DOUBLE FEATURE

About the Book

“… a kind of brilliance that sets it apart … the strategies, such as movie references organized in footnotes and an index, lend the book a strange, even Nabokovian, air that is unique …”

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

In Double Feature, sex, scandal, and mystery all come together in the biographical tale of the life of Leland Granger, a Hollywood film director. When Leland is assumed to have died in a fire, it may have been an accident or the work of a murderous arsonist. All that’s found in the ashes of his home in Chappaqua is Granger’s wedding band, and there are whispers that someone else may have died in the blaze.

Everyone in Leland’s life has their own story to tell, and they are all conflicting. His neurotic twenty-year-old daughter, Debby, tells the world that her father is the first true American auteur. The narrator, who has known Granger since his college days as Leon Grossman, gives a coolly sarcastic evaluation of the man who gained posthumous fame with the success of his only feature film, which was shot on the island of Mallorca.

Then, of course, there is Granger’s wife, his lover, colleagues, and a handful of friends. All of them have something to say about the director and his film as they share their revelations and reminiscences in this riveting novel.

"After a film director dies in a mysterious fire, there is more than one side to the story of his life. Movie director Leland Granger sought acclaim his entire life, but only achieved his goal after his death. His sole feature film is released posthumously, and his daughter Debby pens a biography to establish her father’s status as an auteur, despite the efforts of those, she contends, who undermined him. However, Leland’s longtime friend Paul Garvey sees things differently. Paul levies his judgment upon the biography, while sharing his perspective on the man he had known since college, when he was just the asthmatic, eccentric Leon Grossman from Milwaukee. While Debby’s sensationalist, pretentious tell-all, The Celluloid Umbilical, is widely panned and revealed to be largely fictional, Paul provides particular insight into her flights of fancy, having been present at many of the events she describes. His motive in debunking Debby’s book isn’t simply devotion to the truth or his friend’s memory—he’s defending himself and others against the character assassination she undertakes, which goes so far as to implicate him in the fire that killed her parents. The narrative is a deliciously sarcastic tale, packed with Hollywood history told from an insider’s viewpoint, but the language is often too clever for its own good. Wolfe throws himself wholeheartedly into his novel’s conceit, even supplying numerous footnotes citing Debby’s fictional biography and those of other figures involved, as well as an index. But the meta-fictional premise, which brings Paul Auster to mind, isn’t quite sufficient enough to sustain the reader’s interest for 300 pages. The book ultimately ends with an unsatisfying whimper. Adding to the post-modern resonance, Double Feature has been published posthumously; Wolfe, a longtime Hollywood writer, died in 2007. A Hollywood whodunit told in compelling, if at times verbose, style." Kirkus Discoveries

About the Author

Glenn P. Wolfe, a native of Wisconsin, was a longtime Hollywood writer, mastering his craft in radio, television, and film. Later, he became a novelist. Wolfe died of lung cancer in his Maryland home in 2007 while working on a novel about memory--with baseball as its metaphor--which will be published soon.