Stark in the Bronx: A Detective Novel

Stark is an endangered species. He’s the last Jewish private detective in the south Bronx and his days may be numbered. It’s the summer of 1965: the Yankees are making another pennant run, the war in Vietnam is heating up, hemlines are rising and the old neighborhood is changing. These days it’s easier to stumble on a mugging than to find a good bagel. Stark is not a tough guy. In the trade, he’s what’s known as a peeper. His business is adultery and his weapon is a camera with a long lens not a snub-nose revolver. But Stark’s life is beginning to unravel. His wife left him, his secretary hates him, his mother wants to mother him, he can’t shake his shrink’s voice from his head and he’s got a strange pain in his chest. Then things go from bad to worse. He witnesses a shocking murder and suddenly Stark goes from being the hunter to the hunted, as he races through a decaying world of bookies, transvestites, loan sharks, slum lords and thugs for hire. ＂Stark in the Bronx＂ is the dazzling first novel by acclaimed historian Saul Landau. A kind of comic noir, Landau’s atmospheric novel is both thrilling and hilarious: imagine the ＂Maltese Falcon＂ narrated by Woody Allen.Praise for Saul Landau and Stark: ＂Saul Landau, like the narrator of ’The Great Gatsby, marvels at how the rich so joyously make messes secure in the knowledge that others will clean up. But what if, one day, they don’t?＂ -- Gore Vidal＂You’ll believe him, laugh with him, weep and get off your ass.＂ -- John Berger, author ＂Ways of Seeing＂

Saul Landau, an internationally-known scholar, author, commentator, and filmmaker on foreign and domestic policy issues. Landau’s most widely praised achievements are the over forty films he has produced on social, political and historical issues, and worldwide human rights, for which he won the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award, the George Polk Award for Investigative Reporting, and the First Amendment Award, as well as an Emmy for ＂Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang.＂ In 2008, the Chilean government presented him withthe Bernardo O’Higgins Award for his human rights work. Landau has written fourteen books including The Business of America, Pre-Emptive Empire and A Bush and Botox World. He received an Edgar Allen Poe Award for Assassination on Embassy Row, a report on the 1976 murders of Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier and his colleague, Ronni Moffitt. He is Professor Emeritus at California State University, Pomona. He is a senior Fellow at and Vice Chair of the Institute for Policy Studies..