Synopses & Reviews
Manifesto for the Dead tells the story of legendary crime writer Jim Thompson, as he makes his last stand in the decaying Aztec Hotel in Los Angeles, 1972. It is a book about desire and lust on the back lots of Hollywood, but
Manifesto is also a novel-within-a-novel. It tells two stories that intertwine one set in California, one in Texas each rushing headlong into the other when Thompson finds a dead starlet in the trunk of an abandoned Cadillac.
As the novel opens, the aging writer is at the end of his string. A habitue of Hollywood bars and fleabag hotels, it isn't long before he is approached to work on a project that will resurrect the career of a fading screen star.
Thompson accepts, and soon finds himself at the center of a lurid triangle, following a trail that leads from the dead starlet to the bloody doorstep of one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood.
Manifesto for the Dead is a surreal noir that takes as its main character the master of noir, the late crime novelist Jim Thompson at the end of his career, who suspects that he has been framed for murder. An intricate blend of biography, fiction, and suspense, this literary thriller offers a hair-raising portrait of one of crime fiction's most notorious true-life figures and a brutal satire of the entertainment industry in the tradition of The Day of the Locust.
Review
"A dark and brooding novel....Stansberry's prose is an eerie echo of a dead man's style. And his insights into a writer's anxiety about losing his identity to his characters would make Thompson's own skin crawl." The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Fascinating, beautifully written....Thompson is alive on the page, and the questions that Stansberry poses about the nature of noir seem part of Thompson's own disintegrating persona...an enviable achievement." San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"Stansberry buries a sense of cosmic foreboding in nearly every line. Through a poetics of menace that at times takes on a positively hallucinatory beauty, Stansberry exposes the Manichaean heart of noir." LA Weekly
Review
"[Stansberry's] occasional bleak zingers are offset by amateurishly purple prose, and Stansberry's Thompson doesn't write any better than Stansberry....At no point, sadly, does it sound like the real Jim Thompson." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Though committed Thompson fans may quibble, there's a lot in this bluntly articulate tale to like. The book-within-a-book concept, even if it develops at the expense of the plot line, flashes with Stansberry's brand of fresh, stark prose." Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
The publication of
The Last Days of Il Duce brought new fans to Stansberry and his mastery of classic noir. Now Stansberry turns to the seamy streets of Los Angeles in 1971.
Aging pulp novelist Jim Thompson is drinking away the end of his days in Hollywood bars. Then, hired to write a script about a low-life hired to kill a film exec's girlfriend, Thompson finds that his life begins to imitate his art as the producer plans to live the plot and leave Jim to take the fall.
This is top-notch noir blended with biography, fiction, suspense, and satire.
About the Author
Domenic Stansberry is a two-time Edgar Award nominee and Hammett Prize finalist whose earlier books include The Last Days of Il Duce, The Spoiler, and Exit Paradise. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area.