From And All Our Yesterdays, edited by Andrew MacRae, Darkhouse Books, 2015.
Dennis Palumbo's historical short story is titled, "A Theory of Murder," and originally appeared in The Strand Magazine. Featuring a young Albert Einstein as an amateur sleuth.
An anthology of historical mysteries from DarkHouse Books. Available as both an e-book and a paperback.
HONOERABLE MENTION BIOGRAPHY/AUTOBIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR
They were perplexing thefts, lacking a clear motive or payoff, and they happened in the genteel, not particularly lucrative world of publishing: Someone was stealing unpublished book manuscripts.
The thefts and attempted thefts occurred primarily over email, by a fraudster impersonating publishing professionals and targeting authors, editors, agents and literary scouts who might have drafts of novels and other books.
The mystery may now be solved. On Wednesday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Filippo Bernardini, a 29-year-old rights coordinator for Simon & Schuster UK, saying that he “impersonated, defrauded, and attempted to defraud, hundreds of individuals” over five or more years, obtaining hundreds of unpublished manuscripts in the process.
Mr. Bernardini, who was arrested after landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport, was charged with wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Read more:
Story Merchant Books is pleased to announce our first Zoom Book Launch Party for 2022 with our title, Romeo’s Beat by Vincent Atchity, on Wednesday, January 12th 2022!
We
want to extend a warm invite to all Story Merchant authors and friends to
celebrate with us via Zoom on Wednesday 1/12 at 4pm PST / 7pm EST!
Please
see the invite and agenda below and feel free to forward this email to anyone
who might want to join!
On
the day of the event, click the link below and enter the password to join
everyone virtually!
You can order by clicking on this link: Romeo’s Beat
Join Zoom Meeting on January 12th: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5977327777?pwd=MFY5TXBJQUxwb1J2ZWhPeTR4WDdsUT09
Time: Jan 12, 2022 04:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Meeting ID: 597 732 7777
Passcode: romeo
At her eightieth birthday celebration, in 2001, at KC’s Leawood-South Country Club, the entire family gathered to celebrate my mother’s endless good spirits and hospitality. Dancing and telling jokes and winking, she reigned over the event like the dowager empress she’d become, wearing her signature red dress. and looking for all the world like Betty White on a good day.
My mother was a force larger than
life.
Oddly enough, I met Betty White
because of Mom.
An aspiring novelist and former Mormon
bishop named James Michael Pratt sent me a copy of his self-published book, The Last Valentine. I read the
description on the back cover and thought it was maybe too romantic even for
“Mr. Romance,” as I’d been dubbed during my years in Montreal producing Shades of Love.
But the concept nagged at me, so I
sent the book to Mom and asked her to read it.
She called me two days later.
“You must get involved in this book,” she said. “It’s wonderful.”
I asked her for details. Her response
was sketchy—she was already becoming forgetful, especially of things she’d
read, which is why I’d learned to return her call the minute she reached out to
me after a read. But it was clear emotionally: Mom didn’t use must loosely.
This was beyond should!
Long story short, I did get involved.
My Writers Lifeline company helped Jim perfect the story and my management
company sold it, at auction, for a bunch of money to St. Martin’s Press. It
became a New York Times bestseller, and led to four or five further
bestselling books for Jim.
At one point in his book tour, we
converged in KC where Jim was being hosted by Barnes and Noble—and he insisted
on meeting Mom. “She’s the one who got this book published,” he said. I
certainly wasn’t going to argue with that.
You’d think a New York Times bestseller
would have an easy route to the screen. But I knew one lesson by heart: nothing
is easy in Hollywood. It took over ten years before Valentine was picked
up by Hallmark Hall of Fame. Their president, meeting me over breakfast at the
Alameda Plaza overlooking KC’s Country Club Plaza, brought up a ticklish
subject. “You know this company will never call a movie ‘The Last Valentine,’”
he told me—then tipped his orange juice in a toast.
I laughed, at what I thought was a
joke. But it wasn’t. The movie was retitled, “The Lost Valentine,” and starred
Jennifer Love Hewitt and Betty.
It was one thing to meet the voluptuous Jennifer Love Hewitt—“Don’t avoid these,” she scolded our Director of Photography, having checked the replay of a wedding moment where the camera discreetly hovered above her cleavage line, “I built my career on these beauties.” Unleashing the camera, they did a more revealing take.
But
it was meeting Betty White on the set in Atlanta that truly thrilled me, for
two reasons. In her red dress, white hair, and feisty countenance, she looked
exactly like Mom. And I was given the chance to tell Betty the story of how my
mother had gotten this book published and this movie made.
Excerpt from My Obit: Vol 2: My Multi-Storied Mother, forthcoming 2022.
