Lillian Hellman in Bloomingdale’s

It's 1953. Lillian Hellman is broke, blacklisted by Hollywood studios and television networks. The IRS and the House Un-American Activities Committee are after her. Hammett is in jail. She has no choice but to take a day job under an assumed name in the bedding department at Bloomingdale's-but when her identity is unmasked and the whistleblower found dead in a sleeper sofa, Hellman becomes the NYPD's Prime Suspect. Launching her own independent investigation to save her skin, the inspiration for the character of Nora Charles in Hammett's The Thin Man finds the crime rooted in her own combative days among the literary elites of the turbulent 30s, the seething depravity at the American embassy in the besieged Soviet capital of Moscow, the Communist infiltration of the entertainment industry's guilds and waterfront labor unions, and the bisexual underbelly of Broadway musicals and Hollywood sound stages. It ensnares the young up-and-coming Foreign Service officer who took her to new heights of ecstasy and despair (and whose career she destroyed), and ultimately brings her to an underground bunker in the middle of Central Park, where the bloody consequences of her radical politics forces her to confront her own heart of darkness. This choice, between principle and conscience, is at the core of Lillian Hellman in Bloomingdale's-unless, as her detractors maintain to this day, it's all just another of her melodramatic and self-serving lies.

Lillian Hellman in Bloomingdale’s has been gestating in Lawrence Alexander’s mind for three decades, triggered by an off-the-cuff reference suggesting that the revered and reviled playwright was so impoverished by the blacklist of the early 1950s that she had been forced to take a job as a salesclerk in a New York City department store. The author of three Theodore Roosevelt mystery novels published by Doubleday and Knightsbridge-The Big Stick, Speak Softly, and The Strenuous Life-it was only when research revealed that Hellman had a heretofore unmentioned lover every bit as major in her life as Dashiell Hammett that Alexander began to write the novel, intrigued by the intersection of her romantic liaisons, her radical politics, and her influential position as one of America’s foremost playwrights. Residing in Los Angeles, California, the author has written well over 125 hours of network television episodes for such legendary shows as Streets of San Francisco, Charlie’s Angels, Cannon, and CHiPs, several feature films, and the lyrics and librettos for several theatrical musicals, including the Lincoln Center production of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine at what is now the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. He is the father of two grown children.