Ed Ifkovic

The Arctic trails have their secret talesThat would make your blood run cold.-Robert W. Service, The Cremation of Sam McGee Jack Mabie claims to be the meanest man in Alaska, yet the old sourdough seems to be just one of the crusty geezers in every roadhouse bewildered by how his lawless frontier life has morphed into the pastel 1950s world of martini cocktail bars up and down Fairbanks' Second Avenue. Sonia Petrievich, an editor at The Gold, her father Hank's weekly pro-statehood paper, learns through the mukluk telegraph about Jack's gleeful account of murders and robberies and shell games during the gold rush days. Her breezy March 1957 profile lets Jack revel in newfound notoriety. Edna Ferber, not completely satisfied with her forthcoming novel Ice Palace, has just returned for further research and is fascinated by Jack and his wild tales. Plus the previous summer, young Athabascan lawyer Noah West, a war hero and Sonia's lover, bent on bettering the lives of Alaskan Natives, had sharpened Edna's sense of a corner of the territory she'd ignored: I felt I'd lost sight of the real Alaska, the heartless icebox in the North, the blank-eyed old-timers still haunted by gold... I'd forgotten Alaska is still frontier...a violent, mysterious world below the glossy skin I'd written about. When Jack is found beaten to death, Noah becomes a suspect. Two violent deaths follow. Edna, Noah's advocate, decides she needs to clear his name, believing the murders are connected. As debates over potential statehood rage, Edna begins unearthing scandals and sordid stories hidden in Fairbanks but also dating back to village life in Fort Yukon and down into the Lower 48. What horrible secrets carried from the Arctic Circle have led to so many murders? And what novelist could stand aside from this story?

On the night of his retirement party from a local factory, Felix Calico is found stabbed to death in his driveway. A notorious womanizer for much of his lifetime, he made a host of enemies in the small town of North Farms, just outside New Haven, Connecticut. As Valentine's Day approaches, some suspect that Felix finally got his comeuppance from an old, vengeful flame, especially because certain clues point to the romantic holiday.Anna Farkas, a sixty-five-year-old housewife, disliked the old letch. Part of a small Hungarian-American community that grew up around the factory, nevertheless, she is bothered by the murder. Her great-nephew Mike is a local cop, a man she and her late husband raised after the death of his parents. Slowly, gathering bits of information, unwitting sleuth Anna grapples with the murder. Surrounded by a cast of opinionated characters, including her eccentric two sisters and gossipy neighbors, Anna navigates the strange waters of the town as she and Mike begin to piece together the events that led to the murder.North Farms has hidden stories no one talks about-pettiness, adultery, corruption, drunkenness, deceit, cruelty, and ultimately murder. An ex-wife and on-again-off-again mistress blame each other, but Anna believes neither is the real murderer. As she cooks daily in her kitchen, Anna reviews the evidence. Then she discovers the motive for murder-and that awareness shatters her world.

"The Arctic trails have their secret talesThat would make your blood run cold."-Robert W. Service, "The Cremation of Sam McGee" Jack Mabie claims to be the meanest man in Alaska, yet the old sourdough seems to be just one of the crusty geezers in every roadhouse bewildered by how his lawless frontier life has morphed into the pastel 1950s world of martini cocktail bars up and down Fairbanks' Second Avenue. Sonia Petrievich, an editor at The Gold, her father Hank's weekly pro-statehood paper, learns through the mukluk telegraph about Jack's gleeful account of murders and robberies and shell games during the gold rush days. Her breezy March 1957 profile lets Jack revel in newfound notoriety. Edna Ferber, not completely satisfied with her forthcoming novel Ice Palace, has just returned for further research and is fascinated by Jack and his wild tales. Plus the previous summer, young Athabascan lawyer Noah West, a war hero and Sonia's lover, bent on bettering the lives of Alaskan Natives, had sharpened Edna's sense of a corner of the territory she'd ignored: "I felt I'd lost sight of the real Alaska, the heartless icebox in the North, the blank-eyed old-timers still haunted by gold... I'd forgotten Alaska is still frontier...a violent, mysterious world below the glossy skin I'd written about." When Jack is found beaten to death, Noah becomes a suspect. Two violent deaths follow. Edna, Noah's advocate, decides she needs to clear his name, believing the murders are connected. As debates over potential statehood rage, Edna begins unearthing scandals and sordid stories hidden in Fairbanks but also dating back to village life in Fort Yukon and down into the Lower 48. What horrible secrets carried from the Arctic Circle have led to so many murders? And what novelist could stand aside from this story?

She was 1932 Broadway's newest sensation. Then she was murdered. Three years after the Crash that ushered in the Great Depression, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Edna Ferber finds herself a guest at Noel Coward's lavish birthday party. The British wit, enjoying the Christmas holiday season in New York and bracing for a trip to Cleveland in the new year, has filled his room with rich, famous folks whose lives continue in stark contrast to those being lived out in the city's streets and poorer neighborhoods. Edna is haunted by the dark landscape of Manhattan outside Coward's elegant rooms: the snake-like breadlines, the shanty village in Central Park, the gaunt apple sellers in threadbare suits on freezing sidewalks. She has yet to be introduced to the Automat where a few cents are the difference between nourishment and starvation. Among those who've kept fortune intact is Dougie Maddox, the financially astute but socially na ve only son of a Fifth Avenue dynasty. His widowed mother, known as Lady Maud, has kept the thirty-five-year-old on a short leash, but Dougie has crossed paths with Belinda Ross, the new Broadway songbird. He's mesmerized by her, a woman flagrantly courted by other men. But Belinda seems besotted by Dougie. Gossip flourishes - she has a shadowy past and a producer brother anxious to break onto the Great White Way. When Belinda is found strangled late one night in a Times Square Automat, jealous, hot-tempered Dougie is the prime suspect. But Noel, who had befriended him, and Edna, who likes him, team up to clear Dougie's name. Their investigation inevitably takes them deep into Belinda's circle and her past. As the crowds in Time Square ready for a half-hearted New Year's celebration, are Noel and Edna watching the last act of a New York Othello, or is there some other killer-maybe more than one-afoot on the icy pavements of New York City?

She was 1932 Broadway's newest sensation. Then she was murdered. Three years after the Crash that ushered in the Great Depression, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Edna Ferber finds herself a guest at Noel Coward's lavish birthday party. The British wit, enjoying the Christmas holiday season in New York and bracing for a trip to Cleveland in the new year, has filled his room with rich, famous folks whose lives continue in stark contrast to those being lived out in the city's streets and poorer neighborhoods. Edna is haunted by the dark landscape of Manhattan outside Coward's elegant rooms: the snake-like breadlines, the shanty village in Central Park, the gaunt apple sellers in threadbare suits on freezing sidewalks. She has yet to be introduced to the Automat where a few cents are the difference between nourishment and starvation. Among those who've kept fortune intact is Dougie Maddox, the financially astute but socially na ve only son of a Fifth Avenue dynasty. His widowed mother, known as Lady Maud, has kept the thirty-five-year-old on a short leash, but Dougie has crossed paths with Belinda Ross, the new Broadway songbird. He's mesmerized by her, a woman flagrantly courted by other men. But Belinda seems besotted by Dougie. Gossip flourishes - she has a shadowy past and a producer brother anxious to break onto the Great White Way. When Belinda is found strangled late one night in a Times Square Automat, jealous, hot-tempered Dougie is the prime suspect. But Noel, who had befriended him, and Edna, who likes him, team up to clear Dougie's name. Their investigation inevitably takes them deep into Belinda's circle and her past. As the crowds in Time Square ready for a half-hearted New Year's celebration, are Noel and Edna watching the last act of a New York Othello, or is there some other killer-maybe more than one-afoot on the icy pavements of New York City?

In the summer of 1943, artist Chaim Soutine is living in the small French village of Champigny-sur-Veude with his lover, Marie-Berthe Aurenche. All of France is Nazi-occupied, curfews enforced, Jews rounded up and sent to camps, and the Gestapo has been hunting for the famous Jewish painter who has fled Paris. Chronically ill from ulcers, his condition steadily worsening, Soutine persists in painting landscapes and portraits in the shadow of German authority. One day he meets a curious, crippled young boy, Jean-Pierre Chartier, whose portrait Soutine decides to paint, enthralled by the boy's stark face. During the long, hot summer, as Nazis close in and his illness becomes grievous, Soutine and Jean-Pierre forge an unusual bond, though Jean-Pierre combats opposition from his family who dislike the unkempt Russian painter. Through a series of flashbacks, the author explores crucial moments in Soutine's life-from his early days in an impoverished shtetl to his glory days in Paris-to his flight from the Nazis. In the final months of his life Soutine persists in his beloved craft, but he looks on in horror as a confused Jean-Pierre unwittingly becomes a pawn of the Nazis, and Soutine realizes how dangerous their unusual friendship has suddenly become.

"Ifkovic successfully blends homicide with a loving homage to Budapest on the eve of World War I." --Kirkus Reviews In 1914, as rumors of war float across Europe, Edna Ferber travels to Budapest with Winifred Moss, a famous London suffragette, to visit the homeland of her dead father and to see the sights. Author Edna is fascinated by ancient Emperor Franz Joseph and by the faltering Austro-Hungarian Empire, its pomp and circumstance so removed from the daily life of the people she meets. Sitting daily in the Caf Europa at her hotel, she listens to unfettered Hearst reporter Harold Gibbon as he predicts the coming war and the end of feudalistic life in Europe while patrons chatter. Then a shocking murder in a midnight garden changes everything. Headstrong Cassandra Blaine is supposed to marry into the Austrian nobility in one of those arranged matches like Consuela Vanderbilt's still popular with wealthy American parents eager for titles and impoverished European nobility who have them to offer. But Cassandra is murdered, and her former lover, the dashing Hungarian Endre Moln r, is the prime suspect. Taken with the young man and convinced of his innocence, Edna begins investigating with the help of Winifred and two avant-garde Hungarian artists. Meanwhile possible war with Serbia is the topic of the day as Archduke Franz Ferdinand prepares to head to Sarajevo. While the world braces for disaster, Edna uncovers the truth--and it scares her.

In June of 1953 Mark Antonich celebrates his twelfth birthday-and the beginning of a long summer he hopes will be filled with backyard reading, swimming in the town pool, and hanging out with his next-door cousin Tony Zivich. An ordinary summer in a small Connecticut farming town outside New Haven.But everything changes when his leisurely, dreamy days abruptly turn into what becomes a frightening summer-nightmarish events that will color the rest of his life. He watches, helpless, confused, as his home life starts to crumble: a rebellious, older sister drifting off with dangerous older friends, his quiet mother hospitalized with a mysterious illness, his father laid off from the factory, and on TV the awful specter of the Joseph McCarthy anti-Communist hearings that hit too close to home. Worse, Petar Ivo, his mother's distant cousin from Yugoslavia, one of the wandering Displaced Persons allowed into America after the horror of World War Two, moves in-and the walls of the house echo with fear and panic.As the young Croatian-American family struggles to survive, Mark grapples with a world that confuses and alarms him. As the dead, sticky days of August unfold, Mark begins his most harrowing journey.

Novelist Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road) once wrote in a celebratory letter to the author: "Your strength as a writer is creating a deceptively quiet chronicle of harsh events." This collection of twelve disparate short stories reinforces Yates' succinct observation, a collection of published and unpublished fiction that explores a wide range of human experience captured through Ifkovic's vision.In such stories as "Miss Connecticut" and "Love," the author probes the life of small-town America and the scandal that lies beneath the serene surface. Others, like "Hedges," "Gaetano," and "Neighbors," are set against a backdrop of dying New England cities in which struggling families grapple with change they cannot understand. Yet others present fanciful plays on celebrity, as in "Dyanna Ross" and "Superstar," characters who live in the shadows of those whose names are up in lights. "Cleopatra" and "Missing in Action" move the reader back to the years following the long and painful Vietnam War-and its devastating legacy. In "Emilie" a troubled woman unearths an unknown letter from Emily Dickinson and it redefines her life. In "Observance" a lost man finds himself grappling with ghosts from his past that continue to haunt him. Finally, "The Marriage Room" explores the intricacies of unconventional lives.Ifkovic chronicles lives at the moment they look into shadowy mirrors-or find themselves on the edge of discovery. Together these stories reflect Yates' added assessment: the author's story lines "bring character to life on the page."

In this third volume of memories, the author depicts some of the people he's met along the way. These anecdotal sketches illuminate some famous folks, to be sure-encounters with writers like Walter Tevis (The Hustler), Robert Penn Warren (All the King's Men), and Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road), even sidelong glances at historical giants like Abe Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, as well as a sad tale of ill-fated Manhattan socialite Irene Silverman, who was the victim of notorious grifters Sante and Kenneth Kimes. But mostly we read of ordinary people-like the student who encountered aliens from outer space or the young man lost in a mental hospital on New Year's Eve or the Cuban migr who got lost in a snowstorm. There's even a misguided account of a visit to the Soviet Union back in 1976. Some chronicles are sad stories, while others are funny, but all of them reflect the author's fascination with the people around him.

Who murdered the handsome young actor? And why? In 1940, against the chilling backdrop of Hitler's rise and the specter of another war, Edna Ferber decides to follow an old dream: to act on the stage. Selecting The Royal Family, the comedy she wrote with George S. Kaufman, for her starring role, she travels to Maplewood, New Jersey. But her escape from the troubling daily headlines is short lived. Before opening night, a mysterious understudy is shot to death, opening up a world of lies, greed, and hypocrisy. Ferber, along with Kaufman, who is directing the production, begin a different kind of collaboration: the discovery of the murderer. As rehearsals evolve, they deal with a cast of characters who are all hiding something from their days spent in Hollywood: a stage manager, a young ing nue, an American Nazi and his boisterous girlfriend, a stagehand named Dakota who is the son of a famous evangelist, his charismatic preacher-mother, her money-bags husband, and a driven acolyte of the church. Each character, Edna discovers, has some connection with the dead man. Why have they all converged on quiet Maplewood? As Edna investigates, she realizes that the answer to the murder lies back in Hollywood. As Kaufman wisecracks his way through the story, Edna methodically examines the facts, determined to find the answer. Opening night looms and so does World War II. Edna, resolute, believes that justice needs to prevail in a world that is falling apart.

In 1881 Charles Ethan Porter, a black artist from Hartford, Connecticut, traveled to Paris to study art, carrying with him an enthusiastic letter of introduction from Samuel Clemens, Hartford's most famous resident. During the next three years Porter wrote letters to Clemens-but Clemens never replied. The famous author turned his back on the talented painter.What happened? In The Colored Artist the author suggests an answer.Based on the life of the late-nineteenth-century artist, the novel is narrated by his student and lifelong friend, German-American artist Gustave Adolph Hoffman, whose own life was often lived in the shadow of his mentor. As one of the few black painters in America at the time, Porter not only had to deal with horrific racism but also the stigma attached to any artist whose specialty was floral and fruit still lifes, largely categorized as "women's art." Porter cherished his friendship with Hoffman and another painter named Samuel Morley Comstock, a charismatic but troubled young friend. The story of these three men's lives, beginning in the 1890s in Manhattan and ending in rural Connecticut, is a tale of artistic temperament silhouetted against the background of the shifting currents of American society and art at the end of the Victorian Age.

"Her name was Eve and she spent her long days toiling in the Garden of Eden. Actually her name was Eva, my Hungarian grandmother, and, well, she did spend her days toiling in the Garden of Eden." So begins one of the 20 stories the author relates-a tapestry of memory that moves from the post-war 1940s to the end of the explosive 1960s.Here are accounts that touch on "Frosty the Snowman" and an ill-fated Christmas pageant, First Communion and other harrowing tales of a Catholic boyhood, anti-Commie Joe McCarthy on TV, the sensational death of Marilyn Monroe, the exotic allure of Brigitte Bardot on the movie screen, the KKK in North Carolina, the Kennedy assassination, a wedding at the National Press Club, and even the farewell tour of Diana Ross and the Supremes.Some of these tales are humorous or farcical, some sad and melancholic, some downright satirical, and some-maybe just a bit tragic. Anecdotal, colorful, speckled with contemporary observation, together these recollections depict one man's take on the dynamic world he lived in. Through it all, he knew he was having the time of his life.

Praise for Make Believe..."A pure delight." -Jeffery Deaveraward-winning author of The Bodies Left BehindIn 1951, Edna Ferber heads to Hollywood to support her friend Max Jeffries, who has been blacklisted because of his supposedly Communist leanings. Edna first met Max on the 1927 Broadway production of Show Boat, and now he is being "uncredited" from the new film pro-duction starring Ava Gardner. When Max is murdered, Edna quietly begins investigating. Max was killed right after a brawl with Frank Sinatra, who is having an affair with Ava Gardner. Ava fears her lover will be arrested, but Edna feels for the vulnerable and insecure star. Soon Edna uncovers layers of greed, envy, and desire...and Max's murderer.Ed Ifkovic taught literature and creative writing at a community college in Connecticut for more than three decades. Make Believe is his third Edna Ferber Mystery.

Praise for Escape Artist..."Who would have thought that, of all the real-life characters to have a second life as detectives, Edna Ferber, now largely forgotten as a writer, would emerge as one of the best?" -Booklist starred reviewIn 1904, Edna Ferber is a 19-year-old girl reporter for the Appleton, Wisconsin, Crescent, an occupation considered scandalous for a proper young lady. By chance, she interviews Harry Houdini, in town visiting old friends. When beautiful young Frana Lempke disappears from a locked room at the high school and is then discovered murdered, Edna asks Houdini for help in solving the murder. But as Edna pursues the story, she senses that she is being followed. And the newsroom has become a hostile environment, with a new city editor determined to undermine her....Ed Ifkovic taught literature and creative writing at a community college in Connecticut for more than three decades. Now retired, he devotes himself to writing fiction. Escape Artist is his second novel.