Though the milieu of this boisterous novel is the American film industry, none of it takes place in Hollywood. Its locales are New York, Hamburg, the Arctic, Italy, London, the Queen Elizabeth, South Georgia Island and the Bavarian Alps – and in nearly all these places, someone is out to murder Tynan Bryson. And who is Tynan Bryson? The biggest draw in the history of the movies, that’s who –so big in fact, that he commands 100 percent of the gross of his latest film – a super flick being produced and directed by Albert McCobb, the well known Master of Suspense. Playing opposite Bryson is the beautiful and temperamental Caterina Largo, his female counterpart in cinematic glory, who also shares the distinction of being the first, second, third, and fourth wife. (Bryson suffers from satyriasis and has never been able to remain faithful for more than seventeen hours.)

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As the shooting on the film progresses and the attempts of Bryson’s life grow increasingly ingenious, public interest and hysteria mount (after one close call, the Dow-Jones average drops 22.3 points.)

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Each murderous attack is accompanied by a quotation from William Butler Yeats “The visible world is no longer a reality, and the unseen world is no longer a dream.”

 

Bryson wants to know what is really happening? Life or film script? For as the author satirically and hilariously demonstrates in his plot, sex and violence are Hollywood’s alpha and omega, the beginning and the end of all the lines at the box office.