LOOKING FOR GINGER

Mired in scandal and blighted by excess, the wayward director Erich von Stroheim rarely saw his films reach the screen in the form he made them. Taken out of his hands, butchered and suppressed by the studios for whom he worked, much of Stroheim's work remains lost.Reginald Drewitt had once worked as a stuntman in Hollywood. Taping his reminiscences as an old man, a passing remark suggests an acquaintance once owned a copy of a silent film by Erich von Stroheim.Anyone else might have dismissed the anecdote as the ramblings of a confused mind. Not Mallory. For him the garbled remark is nothing less than fate offering him a last chance of redemption.Although no more than a slim lead to a vanished and now legendary film, Mallory is determined to track it down But first has to find the man who once supposedly owned it. When he does, though, he finds Tommy Beauchamp, the stuntman's old friend, has an agenda of his own.Beauchamp's grandson Guy disappeared a decade earlier. Now what is left of his submerged car has been discovered in a harbour and Beauchamp wants to know if the bones found inside are all that remain of the boy.Was Guy already dead, or did he drown? Accident or murder? Either way Guy's death seems to have strange echoes of the fate of the star of Stroheim's vanished film. Her name was Carlotta Cortez and she was found one morning at the bottom of her own swimming pool.There had already been too many scandals in Hollywood and another was one too many for her studio. Despite the rumours they insisted her death was an accident.Certainly not murder.