Stranger at Home: A George Sanders Mystery - Softcover

Sanders, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1911095838 ISBN 13: 9781911095835

Publisher: Dean Street Press, 2015

Synopsis

Four years. That’s how long it took Californian playboy Michael Vickers to regain his memory and come home.

Four years. That’s how long Vickers spent battered, bruised and south of the border, following the attack which sought to end his life – all because he’d mistaken a mortal enemy for a friend. Or a lover.

And now Vickers is looking for four years’ worth of payback from the devil responsible for his near-demise. But within days of Vickers’ return, a murder attempt is made on one of his suspects – and this time it succeeds. Enter a very shrewd detective, whose eyes are on everyone. Especially Vickers.

In Stranger at Home, the second George Sanders mystery novel, we are taken to a world removed from the backstage comic mystery of Crime on My Hands, but nonetheless a milieu very familiar to the actor – Southern California in the 1940’s. A world of stars and millionaires, but also vice, organized crime and shattered dreams. And Michael Vickers himself is a hero very much after the mould of Sanders’ irresistibly attractive screen persona – gilded and charming, languid and pleasure-seeking... but with a steely, remorseless core.

“The characters are hard-boiled, the language colorful and the solution elusive.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch “A first class whodunit of the tough school.” Richmond Times-Dispatch “The characters are varied and intriguing, the tale moves along at a gallop and the style is crisp and effective.” Columbus Dispatch

About this title

From the Inside Flap

The beach house party is in full swing, and the alcohol is flowing freely. Suddenly, a dead man appears. Michael Vickers had disappeared during a Mexican fishing trip with his three best friends four years ago, and no one has seen him since. But this evening, he is looking very much alive. Which is more than can be said of Harry Bryce. Harry's floating in the ocean shallows with a hole in his head, and the verdict is murder. Could Job Crandall have clubbed Harry down on the beach? Or Bill Saul? They were all there that night, all of Vicker's old “pals.” Or could it have been Vicker's wife, Angie, whom Harry was in love with? Or housekeeper/secretary Joan Merrill, trying to protect Angie's interests? Or did Vickers return from the grave to exact revenge on the friend who left him for dead? Detective-Lieutenant Joe Trehearne has got a lot of suspects, but only one of them had motive enough to kill.

About the Author

George Sanders was born in St Petersburg in 1906. He left Russia in 1917 with his family, who settled in England and had George educated at Bedales and Brighton College.

He made his British film debut in 1929, but it was in 1930’s Hollywood that he honed his distinctive, charming-yet-dangerous screen persona – the quintessential cad. Sanders co-starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent (both 1940), and went on to win an Academy Award for his signature role, that of Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950). He continued to work in films up until the year of his death in 1972.

In the 1940’s, Sanders’ film-star status was the impetus for his two crime novels, both featuring recognizably Sanders-esque heroes: Crime on My Hands (1944) and Stranger at Home (1946). In 1960 came a third book: his autobiography, fittingly titled Memoirs of A Professional Cad in which the line between fiction and fact is blurred even more convincingly – and wittily – than in the novels. All three works are available from Dean Street Press.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dean Street Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1911095838
• ISBN 13: 9781911095835
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 238