Hollywood and LeVine
About this ebook
After nearly a decade of churning out hits, Warner Bros. screenwriter Walter Adrian wants a raise on his weekly $2,500 salary. He thinks a thousand dollars more is fair—but the studio’s counteroffer is low, and dropping fast. Something is wrong, and he thinks it may have to do with communism.
Though he insists he isn’t a Red, Adrian has no way of proving it. He flees to New York to ask the advice of high school buddy Jack LeVine, private eye. LeVine is broke, and has no sympathy for his wealthy friend, but he agrees to fly West to investigate his old classmate’s trouble. When he arrives, Adrian hangs dead from the gallows at the Western set on the Warners’ backlot. Behind his friend’s death LeVine finds a shadowy Cold War conspiracy, and a city far darker than anything Hollywood puts on screen.
About the author
Andrew Bergman (b. 1945) is a successful comedy screenwriter and occasional author of hard-boiled mysteries. After receiving a PhD in American history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Bergman sold Tex X, a novella about a black sheriff in the Old West, to Warner Bros. The studio hired him to turn his story into a screenplay, as part of a team of comedy legends led by Mel Brooks and Richard Pryor. The result was Blazing Saddles (1974), which is widely regarded as one of the funniest films of all time. After that early success, Bergman published the first two novels in a mystery series starring Jack LeVine, a hard-boiled Jewish PI. After The Big Kiss-Off of 1944 and Hollywood and LeVine, he continued writing and directing films, producing such classics as Fletch, The Freshman, and Soapdish. In 2001 he returned to LeVine in Tender Is LeVine. Bergman continues to live and write in New York City.