Jimmy and Fay

August 1, 2016
The core of this novel is a delight. It's 1933, and Fay Wray is in New York to push her film King Kong. A blackmailer is spoiling the fun by demanding $6,000 to bury photos of Miss Wray in various stages of undress. Studio moguls and Manhattan cops choose speakeasy owner Jimmy Quinn to handle negotiations. Why? Jimmy is puzzled, since Miss Wray is out of his league, and the photos are obvious fakes. Readers will likely not care too much because the book's tour through the last days of Prohibition is such a naughty treat. A fiver was a sawbuck then, and women were dames; somebody actually says, hubba hubba, and it's still OK to call Italian wine dago red. After Jimmy discovers the secrets beneath the blackmail scheme, various plot strands need to be tied up, but we really don't care much about that. What we want is to stay a little longer in this world of nasty gin and the gamier examples of the complete New York speakeasy experience, when FDR was about to bring back booze and end the fun.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

August 22, 2016
In Mayo’s uneven third Prohibition-era suspense novel featuring Manhattan speakeasy owner Jimmy Quinn (after 2015’s Everybody Goes to Jimmy’s), movie star Fay Wray hires Jimmy to act as a
go-between and deliver $6,000 in extortion money to suppress the publication of some dirty pictures that feature a Fay Wray lookalike in an ersatz King Kong production. Jimmy’s search for the lookalike involves visiting Polly Adler, who runs an upscale prostitution ring; holding off Gotham Comet columnist Saxon Dunbar, who’s hot for a juicy story; and confronting pornographer Oscar Apollinaire, who has a link to the naughty photos that Wray wants destroyed. Mayo does a good job evoking the 1930s, and he has a great ear for hard-boiled dialogue. He generates some intrigue as Quinn tries to figure out why his girlfriend isn’t speaking to him and why some heavies sacrificed a goat in the offices of a foundation for wayward girls. But, alas, the answers to both of these questions are, like the main story line, less interesting than they ought to be. Agent: Otto Penzler.