The Case of the Shaggy Stalker

Once again there’s a chance that the first Sam August film will be made because handsome and virile leading man Robert Wagner is interested. Joe Bernardi, the fertile brain behind this literary super spy, can’t wait to pin Wagner down to a contract, but when he visits the set of Paul Newman’s newest film, ‘Harper , in which Wagner co-stars, strange circumstances pop into view. Why is Wagner’s newest stand-in being introduced to him as Ben Boxer when Joe knows perfectly well that Boxer’s real name is Gunnar Larsen, the number one guy in private investigator Cosmo Stryker’s stable of operatives. And why can’t he get straight answers to simple questions? What does Wagner need to hide? A great deal, it turns out. A schlock novelist from his wife Marian’s past has turned up and is scaring the devil out of the entire family. Notifying the police is only asking for unwanted publicity, hence the services of Cosmo Stryker. But when the novelist, Horatio Cummings, is murdered in a back alley, the circumstances clumsily arranged to look like a mugging gone bad, Wagner suddenly becomes suspect number one. Luckily there exist suspects number two, three and four, etc. For example a five foot tall Cockney femme fatale and her Irish lawyer or the on-the-cheap B Movie producer Garrison King or lumbering Tough Tony Trippi, once a hero on Omaha Beach, now one of the most feared loan sharks in the city. And what’s all this have to do with a woman who lays dying in a hospice in Belfast, Northern Ireland? Joe is going to have to do a lot of unraveling to get Wagner out of hot water and into his cherished movie.