Blue film and blood-red murder!
All Hollywood producer Ben Sloane had wanted was to find Sol Dahlman, the mysterious film genius who had made The Wild Nymph—and now Sloane is dead. "Go up to Rockview," the governor tells Mike McCall, "and get me the killer!"
But it isn't quite that easy. The Mann Photo Service, long rumored to be a center of the blue-movie industry, is torn by a strike, and nobody is talking to strangers—not Xavier Mann, not Mayor Jordan, not beautiful April Evans, who refuses even to tell who she is or why she, too, is investigating the murder.
Then, just to make the job a little harder, Cynthia Rhodes and her women's liberation raiders hit town—and a man named Carry Tanner decides McCall has lived too long ...
Ellery Queen is a pseudonym used by two American cousins from Brooklyn—Daniel Nathan, alias Frederic Dannay (1905–1982), and Manford (Emanuel) Lepofsky, alias Manfred Bennington Lee (1905–1971)—to write detective fiction. In a successful series of novels that covered forty-two years, Ellery Queen served as both the authors’ name and that of the detective-hero. The cousins also cofounded and directed Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, one of the most influential English crime-fiction magazines of the twentieth century. They were given the Grand Master Award for achievements in the field of the mystery story by the Mystery Writers of America in 1961.
Mark Peckham is an actor and director based in Rhode Island. In addition to working with Trinity Rep, Virginia Stage Co., and many Boston-area theaters, he was the voice of Joseph Smith in the award-winning PBS documentary American Prophet with Gregory Peck.