THE (IM)PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY by Craig McDonald

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Retcon. That’s a relatively newish term that’s a contraction for “retroactive continuity.” Typically you’re going to run into this when a long-running print or film series reckons it’s time to inject fresh blood or your lead actor has to be recast. Take the current Bond flicks as voguish example: Daniel Craig enters as a tyro, … Continue reading THE (IM)PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY by Craig McDonald

Excerpt: Roll the Credits

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FRANCE: 1940   In the old days, if a horse stumbled three times you shot it in the head. As far as I was concerned, our driver had just made his second stumble. Well, arguably it was his third if you counted a certain slip of the tongue earlier in the late-morning. I’d wondered at Billy’s … Continue reading Excerpt: Roll the Credits

Excerpt: The Great Pretender

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1 THE STRANGER   “Perception is reality, that’s how the saying goes, isn’t it, Hec?” Hector Lassiter, novelist, screenwriter, and for the moment, literary executor, looked down at all the chilly pedestrians scurrying through the autumn wind tearing along Fifth Avenue. The fierce wind made eyes water and noses run down there. Up here the wind cut to bone. He … Continue reading Excerpt: The Great Pretender

Book trailer for THE GREAT PRETENDER by Craig McDonald

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Available soon, THE GREAT PRETENDER by Craig McDonald: Orson Welles, voodoo curses, Nazi occultists, the War of the Worlds Panic Broadcast of 1938, the secret history behind the noir classic, THE THIRD MAN, and a search for the Spear of Destiny. Watch the book trailer here:

TOROS & TORSOS: surrealist art and murder in our time?

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The Hector Lassiter series is all about secret history — a blending of fact and fiction that aims to get at something like the hidden truth. "Toros & Torsos" spins on the premise that surrealist art may have informed or inspired several bloody, unsolved crimes of the 20th Century. Life imitating art… art imitating death, … Continue reading TOROS & TORSOS: surrealist art and murder in our time?

Excerpt: Toros & Torsos

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NO GOOD DEED 1 “Can I sit with you for a time, sir?” A silky voice — alto, but strained. The young woman said, “I think a man in this place may mean me harm.” Hector Lassiter looked up from his notebook. She was 23, maybe 24. Pretty, poised and flustered. Hector had seen her … Continue reading Excerpt: Toros & Torsos

Excerpt: One True Sentence

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PARIS: FEBRUARY 1924 “It is the fate of every myth to creep by degrees into the narrow limits of some historical reality, and to be treated by some later generations as a unique fact with historical claims.” — Nietzsche   Snow falling on the Seine. It was half-past-two and it was quiet as it gets … Continue reading Excerpt: One True Sentence

For Hector Lassiter’s fans: the first chapter of RHAPSODY IN BLACK

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Over the years, Craig McDonald has been asked if he would write a Hector Lassiter novel in the sense of creating a novel BY Hector Lassiter. Here, for the first time, is the first chapter of Hector's OWN debut novel, RHAPSODY IN BLACK, a novel that we see Hector drafting in ONE TRUE SENTENCE: http://bit.ly/1kUhCe6