“[T]he book . . .  is a delightfully entertaining epistolary mystery that has about it a whiff of hoax. Someone will mistake the novel for history granting Scottie -- who famously disbelieved in American second acts -- a fanciful third one.”

SINCLAIR ADDS TO THE LEGEND

by David Laurence Wilson

F. Scott Fitzgerald as a World War Two assassin? Granted, it’s a giddy, high-wire concept for a novel but how are you going to begin a story like this?  Have Groucho Marx walk in the door?

Well, yes. Naked.

Yet F. Scott Fitzgerald, American Spy, is not a comic novel.  Nor is it a specimen for those who live to categorize. Its pranks reek of giddy desperation and regret in the same moment. The past lies heavy here, with expatriates all over the place.  Rumination and ruins.

In the early ‘eighties Sinclair was at the point of a new wave of American crime writers and characters—not necessarily detectives, but amateur investigators  who were skewed and countercultural. New voices sans badges or licenses, fedoras or trench coats. Sex, drugs relationships … entertainment mixed with truth. They were young, hip and rebellious and it was the right time and place. Not heroes, necessarily, but argonauts in the service of crime and Hollywood mythology.

Sinclair was a journeyman writer destined for more when he created Ben Crandel, an aspiring screenwriter who was keeping the fluorescents on by churning out sex books.  Things happened in the Crandel novels—death and disorder— and Crandel took it personal.  Of course he lived in Laurel Canyon.

Two hard-boiled exercises: Tough Luck L.A. (1980), and  Only In L. A. (1982) and then Crandel was out the door and so was Sinclair.  At last sight, in 1988, a third Crandel story, Goodbye L.A., and the first two novels were reprinted by Black Lizard books. Sinclair was added to a pantheon that already included Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford and Harry Whittington. He not only stood on the shoulders of the masters but he was rubbing shoulders with them on the covers of tight black paperbacks.

Thirty-five years gone from the genre, Sinclair is back and he even seems prepared to write more of these thrillers. We’ll see. That’s the two birds in the bush. What we have in hand right here with American Spy is a neat package that includes fine illustrations by the eclectic artist Rick Geary, one of our most pleasant caricaturists.

What has Sinclair been doing the last thirty-five years? Preparing for a second debut, obviously.  He also became an attorney, with new and varied opportunities for juggling words.  He’s come out of it with newly born elegance and wisdom.

“I think it is better not to know a man well, .. if you wish to trust him,” Sinclair writes.

So now does the novelist take the opportunity to clean up and incorporate his Hollywood, to spruce it up to twenty-first century standards? Not hardly. He skips back into a more  distant era, to 1940, when the glamor was already chipping.  Zelda Fitzgerald is off-stage but affectionately remembered. Her husband is cohabiting with the columnist Sheila Graham.

In this new effort Sinclair does not tie and untie plot twists but offers a straightforward, however unlikely, narrative. The story is told in a series of letters by Henri Duval, architect turned double agent for the French resistance and “handler” of Fitzgerald. He, like Fitzgerald himself, is posing as a screenwriter, purportedly a confidante of Cocteau and Renoir.

These letters offer plenty of room for opinion, digression, second thoughts and emotions and by their nature, they are retrospective rather than aspirational. Their writer, Duval, is more than a phantom or a literary conceit. In his moments he is a man of action. There is plenty of character and when you go from Hollywood to New York to Paris and the story by turns becomes affectionate, fast moving and uncomfortably still.  This time the stakes are bigger: nations and governments may fall.

Sinclair remains just as cynical and readable about the craft of a screenwriter as he has ever been and his comments on the craft of writing are particularly notable. 

Who could be a more cynical figure to reprise than Fitzgerald.  Tragic? Perhaps. Though Fitzgerald is on the wagon he is still more likely to trip over a highball than follow a copious plan; he is a walking loose cannon, not a man to coordinate with. In real-life Fitzgerald died just two months after the events rendered in this hypothetical novel. 

His companion Duval lives on with the promise of more adventure.

It is Fitzgerald who is given the saddest of lines in this bittersweet adventure as he gazes at his former apartment in Paris:  “We were happy here for a while.  I guess that’s all you can ask.”

As readers we can take it further with Murray Sinclair. “One more, please,” and we’ll be happy again.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALDAmerican SpyMurray M. Sinclair Eclectic Books (218 pp.)$29.99 hardcover, $19.99 paperback, $14.99 e-book ISBN: 979-8-9868261-0-3February 15, 2023BOOK REVIEWThis epistolary novel explores whether F. Scott Fitzgerald really was recruited to assassinateMarshal Philippe Pétain in 1940.Henri Duval is a double agent. His public persona is that of a functionary of the despicable Vichy government in France; in reality, he is working for the Resistance, which often gets him into embarrassing and dangerous situations. He is also supposed to be a Hollywood screenwriter, a guise that enables him to meet and befriend Fitzgerald, now pretty much washed up and rarely sober despite the anxious ministrations of his mistress, gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. Eventually, Henri and Fitzgerald make it to Vichy and are granted an audience with Pétain, but it is no spoiler to say that the assassination is badly bungled (or readers surely would have heard about it). All the trappings are here: the serendipitous discovery of a locked trunk in an estate sale; the existence of silent confederate Hyman Skolski (the recipient of Henri’s fevered letters); the breaking of the code they devised; and the fact that Pétain is a big fan of Fitzgerald and the Roaring ’20s (who knew?). All this is framed with an introduction written by a distinguished Princeton historian who even provides footnotes from time to time. Because this witty novel is in an historical setting, Sinclair can, for example, have Henri stumble on the Marx brothers at their most manic (“I can’t make sense of them, but they’re very nice fellows. They enjoyed themselves immensely making fun of my heavy French accent”). Later, the double agent falls hard for amysterious woman on the Santa Monica beach only to discover that she, too, is a famous, real-life Hollywood mistress. The author does a fine job with Fitzgerald: vain and impulsive, somehow both childish and childlike, and a real challenge for Henri to handle. Henri himself is a wonderful creation. From the first, he is disdainful of these Americans, especially the Los Angeles subspecies. A man can’tfind decent food or wine here, he wails, and the vaunted movies are clichéd and trashy. But of course, he softens to the point that (Zut alors!) he is only bemused by, not contemptuous of, these Americans, though he stops short of becoming a baseball fan.

A decidedly clever and well-written flight of fancy starring a literary legend.  

“It’s very hard to believe that F. Scott Fitzgerald: American Spy is a work of fiction.  The author did a magnificent job to create a work of fiction that reads like a historical document that somehow got leaked . . . If you enjoy your historical fiction served as an epistolary work, F. Scott Fitzgerald is a book I will invite you to take a closer look at.”

                                                            -- Elza Reads Book Review [Mareli Thalwitzer for Reedsy]

                                                               (02/15/2023)

“Would famous writer F. Scott Fitzgerald agree to a plot in 1940 to assassinate Marshal Petain, head of the Nazi-installed Vichy government in France?

That's the unlikely but interesting premise in this novel told in secret letters from double agent Henri Duval to his handler in Washington, D.C. Duval is undercover as a Hollywood screenwriter while working for the Vichy government and the French Resistance.

Petain is said to enjoy Fitzgerald's novels, so Duval wants to use the writer as a way to get into the Marshal's life. But the chronicler of the Jazz Age is an unreliable companion. The novel opens in June 1940, months before Fitzgerald's death in December of that year. He's washed up as a writer, mostly sober, living near gossip columnist Sheila Graham with whom he's having an affair.

Much of the story is made up of Duval's wry discussions of Americans versus the French, and observations of Fitzgerald's political beliefs: "Like any man of deep feeling and sensitivity, he possesses a sincere desire for a better world. He is interested in utopian thinkers - but he is ambivalent, too, fortunately. Regardless of the party line, he is rooting for the Allies to win the war, if America doesn't have to be a part of it. This way, the aspiring American communist can have his cake and eat it too."

The plot meanders through Old Hollywood landmarks such as Sunset Boulevard, Schwab's Pharmacy, and the legendary Garden of Allah hotel, where Duval stays. We meet the Marx Brothers, actress Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst, as well as Fitzgerald's editor Max Perkins.

This is a quirky book, with most of the story taking place well before the meeting with Petain, as Duval tries to keep up with Fitzgerald's love of fast driving, his occasional lethargy and his frequent back-sliding about becoming an assassin. Most fun is Duval's voice, as he writes funny letters that complain about life in California, especially the lack of decent wines, as well as his sex life and worrying he will blow his cover because he doesn't know how to write a script.

Duval and Fitzgerald get within range of Petain. Will Fitzgerald finally vault over Hemingway and again become the toast of the literary world after Peta in is dead?

                                                                                                Twin Cities Pioneer Press

(05/21/2023)