Two O'Clock Eastern Wartime Export - Softcover

Dunning, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743417259 ISBN 13: 9780743417259

Publisher: Pocket Books, 2001

Synopsis

It's the summer of 1942 at radio station WHAR on the New Jersey coast. As bombs fall on Britain, a troupe of gallant actors, sound effects people, writers, and producers explores the promise of this exhilarating medium, struggling to create programming that entertains, informs, and enlightens its listeners.

Into this intense community come Jack Dulaney and Holly Carnahan, determined to find Holly's missing father, who sent his last desperate missive from this noisy seaside town. Holly sings like an angel and quickly becomes a star. Jack -- a onetime novelist who's hit every kind of trouble -- gets hooked by the extraordinary power of radio and discovers that he can write scripts with the best of them.

Holly's father is nowhere to be found, and soon it seems that his disappearance may be linked to an English actor who walked out of the station six years earlier and was never seen again. It is a link that sonic people will do anything to hide -- including murder.

Like E. L. Doctorow in Billy Bathgate or Caleb Carr in The Alienist, Dunning has written a magnificent story of mystery, murder, and revenge that brings to life another era.

About this title

Review:

John Dunning's previous novels featuring a sleuth who's an expert in rare and collectible books won this former bookstore owner a devoted following; first editions of Booked to Die and The Bookman's Wake routinely fetch high sums in stores like the one Dunning himself owned for many years. With the verisimilitude that's a hallmark of his writing, Dunning delves into a new topic, the golden days of radio, igniting the reader's excitement about the enormous potential of the medium. Sadly, he can't assuage the inevitable disappointment over how that potential was wasted:

"Radio is the greatest invention of the past four centuries. It ranks right up there with Gutenberg's movable type as an earthshaking force.... One of the first things Gutenberg did with his movable type was print a magnificent Bible. The first thing radio did was argue how much selling would be permitted and how ridiculous it would be allowed to get. If it keeps on the way it's going there won't be anything worth listening to.... I have this almost morbid fear of the future--not that radio's greatest days will fade away but that its greatest day will never come. Fifty years from now it could just be a medium of hucksters and fools, a whorehouse in the sky."

The speaker is Jack Dulaney, a novelist who follows a dead man's trail to the Jersey shore in the early days of World War II, where a radio station owned by a recluse has fallen on hard times. The mysterious Harford, who built the station as a showcase for his late wife's ambition, has all but abandoned WHAR, but the actors, writers, producers, and technicians who once shared the dead woman's dream are galvanized by the appearance of Dulaney, who finds his true métier in the creation of original, politically provocative broadcast dramas. He also discovers true love in a talented young singer, Holly Carnahan, whose affections he once sacrificed out of loyalty to his best friend.

Carnahan's search for her missing father involves Dulaney in a mystery rooted in the long-ago Boer War that has grown into a conspiracy peopled by German saboteurs, Irish nationalists, and African freedom fighters. The plotting is dense and the cast of minor characters merely sketched, but Dulaney's creative process is artfully drawn and the ambience of America in wartime is skillfully portrayed. --Jane Adams

About the Author:

John Dunning is the Nero Wolfe Award-wining author of Booked to Die and The Bookman's Wake, a New York Times Notable Book of 1995. An expert on rare and collectible books, he owned the Old Algonquin Bookstore in Denver. He is also an expert on American radio history and the author of On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio and was for many years host of the weekly Denver radio show "Old Time Radio." John Dunning lives in Denver, Colorado.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pocket Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0743417259
• ISBN 13: 9780743417259
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1