Everyone

I was wrong! EVERYONE is interested in Vera Caspary's novel BACHELOR IN PARADISE. Looks like it will be our next Doomed Book Club selection. Ace Atkins and Scott Phillips are already onboard, so that's a good sign. And the anonymous Hollywood producer "favorited" my "tweet" on the subject BUT DOES THAT EVER MEAN ANYTHING? Megan tells me that the novel is based on a treatment Caspary did for the Bob Hope movie, and that a great pulp illustrator named Robert McGinnis did the cover for the paperback (I'm not sure it's the one above), and that McGinnis is still around and occasionally turning out new covers for the Hard Case Crime imprint. ("Known for drawing women w impossibly long feet!" Megan tweeted at me.) McNeil, basing his observations on the film versions of BACHELOR IN PARADISE and Caspary's novel LAURA, claims to have already spotted a connection between the "outta control soap" scene in BACHELOR IN PARADISE and what he calls "the highly mannered and homo-erotic soap situation involving Clifton Webb's bath" in LAURA. I have to say I don't recall the "outta control soap" scene in BACHELOR IN PARADISE. I'll soon fix that. Finally, the mention of an ice bucket in this selection from Rosemary Clooney's autobiography prompted Megan to email it to me: "Just a few months before, I'd been sleeping - or trying to - in a room over the clattering kitchen in a honky-tonk in Wildwood, New Jersey, where Dizzy Gillespie was working on his tan in the parking lot, wearing only a leopard-skin thong. Now I was swaddled in the silence of an air-conditioned suite: ankle-deep snowy carpet, silver bucket of champagne, more roses." I have to say that clattering kitchen and parking lot don't sound too bad either!