Book description
It's 1955, and Edna Ferber is basking in the success of her blockbuster
novel Giant. Headed to Los Angeles, where director George Stevens and
Warner Brothers Studio are in the final days of filming her Texas oil
epic, she is looking forward to meeting Rock Hudson, Liz Taylor, and
especially the young James Dean. But there is trouble brewing. Dean, the
new box-office sensation and teen heartthrob, has been accused of
fathering a child with an unstable (and recently fired) extra named
Carisa Krausse. The studio fears the negative publicity will jeopardize
the release of the movie. Then the actress is murdered, and James Dean
is the prime suspect. He was seen at her apartment moments before
Carisa's death. The police are ready to arrest him. With actress
Mercedes McCam-bridge as her sympathetic sidekick, Edna investigates,
determined to clear Dean's name. Soon Edna finds herself exploring the
troubled lives of Dean's circle of disparate friends. As she delves into
Hollywood's dark side she discovers a power-ful studio obsessed with a
cover-up and a solution she doesn't want to accept-a solution that she,
in fact, dreads. Ifkovic's promising debut, the first in a series,
features real-life writer Edna Ferber as an amateur sleuth in 1955
Hollywood. The Pulitzer Prize winner is visiting there because her
bestselling novel, Giant, is being made into a film starring Elizabeth
Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean. While she's repelled at how show biz
distorts the thinking of everyone involved in it, she becomes fascinated
by young Dean-truculent, winsome, infuriating and brilliant. Though he's
the hottest actor in town, he's still vulnerable to blackmail letters
from an unstable actress, so he's the prime suspect when she's murdered.
The septuagenarian Ferber, an equally shrewd but tarter version of Miss
Marple, begins investigating with the help of Giant co-star Mercedes
McCambridge, sorting through a city built on vanity and glamour. Ifkovic
handles the mystery plot competently, but the main pleasure is looking
beneath the surface of the movie business to see the stars as people, in
particular the doomed Dean. Ed Ifkovic taught literature and creative
writing at a community college in Connecticut for over three decades,
and now, retired, devotes himself to writing fiction. His short stories
and essays have appeared in such diverse periodicals as the Village
Voice, America, Hartford Monthly, and the Journal of Popular Culture.
He's published fiction with small presses, including a novel based on
the life of Victorian poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Poisoned Pen Press
published his first Edna Ferber mystery, Lone Star, in 2009. A longtime
devotee of mystery novels, he fondly recalls his boyhood discovery of
Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason series in a family bookcase, and his
immediate obsession with the whodunit world. When he was fourteen, bored
on a lazy summer afternoon, his mother handed him a copy of Edna
Ferber's Cimarron-for him, a riveting Western about the settling of
Oklahoma and the discovery of oil-and he stayed up until three in the
morning, until, bleary-eyed, he finished the novel.
