Terry Mort – författare

Private-investigator-to-the-stars Riley Fitzhugh finds himself caught up in the case of a missing Hollywood beauty—and a stolen Monet—in a 1930s hard-boiled caper as deadly as it is delightful.

Hollywood, 1934. Prohibition is finally over, but there is still plenty of crime for an ambitious young private eye to investigate. Though he has a slightly checkered past, Riley Fitzhugh is well connected in the film industry and is hired by a major producer—whose lovely girlfriend has disappeared. He is also hired to recover a stolen Monet, a crime that results in two murders … with more to come.

Along the way Riley investigates the gambling ships anchored off LA, gets involved with the girlfriend of the gangster running one of the ships, disposes of the body of a would-be actor who assaults Riley''s girlfriend, and meets an elegant English art history professor from UCLA who helps him authenticate several paintings.

Living at the Garden of Allah Hotel, Riley meets and assists many Hollywood screenwriters, who frequent the hotel bar. Incidentally one of these gents, whose nom de plume is Hobey Baker, might actually be F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Evoking the classic hard-boiled style, The Monet Murders is a charmingly cozy murder mystery by a novelist whose "lucid, beautifully written books are a pleasure to read" (Wall Street Journal).

The eve of World War II. A Hollywood producer’s murdered wife. Her husband’s guilty memory of a shipboard romance. A stolen painting signed “Picasso.” French gangsters. A beautiful courtesan. A shoot-out in a brasserie. All these and more confront Private Detective Riley Fitzhugh as he travels from Hollywood to the Riviera, Paris, and London in search of his client’s vanished dream girl and some answers. Is the painting a genuine Picasso or just a clever forgery? Who is responsible for the corpses that keep littering his path and complicating the investigation? And whatever happened to Amanda Billingsgate?

"The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time," writes Jack London, accurately proclaiming the very ingredients of his full, passionate lifestyle.

Bearing a name that is now synonymous with adventure, London seemed to fear nothing, constantly stretching his comfortable limits - composing his classic short stories at one thousand words every morning, sailing across the Pacific Ocean on voyages both for pleasure and profit, horseback riding, continual entertaining at home in Glen Ellen, California, barroom socializing and debating, marrying twice, frequent lecturing, and operating a ranch - all with about four or five hours of sleep a night to make it possible.

Rising from the low-income factory-worker community of West Oakland, California, London's romantic writings on adventure found at sea, or in Alaska, or in the fields and factories of California appealed to the everyman - millions of readers around the world. Here, in Jack London on Adventure, are excerpts from his well-loved works, which were the result of his restless quest for experience, combined with "his observations of unalterable facts," as editor Terry Mort writes in his introduction. Lose yourself in the sheer unending quietude of the North in "White Fang" and "The White Silence"; enter into the listless, worried mind of an elder in "The League of the Old Men"; prepare to sail around the world for seven years' time alongside the author-turned-captain, himself, in "The Cruise of the Snark," where the famed boat is built with each dollar earned from London's writings; and peek into the observations of seasoned sailors and the foolish passengers they carry in "The Sea Wolf." Mort ends with the statement, "A complex man and artist is hard to capture in a single image," but in terms of the unlikely and unknown, London's works here capture the thrill that burned in him so brightly.