About this ebook
TWO YOUNG RADICALS ASSASSINATE A HIGH GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL. WERE THEY PATRIOTS OR MURDERERS?
CAIRO, EGYPT: The car moved slowly through the baking heat and noise of the city and finally arrived at Lord Moyne’s residence. The car halted and the chauffeur hurried to open the door for the British Ambassador. On the other side, two figures leapt up and raced toward the car—both carrying revolvers. One youth reached the automobile, wrenched open the back door and fired three times at Lord Moyne.
“Stop, murderers, stop!”
Within seconds police had captured the two.
“Who are you? Why have you done this?”
One boy spoke. “We have nothing to say. We await the judgment of mankind.”
“Brilliant and suspenseful. I can think of few reading experiences in the last year as compelling as The Deed.”—Los Angeles Times
“SPELLBINDING SUSPENSE...a slice of history beautifully and accurately told. The Deed is by far the finest book Gerold Frank has ever written; it is easy to read but awfully, awfully hard to forget.”—Quentin Reynolds, Saturday Review
“COMPELLING, IMPORTANT. Even if it were not true—and it is agonizingly true—it would be a genuine literary work. It is a book not to be forgotten.”—Herald Tribune
“A NARRATIVE THAT WON’T LET YOU GO...moving and disturbing.”—Chicago Tribune
“POWER AND POIGNANCY...gives life to a footnote in history. The opening prickles with suspense. The book reaches a climax of genuine pathos. Few, I predict, will fail to be moved by the closing pages of The Deed.”—John Barkham, Saturday Review Syndicate
About the author
Gerold Frank (August 2, 1907 - September 17, 1998) was an American author. He wrote several celebrity memoirs and was considered a pioneer of the “as told to” form of (auto)biography. His two best-known books, however, are The Boston Strangler (1966), which was adapted as the 1968 movie starring Tony Curtis and Henry Fonda, and An American Death (1972), about the assassination of Martin Luther King.
Born in 1907 in Cleveland, Ohio, where his father was a tailor and owned a dress shop, he graduated from Ohio State University and moved to Greenwich Village as an aspiring poet. Later he worked for a newspaper in Cleveland. He wrote some articles published by The New Yorker and The Nation and eventually returned to New York City where he worked for Journal-American.
He wrote about the lives of Eastern European Jews before the Holocaust and, in 1934, made a film about life in a Polish shtetl, featuring the lives of his parents and his wife Lilian. It included rare scenes of the Warsaw Ghetto, which Frank donated to the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research.
Frank served as a war correspondent in the Middle East during World War II, and in 1947 collaborated with Bartley Crum on a book about the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine, Behind the Silken Curtain.
He co-wrote the biography, Zsa Zsa Gabor: My Story (1960), and wrote the biography of Judy Garland, Judy (1975), considered by many to be the definitive book on the actress. I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1954), co-written with Lillian Roth and columnist Mike Connolly, was an international bestseller and was adapted as a 1955 movie, earning Susan Hayward an Oscar nomination for her starring role as Lillian Roth.
Frank won the annual “Best Fact Crime” Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America twice, for The Deed (1963) and The Boston Strangler (1966).
He was married to Lilian Frank and together the couple had a son and a daughter.
