New Deal for Death: A Blackjack Endicott Novel - Softcover

The second in this posthumously published series featuring Boston banker-playboy Jack Endicott (The President's Man, 1991) is set in 1932, just after FDR's nomination for President. Roosevelt has lots of enemies besides Republicans; a powerful group of Hollywood movie men is among them--and his ideas on labor laws might considerably lessen their profits. Enlisting local gangsters, a plot is hatched to disgrace the nominee's California-based son Elliott. It misfires, thanks in large part to Jack, who has come to California with mistress Charlotte Wendell to protect his friend Roosevelt's interests. But a more menacing scheme soon develops- -this time no less than a plan for Roosevelt's assassination as he rides in an open car down the main avenue of L.A.--the hired gun an eccentric loner who's also a crack shot. How Jack foils this plan lends some badly needed excitement to a story slow to build and heavy with names dropped--from Douglas MacArthur to Rudy Vallee, along with a veritable catalogue of gangsters of the era (Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, etc., etc.). Painstakingly depicted details of food, dress, transportation and upper-class mores--along with a skirting glance at the Great Depression--provide a superficial lesson in recent history. The rest is mildly interesting and totally forgettable. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Before his death in 1990, the author completed this follow-up to The President's Man , again taking as his protagonist Boston bon vivant "Blackjack" Endicott, who serves as friend and protector to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Although the narrative succeeds in conveying a certain amount of period atmosphere (readers learn how airlines of the '30s accommodated passengers who needed to use the bathroom), the story is outlandish, the characters cartoonish and the constant name-dropping tiresome. Endicott, a yachtsman, race car driver, flier, lover and crack shot, must travel to Hollywood to foil an unholy alliance of film producers and crooked union leaders out to stop the newly nominated FDR from carrying out labor reform. First they plot to smear the presidential candidate through his son Elliott, falsely accused of impregnating a 16-year-old schoolgirl; then they attempt to assassinate Roosevelt when he visits Los Angeles. Abetted by Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, William Randolph Hearst, Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, Blackjack saves the day. Pure pulp.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.