The Innocent

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Story goes, Vincent Zandri-prominent photo-journalist and globe-trotter-stumbled backwards into the story for this book, back in the nineties. He was working on the memoirs of some guy used to work as a prison guard at Sing Sing or Alcatraz or some such, when the basic premise of the novel As Catch Can came to him.

I don’t know if he ever wrote those memoirs. But in ‘99, As Catch Can was published and got all the accolades that a young writer always hopes for: it sold pretty well, the critics dug it, and there was even some vague stirrings of interest from the Cash Cow we call Hollywood. Riding on the success of As Catch Can, Zandri wrote another two novels and was well on his way to establishing himself as a major name in hardboiled fiction circles.

Then something happened, I dunno what. He dropped out. Some say Zandri-who, remember, is a sort of world-travelin’ action man type-was forced on the lam after seducing the wife of a prominent South-East Asian warlord. Some people were convinced he’d been murdered by a drug cartel after discovering a secret connection between them and the C.I.A. Others still were certain that Zandri had finally fallen into the bottle and was strapped up in some padded room in his hometown of Albany.

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