Manifesto for the Dead is a surreal noir that takes as its main character the master of noir, the late crime novelist Jim Thompson at the end of his career, suspecting he has been framed by a Hollywood producer for the murder of a young starlet. An intricate blend of biography, fiction, and suspense, this literary thriller offers a hair-raising portrait of one of crime fiction's most notorious true-life figures-and a brutal satire of the entertainment industry in the tradition of The Day of the Locust. ¡ As the novel opens, the aging writer is at the end of his string-a habitǔ of Hollywood bars and endless drinking sessions at the Musso & Frank Grill. Here he is approached by a small-time producer, Billy Miracle, with an offer to work on a project designed to resurrect the career of a fading screen star. ¡ Thompson accepts, and soon finds himself at the center of a lurid triangle, inadvertently following a trail that leads from a dead starlet-found strangled in the back of a Cadillac-to the doorstep of one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. ¡ Set in the seamy back streets of Los Angeles, in 1972, Manifesto for the Dead tells the story of legendary crime writer Jim Thompson in his darkest hour. It is a book about desire and lust, about a writer struggling with illusion, disillusion and fate on the back lots of Hollywood. But the Manifesto is also a novel-within-a-novel, telling two stories that intertwine-one set in Hollywood, the other in Thompson's imagination-each rushing headlong into the other, into that area where fact and fiction are no longer distinguishable, and the darkness is inseparable from the light

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