Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Explosive Humphrey Bogart Novel Out


         Actor Humphrey Bogart decides in late 1941 to get a private detective’s badge in real life. He wants to quit the movies for a new line of work.
After many years of sweat and 40 movies, Bogie feels he is a failure. Superstardom is just over the horizon but he has no way of knowing it.
Drinking to excess and fighting with his third wife Mayo “Sluggy” Methot, Bogie realizes he is paid $2,000 a week while swashbuckling actor Errol Flynn makes $15,000 per week. And, of all people, cornball Mickey Rooney is the top male movie star that year. Bogie is disinterested, disgusted, and disheartened in the movie business.
“I’m tired of being a guy with a gun in his hand supporting the star who has a gun in his hand,” he said. A few good films that comes his way are available to him only because tough guy actor George Raft turned the roles down.
“My career depends on George Raft rejects,” he moans.
 However, December 3, 1941 is the beginning of a new life for Bogart. A supposedly quiet weekend on his beloved motor launch with his wife turns into a flaming cauldron and a preview – four days early – of the intrigue, mayhem and murder of World War Two.
Bogie confronts spies and cutthroats, as well as enemy agents with large caliber pistols spouting flaming lead in his direction. A fortune in stolen crown jewels comes his way along with a horde of bad guys and girls on a murderous rampage looking to do him in.
Bogie also unearths the super-secret lives of big time movie stars who are willing to kill to keep their kinky sex lives private.
“Humphrey Bogart, Private Dick” is a hard boiled private eye novel as well as a Hollywood Historical Novel of the 1940s. There are no cuss words or graphic sex scenes in this novel.

Author Howard Decker is no stranger to Hollywood. He was a general assignment reporter for a major Los Angeles metropolitan newspaper in 1957, a time he calls the “tail end of the Raymond Chandler era.”  It is also the year Bogie died in his own bed at home.“I spent many a night traveling down what the iconic mystery writer Chandler called the ‘mean streets’ of Hollywood,” the author said. “I saw the dead bodies, the busted dreams and broken lives for myself.” He personally knew and interviewed many reporters, editors and policemen, gangster and gangster molls and stars and studio personnel who lived through Hollywood’s rowdy times during World War Two. “Humphrey Bogart, Private Dick” is available as an ebook on Amazon and elsewhere