Manifesto for the Dead
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Manifesto for the Dead is a surreal noir that takes as its main character the master of noir, the late crime novelist Jim Thompson at the end of his career, suspecting he has been framed by a Hollywood producer for the murder of a young starlet. An intricate blend of biography, fiction, and suspense, this literary thriller offers a hair-raising portrait of one of crime fiction’s most notorious true-life figures—and a brutal satire of the entertainment industry in the tradition of The Day of the Locust.
As the novel opens, the aging writer is at the end of his string—a habitué of Hollywood bars and endless drinking sessions at the Musso & Frank Grill. Here he is approached by a small-time producer, Billy Miracle, with an offer to work on a project designed to resurrect the career of a fading screen star.
Thompson accepts, and soon finds himself at the center of a lurid triangle, inadvertently following a trail that leads from a dead starlet—found strangled in the back of a Cadillac—to the doorstep of one of the most powerful men in Hollywood.
Set in the seamy back streets of Los Angeles, in 1972, Manifesto for the Dead tells the story of legendary crime writer Jim Thompson in his darkest hour. It is a book about desire and lust, about a writer struggling with illusion, disillusion and fate on the back lots of Hollywood. But the Manifesto is also a novel-within-a-novel, telling two stories that intertwine—one set in Hollywood, the other in Thompson’s imagination—each rushing headlong into the other, into that area where fact and fiction are no longer distinguishable, and the darkness is inseparable from the light.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The always-adventurous Stansberry, whose The Last Days of Il Duce (1998) was nominated for both an Edgar and a Hammett Award, endeavors to bring the talented, troubled noir icon Jim Thompson to life, and comes close to pulling it off. Certainly the real-life details ring true: it's 1971, and 64-year-old novelist Thompson is on the downward curve of his career, drinking too much at the famous Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard. After writing dozens of successful novels and two movie scripts with Stanley Kubrick, Thompson is out of money and ideas. His wife, Alberta, is disillusioned with him, and the couple is forced to move into a cheaper apartment. Then a sleazy producer called Billy Miracle and a fading star named Michele Haze sign the vulnerable Jim to write a novel based on a screenplay, scheming to rope movie mogul Jack Lombard into bankrolling both the book and the film. The tale turns seamy when a starlet is murdered, and Thompson is set up as the chief suspect. Though the book is clearly an homage to the late noir writer, Stansberry is less successful with his murder-mystery stylings than he is with his uncanny recreations of Thompson's writing. Stansberry works heroically to distract his readers with chapters of the protagonist's novel-in-progress, which channel Th0mpson's masterful use of dark, simple, powerful imagery. He also describes the hero coping with, and mirroring, the notion of plot inconsistencies: "He'd been up against that wall himself, clutching all those ragged ends, stories within stories that almost webbed together...." Though committed Thompson fans may quibble, there's a lot in this bluntly articulate tale to like. The book-within-a-book concept, even if it develops at the expense of the plot line, flashes with Stansberry's brand of fresh, stark prose.
