It is 1935 and America remains in the depths of the Great Depression - Benny Goodman is the "King of Swing," Senator Huey Long was just assassinated, and Joe Louis has just beaten Primo Carnera in the boxing ring. To millions of Americans, Alexander Brass, newspaper columnist and radio personality, is the voice of Manhattan nightlife, and they rely on him for the latest gossip about the stars and the beautiful people, the gangsters and the lowlifes, who make up the scene. While researching his column at the latest hot spot, Alexander Brass learns that Two-Headed Mary, a renowned and beloved grifter who works the Broadway theaters, is missing and that her friends on the Street are worried. Brass runs a short item in his column about her disappearance and shortly thereafter he finds himself in the midst of a full-scale mystery. Not only does Mary's disappearance seem tied to the disappearance of an ex-chorus girl cum Broadway box-office ticket taker, but Brass learns that someone else out there is far too interested in Mary's whereabouts.
A plump, middle-aged man with greying hair and mild, hazel eyes looking out from behind wire-rim glasses, Author Michael Kurland has the perpetually nervous look of a rabbit invited to lunch at the Lions' Club. He has been a teacher of obscure subjects to disinterested children, the editor of a magazine even more idiosyncratic than himself, a seeker of absent persons, a magical explainer, and guest lecturer at numerous unrelated events. But he has never wandered far from his chosen profession of scrivener for very long, since he finds the fawning idolatry of his fans a useful counterbalance to the disinterest of landlords and the disapproval of bank managers.
In Kurland's over 30 books he has romped through a variety of fields. His non-fiction works cover topics as diverse as forensic science, criminal law, espionage, amateur radio, and the history of crime in America, and have been selections of the Military Book Club, the Readers' Digest Book Club, the Junior Literary Guild, and the Writers' Digest Book Club, among others.
Kurland has written a dozen or so science fiction and fantasy novels, notably "Ten little Wizards" and "A Study in Sorcery," set in Randall Garrett's Angevin Empire, and "The Unicorn Girl," which was nominated for a Hugo. He now mainly writes mysteries, including "The Infernal Device," the first of (currently) five Professor Moriarty novels, which was nominated for both an Edgar and an American Book award, and "Too Soon Dead" and "The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes," set in the 1930s and chronicling the mystery-solving talents of Alexander Brass, a columnist for the New York World. A couple of his books, notably "The Last President," and "Button Bright" fit tenuously into that nondescript category known as "mainstream."
The next Moriarty novel, tentatively titled "Who Thinks Evil," is in the works.
