Part of Series
A copywriter’s wife has vanished, and only John Easy is slick enough to save her Jim Benning makes $25,000 a year writing drivel for the admen at the Arbogast & Joseph Agency, and his wife thinks he’s worth a whole lot less. Joanna is a model: nervous, beautiful, and prone to meltdowns. In a last-ditch attempt to save their marriage, she agrees to a few sessions with a psychiatrist in San Ignacio—a quack whose psychobabble is more sinister than it appears. But when Joanna disappears, Jim’s only hope is John Easy, the hippest P.I. in Hollywood. Jim gives John a matchbook found in his wife’s purse for a club called Maybe—a swinger’s hideout where morality is not in style—and John plunges into the seedy side of sunny San Ignacio, where the copywriter’s wife led an entirely different sort of existence. To save Joanna from her shadow self, John Easy will have to swing harder than ever before.
Author
Pseudonyms: Howard Lee; Frank S Shawn; Kenneth Robeson; Con Steffanson; Josephine Kains; Joseph Silva; William Shatner. Ron Goulart is a cultural historian and novelist. Besides writing extensively about pulp fiction—including the seminal Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of Pulp Magazines (1972)—Goulart has written for the pulps since 1952, when the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction published his first story, a sci-fi parody of letters to the editor. Since then he has written dozens of novels and countless short stories, spanning genres and using a variety of pennames, including Kenneth Robeson, Joseph Silva, and Con Steffanson. In the 1990s, he became the ghostwriter for William Shatner’s popular TekWar novels. Goulart’s After Things Fell Apart (1970) is the only science-fiction novel to ever win an Edgar Award. In the 1970s Goulart wrote novels starring series characters like Flash Gordon and the Phantom, and in 1980 he published Hail Hibbler, a comic sci-fi novel that began the Odd Jobs, Inc. series. Goulart has also written several comic mystery series, including six books starring Groucho Marx. Having written for comic books, Goulart produced several histories of the art form, including the Comic Book Encyclopedia (2004).
