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Me and Orson Welles |
| A Novel | |
| by Robert Kaplow | |
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MacAdam/Cage, 2003 |
"This is the story of one week in my life. I was seventeen. It was the week I slept in Orson Welles's pajamas. It was the week I fell in love. And it was the week I changed my middle name – twice."
So begins Me and Orson Welles, a comic coming-of-age novel set against the background of the twenty-two-year-old Orson Welles's debut production at the Mercury Theatre on Broadway. Richard Samuels is the stage-struck seventeen-year-old from New Jersey who wanders onto the set one day and gets a small role in Welles's Julius Caesar. His life will never be the same.
With humor and pathos, Kaplow evokes a lost era in theatrical history. At the same time, he has created a compelling romantic comedy whose protagonist finds himself in the center of an exhilarating vortex of celebrity, ego, art, and love.
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America's most beloved writer, Lilian Jackson Braun, author of twenty-five Cat Who... mysteries, is now the subject of a mystery herself. In Robert Kaplow's brilliant and bawdy parody, Ms. Braun's headless body has been discovered in the men's room of a bar in Lower Manhattan. The police are busy filming reality television shows, so it falls to Braun's writer friend James Qafka and his Siamese cats, Ying-Tong and Poon-Tang, to solve the ghastly mystery.
Q's quest leads him on a wildly satirical chase that combines the spirits of Lenny Bruce, Dashiell Hammett, and the Hope/Crosby "Road" pictures. Before it's over, we've encountered a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, a sex-starved suburban housewife, a mysterious Hollywood diary, Harry Houdini, a sinister cult, and two gifted cats who lead Q. and his spunky undergraduate assistant to finally unravel the riddle of The Cat Who Killed Lilian Jackson Braun.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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Satirist Robert Kaplow is the creator of Moe Moskowitz and the Punsters for NPR's Morning Edition. He is a teacher and the author of four highly acclaimed novels.
