Book description
Cannes. Film Festival time. Classy hotels, wonderful food, expensive
movies - and a beach full of starlets showing off their curves. And
delicious blonde Lucille Balu is more curvaceous than most.
When she hears that world-famous movie mogul Floyd Delaney wants to
meet her she jumps at the chance. But as she taps softly on the door of
his suite at the Plaza hotel, the last thing she expects is a date with
death. Born René Brabazon Raymond in London, the son of a British
colonel in the Indian Army, James Hadley Chase was educated at King's
School in Rochester, Kent, and left home at the age of 18. He initially
worked in book sales until, inspired by the rise of gangster culture
during the Depression and by reading James M. Cain's The Postman
Always Rings Twice
, he wrote his first novel, No Orchids for Miss Blandish
. Despite the American setting of many of his novels, Chase (like Peter
Cheyney, another hugely successful British noir writer) never lived
there, writing with the aid of maps and a slang dictionary. He had
phenomenal success with the novel, which continued unabated throughout
his entire career, spanning 45 years and nearly 90 novels. His work was
published in dozens of languages and over thirty titles were adapted for
film. He served in the RAF during World War II, where he also edited the
RAF Journal. In 1956 he moved to France with his wife and son; they
later moved to Switzerland, where Chase lived until his death in 1985.
