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Newt Love:
Works of Words
"Sandemann Beach" is my homage to Rod Serling. If Rod had asked me to write a "Twilight Zone" episode for him, this would have been it. It is slated to be in my first anthology, which I hope that Rockway Press will publish in 2008.
Road House Affairs is my homage to fellow Marylander,
Dashiell Hammett.
Dash wrote a pair of stories,
"The House in Turk Street" and "The Girl with the Silver Eyes"
which are sequential. The femme fatale from Turk Street reappears
in Silver Eyes, and she moves the latter story from San Francisco
to a road house in Half Moon Bay.
Road House Affairs is set in 1930 at the
Moss Beach Distillery in Half Moon Bay,
which, in the 1920s was also referred to as "The Road House." It has always been painted white,
to help make it easy to find against the coastal chapparal that covers the hillsides.
Dash called it "The White Shack" in his story.
In this homage to Dash, the "fat little detective" has retired
to Mexico, and is a regular at the saloon Dash wrote into "The Golden Horshoe."
The Old Man brings him back as a stringer for a case of blackmail on a
high society family. The Op sets up at the Road House to watch for the next
sucker to be set up. While there, he lands in the middle of several murders,
a bootlegging raid, and a kidnapping.
Using James Ellroy's
true crime works as a guide,
I am writing it as true crime, using real people from that era who were known to
frequent the Road House, and real events that happened in the Bay Area.
An unsolved murder at the Moss Beach distillery and hotel left a ghost,
The Blue Lady
who still haunts the place. Her murder is one of the Road House Affairs
that the Op solves.
1930 was when
Roscoe Arbuckle
engineered his acting come-back,
which he planned during several business meetings at
the road house.
Earl Warren
was the Alameda County District Attorney
at that time, and later Governor of California, and Supreme Court Chief Justice.
A whole lot of famous folks were at the road house for various nefarious
and legitimate purposes, even if it was making a bootlegging bust.
This novel is one of the ones that I am working on now.
I hope that Rockway Press will publish it in 2008.
Contents of this web site © 2001-2007 by Newt Love.
Photos of Newt Love by Nance Love. Ocean effects by Zachary Hock.
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