Carole Eglash-Kosoff

Hollywood 1940, a pre-pubescent town, adorned with orange groves, pretty girls hoping to make it big in the movies, and gangsters like Bugsy Siegel, finding fertile ground. The Great Depression may be over but war is on the horizon as a young man, Guff, with a peculiar talent for remembering numbers and patterns arrives with his friend, Nick, aka Picnic, a light-fingered pickpocket. The Grauman's Chinese, the movie studios, his girlfriend, Julie, and the warm sun backdrop the events of the plot. Drafted, Guff's prowess takes him to encryption, German secrets, General George Patton, and the atom bomb. The decade's tumultuous events provide spice to Guff's adventures. It is all true except for those parts that aren't.

Before Black Lives Matter, Civil Rights marches, and Dr. Martin Luther King, there was the Double V campaign.In 1942, during the earliest days of the Second World War, a young Black man was beaten trying to enlist and serve his country. Distraught, he wrote a letter to a large Negro newspaper, The Pittsburgh Courier, asking why he should offer his blood to a country that treated him so badly. He suggested a Double V campaign...a V for Victory in the war and a V for a victory in racial equality at home...a Double V.The reporters and staff of The Courier successfully championed the Double V and a change in Government policy that led to full participation for America's twelve million Black Americans, including more than one million who served in the military. When the war ended, those who served expected a degree of equality. It failed to materialize and their frustrations exploded into the Civil Rights movement and today's activism.And It all began with a letter from one man. It's all true. This novel, The Double V, is a dramatization of those events.