' first mystery novel, he has already wowed Broadway audiences with two crime stories: his musical adaptation of Dickens' Mystery of Edwin Drood (for which he won four Tony awards) and his Edgar-winning thriller, The Accomplice. This foray into narrative fiction is literate, witty, and atmospheric. Holmes re-creates the extravagant side of the 1970s--jumbo jets equipped with upper-level piano bars; Hollywood before the glamour died. Connecting all this glitz is the attempt of Holmes' heroine, a young female journalist, to write a book investigating the split of a comedy team obviously modeled on Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. The reporter soon learns that a girl found murdered in a bathtub in a New Jersey casino years ago is somehow at the core of the duo's breakup. Further digging puts her in contact with some very funny, very scary gangsters and leads to her discovery that one of the comedy team may be a murderer--and may be coming after her. The plotline will command reader's interest, but what will probably knock them out is the dead-on way Holmes captures the comedy team's speech cadences and sybaritic habits, making what is known of Martin and Lewis' wild celebrity ride a compelling backdrop for villainy. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Where the Truth Lies is a beguiling suspense novel. It's sexy and surprising, witty and intriguing. I was hooked from the very first page." –Candace Bushnell, author of Sex in the City and Four Blondes
“Days after you finish this book, you’ll still feel the narrator’s voice elbowing through your brain. Fully realized characters, ruthless commentary, and a beautifully dark sense of humor—all masquerading as a hyper-clever mystery. You won’t look at the truth the same way again.” —Brad Meltzer, author of The Millionaires
“Rupert Holmes seats you gently next to an irresistible narrator only to entangle you completely in her twisted, dark, exhilarating troubles. The ensuing thriller crosses a Dickensian world of deceit and destiny with the slipping glory of 1970s New York and Los Angeles. Every character is so alive with delicious secrets that you’ll never suspect Where the Truth Lies.” —Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club
“Five pages into Rupert Holmes’s Where the Truth Lies, I was intrigued. Twenty pages in, I was laughing. A hundred pages in, my wife told me to turn off the damned light already and come to bed. This is a book astonishing not only for its intricate plot and rich characters but for the ways in which it finds humor in the darkest of places.” —Eric Garcia, author of Anonymous Rex and Matchstick Men
“Rupert Holmes is a genius.” —Jason Alexander
“Days after you finish this book, you’ll still feel the narrator’s voice elbowing through your brain. Fully realized characters, ruthless commentary, and a beautifully dark sense of humor—all masquerading as a hyper-clever mystery. You won’t look at the truth the same way again.” —Brad Meltzer, author of The Millionaires
“Rupert Holmes seats you gently next to an irresistible narrator only to entangle you completely in her twisted, dark, exhilarating troubles. The ensuing thriller crosses a Dickensian world of deceit and destiny with the slipping glory of 1970s New York and Los Angeles. Every character is so alive with delicious secrets that you’ll never suspect Where the Truth Lies.” —Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club
“Five pages into Rupert Holmes’s Where the Truth Lies, I was intrigued. Twenty pages in, I was laughing. A hundred pages in, my wife told me to turn off the damned light already and come to bed. This is a book astonishing not only for its intricate plot and rich characters but for the ways in which it finds humor in the darkest of places.” —Eric Garcia, author of Anonymous Rex and Matchstick Men
“Rupert Holmes is a genius.” —Jason Alexander
Book Description
Where the Truth Lies is a tour de force of sinister mystery, sly comedy, grand cuisine, and incredible sex—a sensual, sardonic, neo-Dickensian thriller in which a latter-day Alice careens through the seductive Wonderland of New York and Los Angeles in the dark heart of the 1970s.
This novel of intrigue speeds from one vivid setting to another, all of them factually real even as they are fantastically surreal: a clandestine club in Disneyland with a dazzlingly well stocked bar; a dizzying Shangri-La of a castle hidden away in Burbank; a drive-in movie theater nestled below the most chic streets of midtown Manhattan; an elegant table for four perched thirty thousand feet above the earth.
Written by Edgar, Tony, and Grammy Award winner Rupert Holmes (who first came to public attention in the mid-seventies as a singer and writer of story songs), Where the Truth Lies will wine and dine you in wickedly whimsical company, all the while luring you into a labyrinth of ever-sharpening bends and darkening corners.
The tale is told by O’Connor, a vivacious, free-spirited young journalist known for her penetrating celebrity interviews and bent on unearthing secrets long ago buried by the handsome showbiz team of singer Vince Collins and comic Lanny Morris. These two highly desirable men, once inseparable (and insatiable where women were concerned), were driven apart by a bizarre and unexplained death that may have cast one of them as a murderer.
As the tart-tongued, eye-catching O’Connor ventures deeper into this unsolved mystery, she finds herself compromisingly coiled around both men, knowing more about them than they realize and less than she might like, but increasingly fearful that she now knows far too much.
At once funny, frightening, delightful, and disturbing as it restores the opulent Hollywood and Manhattan of the seventies to their garish glory, Where the Truth Lies drops its veils like a giddy and voluptuous Salome who knows not what reward or punishment awaits her when she is at last naked. It is the work of a master storyteller and wit at the very top of his form.
This novel of intrigue speeds from one vivid setting to another, all of them factually real even as they are fantastically surreal: a clandestine club in Disneyland with a dazzlingly well stocked bar; a dizzying Shangri-La of a castle hidden away in Burbank; a drive-in movie theater nestled below the most chic streets of midtown Manhattan; an elegant table for four perched thirty thousand feet above the earth.
Written by Edgar, Tony, and Grammy Award winner Rupert Holmes (who first came to public attention in the mid-seventies as a singer and writer of story songs), Where the Truth Lies will wine and dine you in wickedly whimsical company, all the while luring you into a labyrinth of ever-sharpening bends and darkening corners.
The tale is told by O’Connor, a vivacious, free-spirited young journalist known for her penetrating celebrity interviews and bent on unearthing secrets long ago buried by the handsome showbiz team of singer Vince Collins and comic Lanny Morris. These two highly desirable men, once inseparable (and insatiable where women were concerned), were driven apart by a bizarre and unexplained death that may have cast one of them as a murderer.
As the tart-tongued, eye-catching O’Connor ventures deeper into this unsolved mystery, she finds herself compromisingly coiled around both men, knowing more about them than they realize and less than she might like, but increasingly fearful that she now knows far too much.
At once funny, frightening, delightful, and disturbing as it restores the opulent Hollywood and Manhattan of the seventies to their garish glory, Where the Truth Lies drops its veils like a giddy and voluptuous Salome who knows not what reward or punishment awaits her when she is at last naked. It is the work of a master storyteller and wit at the very top of his form.
From the Back Cover
"Where the Truth Lies is a beguiling suspense novel. It's sexy and surprising, witty and intriguing. I was hooked from the very first page." –Candace Bushnell, author of Sex in the City and Four Blondes
“Days after you finish this book, you’ll still feel the narrator’s voice elbowing through your brain. Fully realized characters, ruthless commentary, and a beautifully dark sense of humor—all masquerading as a hyper-clever mystery. You won’t look at the truth the same way again.” —Brad Meltzer, author of The Millionaires
“Rupert Holmes seats you gently next to an irresistible narrator only to entangle you completely in her twisted, dark, exhilarating troubles. The ensuing thriller crosses a Dickensian world of deceit and destiny with the slipping glory of 1970s New York and Los Angeles. Every character is so alive with delicious secrets that you’ll never suspect Where the Truth Lies.” —Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club
“Five pages into Rupert Holmes’s Where the Truth Lies, I was intrigued. Twenty pages in, I was laughing. A hundred pages in, my wife told me to turn off the damned light already and come to bed. This is a book astonishing not only for its intricate plot and rich characters but for the ways in which it finds humor in the darkest of places.” —Eric Garcia, author of Anonymous Rex and Matchstick Men
“Rupert Holmes is a genius.” —Jason Alexander
“Days after you finish this book, you’ll still feel the narrator’s voice elbowing through your brain. Fully realized characters, ruthless commentary, and a beautifully dark sense of humor—all masquerading as a hyper-clever mystery. You won’t look at the truth the same way again.” —Brad Meltzer, author of The Millionaires
“Rupert Holmes seats you gently next to an irresistible narrator only to entangle you completely in her twisted, dark, exhilarating troubles. The ensuing thriller crosses a Dickensian world of deceit and destiny with the slipping glory of 1970s New York and Los Angeles. Every character is so alive with delicious secrets that you’ll never suspect Where the Truth Lies.” —Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club
“Five pages into Rupert Holmes’s Where the Truth Lies, I was intrigued. Twenty pages in, I was laughing. A hundred pages in, my wife told me to turn off the damned light already and come to bed. This is a book astonishing not only for its intricate plot and rich characters but for the ways in which it finds humor in the darkest of places.” —Eric Garcia, author of Anonymous Rex and Matchstick Men
“Rupert Holmes is a genius.” —Jason Alexander
About the Author
For his Broadway musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Rupert Holmes became the first person in theatrical history to solely receive Tony Awards for Best Book, Best Music, and Best Lyrics, while Drood itself won the Tony Award for Best Musical. The Mystery Writers of America gave Holmes their coveted Edgar Award for his Broadway comedy-thriller Accomplice, the second time he received their highest honor. He created and wrote all four seasons of the critically acclaimed Emmy Award–winning series Remember WENN, and most recently authored the Broadway hit Say Goodnight, Gracie, based on the life of George Burns. Holmes began his career in the seventies as the writer and composer of songs so intricate that many have been included in mystery collections from Ellery Queen. The Los Angeles Times has stated that “Rupert Holmes is an American treasure.” Where the Truth Lies is his first novel; the film rights have been acquired by Atom Egoyan, director of The Sweet Hereafter. Holmes is currently working on a second novel for Random House, to be published in 2004.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
As a twenty-six-year-old woman, I had an undepleted girlish energy that allowed me the capability of living a life and writing about it at the same time. Astounding. Thus a majority of what follows was scrawled by this scrivener as it occurred in the 1970s, often within hours of the events described, the alphabetic characters and my own character being formed in the same moment and the same manner: recklessly, hastily, often indecipherably. However, I eventually came to realize that I could not publish any of what I’d written until at least one person who figures in this narrative had died. (It’s nice to have something to look forward to, don’t you think?) It was not, in fact, until this year that these pages could be printed, along with certain other writings that bear closely upon a story I’ve wished to tell for so very long.
I must admit I’m somewhat alarmed by the naïveté I display in some of these pages, as well as the chauvinism of not only others but myself. Things were simply very different then.
I will also confess outright that I have occasionally touched up what I wrote (though perhaps you will think I have not touched up enough). Having admitted this, let me rush to add that most of what follows is actually worded as I first inscribed it, with only some proper names and present tenses changed. My Prose Nouveau (being of a vintage frequently purple, with a tart finish) remains largely as it was, to my immense mortification and, hopefully, your mild amusement.
The writings of Lanny Morris and related material derived from my conversations with Vince Collins are reproduced here by express agreement and may not be used without written permission.
K. O’Connor
Kiawah Island, S.C.
CHAPTER ONE
In the seventies, I had three unrelated lunches with three different men, each of whom might have done A Terrible Thing. The nature of their varying “things” ranged from obscene to unspeakable to unutterable, and you will surely understand if, as a writer, I was rather hoping that each had. (Done their particular Terrible Thing.)
In the case of my lunch with the first man, I knew by the time he rested his gold Carte Blanche card upon the meal’s sizable check that my hopes were abundantly justified.
In the case of the second lunch, even while a busboy filled our water tumblers, I realized that my dining companion was as innocent (and inevitably tedious) as a playful pup. But neither of these men need concern us here.
As for Man the Third (whom you shall meet in but a few paragraphs), I left our first repast feeling much the way I feel after a dinner of chirashi and green tea . . . full but starving. To paraphrase Mark Twain regarding a literary puzzle, it seemed my studies had already thrown considerable darkness on the subject, and if my research continued, I would soon know nothing about the matter at all.
He had agreed to meet me for lunch at the restaurant of his choosing, Le Carillon, which is gone now but which was, for that particular month of the mid-seventies, the restaurant of choice for the Hollywood community. Lots of brass, both hanging on the walls and seated at the tables, was the look of the period. Heaps and heaps of flowers everywhere. I was greeted (if a full military dress inspection can be called a greeting) by a searingly stunning young girl who had almost as many inches on me as I had years on her. This is my way of saying that I was a jaded twenty-six when all this took place, and if you picture me at all, you might picture me five-five in height and fairly trim from a steady diet of Tab, menthol Virginia Slims, and encroaching deadlines for slick publications. I apparently was also fairly “cute,” or so lots of married men had taken the time to tell me.
I gave the hostess my name and she went searching for it in her reservation book, almost certainly the only book she had ever read through to the very end.
“O’Connor, O’Connor,” she murmured, pleased to have learned a new word.“I’m meeting with Mr. Collins,” I added.The Gossamer Girl (not just her hair—even her exposed navel was somehow gossamer) nodded in recognition and said, “Oh yes, he’s just finishing his first lunch.” She indicated the restaurant’s small bar. “If you’ll take a seat, Mizz O’Connor”—the use of “Ms.” was still quite new at the time, and she buzzed charmingly on the letter s—“I’ll let you know when he’s ready.”
So it seemed I was taking a seat at the bar, which was tended by another fair Ophelia, who was just as uselessly lovely as the hostess. She stood on endless legs capped by a blank, beauteous face with the big, empty eyes of a murder victim. “Ophie” (as I’d now named her) asked me, with the delivery of an actress trying to give importance to a perfunctory part, what I’d like to drink.
“Dry vermouth on the rocks, twist. Noilly Prat if you have it,” I pronounced perfectly. This was my good-behavior drink. Vermouth on the rocks at lunch was the seventies equivalent of mineral water. We all drank at lunch in the seventies. How any competent work was done after three in the afternoon during that decade is, for me, as mysterious a question as the one I had for Mr. Collins, upon whose pleasure I was waiting.
There was a brass-framed mirror behind the bar, hung on the bottle-green velvet wall between an ornamental brass coal scuttle and an ornamental brass footbath. In the mirror, I could see the back of Vince Collins’s head. He was seated with a female who was dressed in a women’s business outfit of the time—pin-striped jacket, vest, extremely tight skirt riding high on her thighs. I couldn’t see Vince’s face, but the female’s alternated between an earnest “Does what I’m saying make any sense?” expression and an occasional giddy laugh, apparently more at something he had said than at something she had said. I couldn’t hear his voice as more than a low, burry murmur.
My vermouth was set before me by the Oph. I had the thought that when Vince finally allowed me to sit at the grown-ups’ table, I would not want to be making my business pitch while contending with food that required advanced cutlery skills. I had once tried to promote a series of essays on “high infidelity” to an editor at Viva Magazine while simultaneously attempting to disassemble the near covey of quails that littered my plate. Never again. We were now, in the seventies, well into the Age of Egg-Based Skillet Cuisine, and I wondered if a ratatouille crepe or Gruyère omelette was on the bill of fare. I certainly wasn’t going to order anything that couldn’t be cut with the side of my fork.
“Might I see a menu?” I asked of the Oph.
“Oh, don’t worry, they’ll be giving you one when you sit down at your table,” she reassured me in her most affable Braniff Airlines stewardess manner and moved to the other end of the bar.
In the mirror, Vince’s table companion laughed again, displaying several sets of teeth. Vince laughed as well, low and lovely, as one might expect from a pop recording artist who’d been heavily influenced by Crosby and Como.
In a magnificent manifestation of the Totally Disproportionate Reaction, I was now beginning to feel . . . rejected. Yes. Hurt, jilted by this man who had never met me. My ears were toasting with embarrassment and jealousy. His pin-striped lady friend in the mirror had become the embodiment of girls I’d loathed in high school—hurtful girls whose names I’d long ago forgotten, Janet Maitlin, Ann Rakowsky, Lisa Robb, Sarah Connelly, and Barbara Tozer. The goblet of vermouth before me was the humiliating punch bowl of the Sadie Hawkins dance where Kevin McMahon had arrived with me but danced the evening thereafter with another. And Vince—
“Mr. Collins is ready for you to join him at his new table,” said my perishable hostess.
I got down from my seat at the bar feeling, yes, a bit absurd about my wounded heart. My left eye saw Vince’s dining companion departing the restaurant. She had stopped to laugh with a table of men. One slid his hand onto her pin-striped rear end. She laughed at this as if her left buttock were the Algonquin Round Table and his flattened palm George S. Kaufman. The hostess led me like a sedated calf to a spanking-brand-new table where Vince was waiting upon my arrival. The restaurant’s lead busboy rushed around Vince, transferring his half-finished bourbon on the rocks and chaser from his prior table to our new table, wiping the glasses clean of condensation as he set them down.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” said Vince in an absurdly familiar baritone.
People think to themselves all sorts of things that would be embarrassing or humiliating if heard aloud, and thank God, they rarely voice them. As a writer, however, I’ve always felt it’s precisely my job to voice exactly such things and for you to enjoy hearing them and for me simply not to mind my embarrassment and humiliation . . . as a diabetic doesn’t mind a hypodermic injection, as a boxer doesn’t mind a sharp blow to the head. This is nothing more than the shamanlike obligation clearly stated in the job description when I first applied to the Famous Writers’ School for Famous Writing.
So I will voice that, in the moment when I first met Vince Collins, my rush of thoughts ran: My God he is truly gorgeous (gorgeous not being a word I can recall ever using previously), He’s a little shorter than I thought he’d be, That cashmere turtleneck and camel’s hair jacket must have cost a fortune, and I wonder if he’s circumcised.
Please understand I was not thinking this las...
As a twenty-six-year-old woman, I had an undepleted girlish energy that allowed me the capability of living a life and writing about it at the same time. Astounding. Thus a majority of what follows was scrawled by this scrivener as it occurred in the 1970s, often within hours of the events described, the alphabetic characters and my own character being formed in the same moment and the same manner: recklessly, hastily, often indecipherably. However, I eventually came to realize that I could not publish any of what I’d written until at least one person who figures in this narrative had died. (It’s nice to have something to look forward to, don’t you think?) It was not, in fact, until this year that these pages could be printed, along with certain other writings that bear closely upon a story I’ve wished to tell for so very long.
I must admit I’m somewhat alarmed by the naïveté I display in some of these pages, as well as the chauvinism of not only others but myself. Things were simply very different then.
I will also confess outright that I have occasionally touched up what I wrote (though perhaps you will think I have not touched up enough). Having admitted this, let me rush to add that most of what follows is actually worded as I first inscribed it, with only some proper names and present tenses changed. My Prose Nouveau (being of a vintage frequently purple, with a tart finish) remains largely as it was, to my immense mortification and, hopefully, your mild amusement.
The writings of Lanny Morris and related material derived from my conversations with Vince Collins are reproduced here by express agreement and may not be used without written permission.
K. O’Connor
Kiawah Island, S.C.
CHAPTER ONE
In the seventies, I had three unrelated lunches with three different men, each of whom might have done A Terrible Thing. The nature of their varying “things” ranged from obscene to unspeakable to unutterable, and you will surely understand if, as a writer, I was rather hoping that each had. (Done their particular Terrible Thing.)
In the case of my lunch with the first man, I knew by the time he rested his gold Carte Blanche card upon the meal’s sizable check that my hopes were abundantly justified.
In the case of the second lunch, even while a busboy filled our water tumblers, I realized that my dining companion was as innocent (and inevitably tedious) as a playful pup. But neither of these men need concern us here.
As for Man the Third (whom you shall meet in but a few paragraphs), I left our first repast feeling much the way I feel after a dinner of chirashi and green tea . . . full but starving. To paraphrase Mark Twain regarding a literary puzzle, it seemed my studies had already thrown considerable darkness on the subject, and if my research continued, I would soon know nothing about the matter at all.
He had agreed to meet me for lunch at the restaurant of his choosing, Le Carillon, which is gone now but which was, for that particular month of the mid-seventies, the restaurant of choice for the Hollywood community. Lots of brass, both hanging on the walls and seated at the tables, was the look of the period. Heaps and heaps of flowers everywhere. I was greeted (if a full military dress inspection can be called a greeting) by a searingly stunning young girl who had almost as many inches on me as I had years on her. This is my way of saying that I was a jaded twenty-six when all this took place, and if you picture me at all, you might picture me five-five in height and fairly trim from a steady diet of Tab, menthol Virginia Slims, and encroaching deadlines for slick publications. I apparently was also fairly “cute,” or so lots of married men had taken the time to tell me.
I gave the hostess my name and she went searching for it in her reservation book, almost certainly the only book she had ever read through to the very end.
“O’Connor, O’Connor,” she murmured, pleased to have learned a new word.“I’m meeting with Mr. Collins,” I added.The Gossamer Girl (not just her hair—even her exposed navel was somehow gossamer) nodded in recognition and said, “Oh yes, he’s just finishing his first lunch.” She indicated the restaurant’s small bar. “If you’ll take a seat, Mizz O’Connor”—the use of “Ms.” was still quite new at the time, and she buzzed charmingly on the letter s—“I’ll let you know when he’s ready.”
So it seemed I was taking a seat at the bar, which was tended by another fair Ophelia, who was just as uselessly lovely as the hostess. She stood on endless legs capped by a blank, beauteous face with the big, empty eyes of a murder victim. “Ophie” (as I’d now named her) asked me, with the delivery of an actress trying to give importance to a perfunctory part, what I’d like to drink.
“Dry vermouth on the rocks, twist. Noilly Prat if you have it,” I pronounced perfectly. This was my good-behavior drink. Vermouth on the rocks at lunch was the seventies equivalent of mineral water. We all drank at lunch in the seventies. How any competent work was done after three in the afternoon during that decade is, for me, as mysterious a question as the one I had for Mr. Collins, upon whose pleasure I was waiting.
There was a brass-framed mirror behind the bar, hung on the bottle-green velvet wall between an ornamental brass coal scuttle and an ornamental brass footbath. In the mirror, I could see the back of Vince Collins’s head. He was seated with a female who was dressed in a women’s business outfit of the time—pin-striped jacket, vest, extremely tight skirt riding high on her thighs. I couldn’t see Vince’s face, but the female’s alternated between an earnest “Does what I’m saying make any sense?” expression and an occasional giddy laugh, apparently more at something he had said than at something she had said. I couldn’t hear his voice as more than a low, burry murmur.
My vermouth was set before me by the Oph. I had the thought that when Vince finally allowed me to sit at the grown-ups’ table, I would not want to be making my business pitch while contending with food that required advanced cutlery skills. I had once tried to promote a series of essays on “high infidelity” to an editor at Viva Magazine while simultaneously attempting to disassemble the near covey of quails that littered my plate. Never again. We were now, in the seventies, well into the Age of Egg-Based Skillet Cuisine, and I wondered if a ratatouille crepe or Gruyère omelette was on the bill of fare. I certainly wasn’t going to order anything that couldn’t be cut with the side of my fork.
“Might I see a menu?” I asked of the Oph.
“Oh, don’t worry, they’ll be giving you one when you sit down at your table,” she reassured me in her most affable Braniff Airlines stewardess manner and moved to the other end of the bar.
In the mirror, Vince’s table companion laughed again, displaying several sets of teeth. Vince laughed as well, low and lovely, as one might expect from a pop recording artist who’d been heavily influenced by Crosby and Como.
In a magnificent manifestation of the Totally Disproportionate Reaction, I was now beginning to feel . . . rejected. Yes. Hurt, jilted by this man who had never met me. My ears were toasting with embarrassment and jealousy. His pin-striped lady friend in the mirror had become the embodiment of girls I’d loathed in high school—hurtful girls whose names I’d long ago forgotten, Janet Maitlin, Ann Rakowsky, Lisa Robb, Sarah Connelly, and Barbara Tozer. The goblet of vermouth before me was the humiliating punch bowl of the Sadie Hawkins dance where Kevin McMahon had arrived with me but danced the evening thereafter with another. And Vince—
“Mr. Collins is ready for you to join him at his new table,” said my perishable hostess.
I got down from my seat at the bar feeling, yes, a bit absurd about my wounded heart. My left eye saw Vince’s dining companion departing the restaurant. She had stopped to laugh with a table of men. One slid his hand onto her pin-striped rear end. She laughed at this as if her left buttock were the Algonquin Round Table and his flattened palm George S. Kaufman. The hostess led me like a sedated calf to a spanking-brand-new table where Vince was waiting upon my arrival. The restaurant’s lead busboy rushed around Vince, transferring his half-finished bourbon on the rocks and chaser from his prior table to our new table, wiping the glasses clean of condensation as he set them down.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” said Vince in an absurdly familiar baritone.
People think to themselves all sorts of things that would be embarrassing or humiliating if heard aloud, and thank God, they rarely voice them. As a writer, however, I’ve always felt it’s precisely my job to voice exactly such things and for you to enjoy hearing them and for me simply not to mind my embarrassment and humiliation . . . as a diabetic doesn’t mind a hypodermic injection, as a boxer doesn’t mind a sharp blow to the head. This is nothing more than the shamanlike obligation clearly stated in the job description when I first applied to the Famous Writers’ School for Famous Writing.
So I will voice that, in the moment when I first met Vince Collins, my rush of thoughts ran: My God he is truly gorgeous (gorgeous not being a word I can recall ever using previously), He’s a little shorter than I thought he’d be, That cashmere turtleneck and camel’s hair jacket must have cost a fortune, and I wonder if he’s circumcised.
Please understand I was not thinking this las...
From AudioFile
Yes, this is Rupert Holmes--composer/performer of "Escape" ("The Pina Colada Song"). He's also won Edgar, Tony, and Grammy Awards and is a coy wordsmith who keeps us waiting for the next bon mot in this stylish, funny murder mystery. The comedy backgrounds of our readers--"Saturday Night Live" alum Gasteyer and McKean (from the movies SPINAL TAP and A MIGHTY WIND)--come to the fore as our heroine, O'Connor, an investigative journalist, digs deep into the story of a Dean Martin/ Jerry Lewis type duo. The stars wine, dine, connive--but did they murder? O'Connor follows 40s gumshoe tradition in this 70s romp, replete with sex, romance, and noir-style voice-overs. This is way better than a blackjack in a dark alley or a double cross in Madagascar. D.J.B. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
