The Marble Orchard is a complex, colourful and ultimately dangerous adventure, a richly textured thriller that also celebrates the joys of love and marriage between Chandler and his exceptional wife, Cissy. The year is 1936, and Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Erle Stanley Gardner have taken to solving crimes as amateur detectives. As narrated by Chandler, their latest adventure begins in East Los Angeles, with the discovery of what is apparently the ritual suicide of his wife's former husband in a Chinese cemetery, but was it really suicide? Following a trail of clues from the coastal splendors of the William Randolph Hearst castle to the rococo Victorian mansions of Bunker Hill, the trio of sleuths are helped, and hindered, by an odd assortment of characters like the mysterious screen star known as the Vampire Queen, a missing sister who prefers to stay missing, and an ex-stage with a penchant for using his fists, and by such real life personalities as Shirley Temple, Charlie Chaplin, Hedda Hopper, and Orson Welles.
With 85 books to his credit, plus hundreds of scripts, articles and short stories embracing a dozen genres, William F. Nolan is an official Living Legend (voted that honor by the International Horror Guild).
As a noted pulp historian, he is a recognized authority on Black Mask, Dashiell Hammett, and "Max Brand" (Frederick Faust). Nolan has edited six collections of Faust tales, has written Max Brand: Western Giant, and is the author of the forthcoming biography King of the Pulps: The Man Who Was Max Brand. Nolan's historical anthology, The Black Mask Boys, is the key work on the legendary magazine - and he's written three books on Dashiell Hammett, plus several pieces on the early pulp fiction of his longtime pal, Ray Bradbury.
Nolan states: "I began my fiction career [13 novels and 185 stories] too late for the pulps, but I did have letters printed in Planet Stories and Famous Fantastic Mysteries - and I grew up reading Argosy and Weird Tales."
Recently voted a Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to Dark Fantasy, Nolan is currently at work on ten new books. His most famous creations, Logan's Run, is now out in comic-book format from Bluewater Productions - and a new mega-budget film version is due from Warner Bros. in 2012.
Nolan lives in Vancouver, Washington, with an apartment full of books, pulp magazines, and stuffed animals.
