J. M. Tyree – författare

Vanishing Streets reveals an American writer''s twenty-year love affair with London. Beguiling and idiosyncratic, obsessive and wry, it offers an illustrated travelogue of the peripheries, retracing some of London''s most curious locations. As J. M. Tyree wanders deliriously in "the world''s most visited city," he rediscovers and reinvents places that have changed drastically since he was a student at Cambridge in the 1990s. Tyree stumbles into the ghosts of Alfred Hitchcock, Graham Greene, and the pioneers of the British Free Cinema Movement. He offers a new way of seeing familiar landmarks through the lens of film history, and reveals strange nooks and tiny oddities in out-of-the-way places, from a lost film by John Ford supposedly shot in Wapping to the beehives hidden in Tower Hamlets Cemetery, an area haunted by a translation error in W. G. Sebald''s Austerlitz.

This book blends deeply personal writing with a foreigner''s observations on a world capital experiencing an unsettling moment of transition. Vanishing Streets builds into an astonishing and innovative multi-layered project combining autobiography, movie madness, and postcard-like annotations on the magical properties of a great city. Tyree argues passionately for London as a cinematic dream city of perpetual fascinations and eccentricities, bridging the past and the present as well as the real and the imaginary.

Informed by the eerie paranoia of horror film, J. M. Tyree''s uncanny novella follows a couple transplanted to Germany.

While in the throes of writing a book on Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a film scholar believes he’s being followed by a strange presence. Is this a supernatural force emanating from the prehistoric caves in the region, one captured in lost footage from horror movies filmed in the area in the 1920s? Or is he being stalked by his ex, a mentor, former lover, and brilliant but problematic critic who claims to have discovered the secret history of a supernatural camera used in films by Murnau and Hitchcock?

When our scholar''s wife disappears and the local police start investigating him, he attempts to unravel a mystery that takes him to Berlin, to Prague, and into the haunted heart of movies whose scenes appear to be recurring in the present.

Moving between the double- life of professional networking and obsessive unease, The Haunted Screen blends the madness and obsession of academia with a dark, thrilling current of psychological mystery.