It Pays to Re-request Books that You don't Pick up at the Library

So it was with Lillian and Dash by Sam Toperoff.  The hold expired when I was savoring Brave Genius for weeks on end.  (Unbelievably, the fine was only $3.60.)  And the real life Nick and Nora was still waiting on the shelf for me.

I love Thin Man movies with William Powell and Myrna Loy as the Nick and Nora and from my point of view, there are never enough film festivals of these wonderful double entendre repartee movies.   But I have never read anything by either Lillian Hellman or Dashiell Hammett, let alone never heard of Toperoff.  Toperoff's books are not to be found in our library network and even on Amazon his reviews can be counted on one hand despite having written books with interesting titles about the Pittsburgh Steelers, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean.  Meanwhile, I have reserved a copy of the Thin Man and a collection of Hellman's plays

This biographical novel is a segue for me, still looking for stories stuffed with lust yet with intelligence and wit.  But, it is a wonderful contrast to Brave Genius as well.  Dash's involvement in WWII was basically an attempt to recapture his youth, not anything that was motivated by higher values; Lillian seemed manipulated, first by movie producers and Hemingway to film the Spanish Civil War and then by FDR and his son to do a propaganda piece that was very pro-Russia.  Both ended up before HUAC, bizarre given their arguments about FDR

Lillian and Dash had years of separation in their decades long love affair:  she filming the war in Spain and Russia, he enlisting in his late forties and being shipped off to Alaska, she writing for Broadway plays, he trying to get work and stay sober in Hollywood.  Dash was married, Catholic and easily tempted, as was Lillian, but Jewish.  Her writing flourished under his advise.  They did the 21, he won $23,000 at the '41 Santa Anita Handicap.  I am easily lost in fantasy of a love story with painful lows and dizzying highs

Did Hammett or Toperoff write the letters to Lillian?  Does every man say the same things to the woman he loves the most?  "To never see you again is a fate I deserve ... still I can't imagine living out my live -- our lives --and never again spending an evening with you ... To never see you again would be impossible for me.  So how and when becomes the issue, and those are entirely up to you.  I'll wait ..." and again "I miss your face.  I miss your brains.  I miss you.  I have always missed you."  Such simple words stop me cold.