Kirjahaku

The light was growing dim in the late afternoon of July 10, 1972, when the poet Kenneth Rexroth halted our conversation abruptly and reached for a file at the corner of his desk, sliding it across in my direction. "Look at this," he said with some exasperation. It was a manuscript, 64 typewritten pages, which had originally come to him under a blind cover letter. "A fellow down in Los Angeles has sent this to me," he said. "Perhaps you can make some sense of it. I think the guy might be crazy. But you may find something there."It was bewildering enough that I slipped it into a box of papers under my desk that night and promptly forgot about it. Eventually the box traveled down to my parent's garage in Seal Beach, California. There it lay until 2013, when I stumbled upon it, forty-one years later.This is the complete text of that manuscript.

He's fat and she's pushy, and there the story begins. It's the picaresque 70s real estate boom in LA, and these two vultures want a piece of it for themselves. Along the way preposterous characters and situations intrude on their quest for wealth, status and prestige. They struggle with the locals in a swirl of scandal and swindle.Set in a world before cell phones, without the internet, when lives are shaped by interactions and punctuated by moments in front of tiny Sony television screens, Raymond and Philomena connive for the American Dream. They're helped along in this comedy of bad manners by corrupt realtors, desperate characters, a grey-suited flatfoot and a grungy Zen oligarch, set on a backdrop of excess in an arid land of emptiness.

The scandalous painting has disappeared and now it falls to the enigmatic Captain Harry Blackpool to locate a missing strand of extravagantly expensive pearls. In a series of flashbacks we learn of Harry's earliest days in India and beyond, his connection to the House of Jaipur, and the search for the mysterious Marquis who gave the boy his name. Read the prequel, "The Crimson Garter," also available on Amazon. And in 2020 look for "The Jade Lion," Book 3 in the Captain Blackpool Trilogy.