George AxelrodGold Medal 248
Axelrod is probably best known for writing The Seven-Year Itch, resulting in an okay film that in turn led to a truly horrible piece of public art in downtown Chicago for the past year.
Blackmailer collides Hollywood with the world of publishing. Our narrator is an editor at a broken-down book house that deals primarily in word puzzles. Suddenly he has the chance to acquire the final manuscript by a world class author (which gives Axelrod the opportunity to take a few swipes at Hemingway). The only problem is multiple people are pressuring him to buy the manuscript, leading to a murder and sundry other pulp twists of fate. Issues are complicated by the return of our publishing hero's old flame, now a big star in Hollywood.
Hard Case republished this in 2006, but it's not one of their better finds, I'm afraid. Wholly generic, completely forgettable, and so bored with itself that it actually uses "voice-throwing" as the device for revealing the who in whodunit.
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