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A collection of some of the most well-known stories by one of
America's premier adventure writers.
In February 1861, the twelve-year-old son of Arizona rancher John
Ward was kidnapped by Apaches. Ward followed their trail and
reported the incident to patrols at Fort Buchanan, blaming a band
of Chiricahuas led by the infamous warrior Cochise. Though Ward had
no proof that Cochise had kidnapped his son, Lt. George Bascom
organized a patrol and met with the Apache leader, who, not
suspecting anything was amiss, had brought along his wife, his
brother, and two sons. Despite Cochise's assertions that he had not
taken the boy and his offer to help in the search, Bascom
immediately took Cochise's family hostage and demanded the return
of the boy. An incensed Cochise escaped the meeting tent amidst
flying bullets and vowed revenge.What followed that precipitous
encounter would ignite a Southwestern frontier war between the
Chiricahuas and the US Army that would last twenty-five years. In
the days following the initial melee, innocent passersby-Apache,
white, and Mexican-would be taken as hostages on both sides, and
almost all of them would be brutally slaughtered. Cochise would
lead his people valiantly for ten years of the decades-long
war.Thousands of lives would be lost, the economies of Arizona and
New Mexico would be devastated, and in the end, the Chiricahua way
of life would essentially cease to exist.In a gripping narrative
that often reads like an old-fashioned Western novel, Terry Mort
explores the collision of these two radically different cultures in
a masterful account of one of the bloodiest conflicts in American
frontier history.
Riley Fitzhugh is temporarily assigned as officer in charge of the
naval guard on board the SS Carlota, a merchant ship assigned to
deliver bombs and aviation fuel to the Sebou River during Operation
Torch. The Atlantic crossing was supposed to be in convoy, but
Carlota breaks down after surviving a U-boat attack and is forced
to limp along alone. At the mouth of the Sebou River, Riley rejoins
the anti-U-boat vessel Nameless, which has come down from her refit
in Scotland to join the Torch attack. When the Nameless is tasked
with delivering a company of Army Rangers to capture the French air
force base, she and her crew must force their way through the boom
guarding the mouth of the river and pass through the gunfire from
the French fort on the hills above. Along the way, Riley runs into
an old flame or two-one an enemy agent, the other a war
correspondent from Cuba.
Hollywood, 1934. Prohibition is finally over, but there is still
plenty of crime for an ambitious young private eye to investigate.
Though he has a slightly checkered past, Riley Fitzhugh is well
connected in the film industry and is hired by a major
producer-whose lovely girlfriend has disappeared. He also is hired
to recover a stolen Monet, a crime that results in two murders
initially, with more to come. Along the way, Riley investigates the
gambling ships anchored off LA, gets involved with the girlfriend
of the gangster running one of the ships, and disposes of the body
of a would-be actor who assaults Riley's girlfriend. He also meets
an elegant English art history professor from UCLA who helps Riley
authenticate several paintings and determine which ones are
forgeries. Riley lives at the Garden of Allah Hotel, the favorite
watering place of screenwriters, and he meets and unknowingly
assists many of them with their plots. Incidentally, one of these
gents, whose nom de plume is "Hobey Baker," might actually be F.
Scott Fitzgerald.
The eve of World War II. A Hollywood producer's murdered wife. Her
husband's guilty memory of a shipboard romance. A stolen painting
signed "Picasso." French gangsters. A beautiful courtesan. A
shoot-out in a brasserie. All these and more confront Private
Detective Riley Fitzhugh as he travels from Hollywood to the
Riviera, Paris, and London in search of his client's vanished dream
girl and some answers. Is the painting a genuine Picasso or just a
clever forgery? Who is responsible for the corpses that keep
littering his path and complicating the investigation? And whatever
happened to Amanda Billingsgate?
Though he made his name and his fortune as an author of Western
novels, Zane Grey's best writing has to do with fishing. There he
was free from the conventions of the Western genre and the
expectations of the market, and he was able to blend his talent for
narrative with his keen eye for detail and humor, much of it
self-deprecating, into books and articles that are both informative
and exciting. His first published fishing article appeared in 1902,
and he continued to write books and articles on angling until his
death in 1939. From the trout streams and bass rivers of the East
to the steelhead rivers of the Northwest; from the offshore angling
of Nova Scotia and California to the unexplored waters of New
Zealand and the South Sea islands, Grey was constantly in motion,
sometimes fishing three hundred days a year, always writing to
support his passion. At one time or another he held more than a
dozen saltwater records, yet he always returned from the big game
to the freshwater streams he had learned to love as a boy. This
book is a selection of some of Grey's best work, and the stories
and excerpts reveal a man who understood that angling is more than
an activity-it is a way of seeing, a way of being more fully a part
of the natural world. No writer exceeds Zane Grey's ability to
integrate the fishing experience with a world he saw so vividly.
Hollywood in the Thirties: Nazi saboteurs, gangsters running
gambling ships, British spies and diplomats, FBI agents, starlets
looking for the big break, cheap hustlers on the fringes of the
law, local cops-some are friends and some are adversaries, but all
are involved somehow with Riley Fitzhugh, a private eye who's
wondering whether the death of an English aristocrat really was an
accident.
A fascinating account of a dramatic, untold chapter in Hemingway's
life--his pursuit of German U-boats during World War II.
From the summer of 1942 until the end of 1943, Ernest Hemingway
lived in Havana, Cuba, and spent much of his time in the Gulf
Stream hunting German sub- marines in his wooden fishing boat, "The
Pilar." This phase of Hemingway's life has only been briefly
touched upon in biographies of Hemingway but proved to be of
enormous importance to him. At the time, the U-boats were torpedo-
ing dozens of Allied tankers each month and threatened America's
ability to wage war in Europe. Hemingway's patrols were supported
by the U.S. Navy, and he viewed these danger- ous missions as both
patriotic duty and pure adventure. But they were more than that:
they provided some literary basis for "The Old Man and the Sea" and
"Islands in the Stream."
Terry Mort's sensitive portrait of Hemingway also brings us his
wife Martha Gellhorn (who was scornful of Hemingway's patrols), a
naval account of the U-boat attacks in the vicinity, and a
perceptive contemplation of what the patrols meant to Hemingway the
man as well as the artist. Drawing on the writer's letters,
Gellhorn's memoirs, and the sailor's log of "The Pilar," Mort
reveals an important chapter in the life of a""literary legend.
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