Bøker av Terry Mort

Hollywood in the Thirties: Nazi saboteurs, gangsters running gambling ships, British spies and diplomats, FBI agents, starlets looking for the big break, cheap hustlers on the fringes of the law, local cops-some are friends and some are adversaries, but all are involved someho...

The eve of World War II. A Hollywood producer's murdered wife. Her husband's guilty memory of a shipboard romance. A stolen painting signed "Picasso." French gangsters. A beautiful courtesan. A shoot-out in a brasserie. All these and more confront Private Detective Riley Fitzh...

In Hunters in the Stream, Riley Fitzhugh goes through officer training and is assigned to PC 475, a new anti-U-boat vessel stationed in Key West. The 475 is nicknamed Nameless by her crew because patrol craft vessels were only given numbers. Nameless cruises the Gulf of Mexico in search of U-boats, goes to the rescue of a sinking oil tanker, stops in Havana for meetings with the Cuban Navy, and learns of a possible secret German U-boat fueling station in the wilds of eastern Cuba. Nameless locates the base and destroys it with the ship's gunfire and a coordinated small-arms attack led by Fitzhugh and his shore party. Later, another U-boat is reported damaged and sinking. The German survivors capture a Bahamian turtle boat, murder the crew, and head for Cuba, thinking that the fuel dump is still in operation. Fitzhugh and the Nameless pursue through the tangle of mangroves and Cuban keys, find the Germans, and finish them off in a shootout. Along the way, Fitzhugh meets Ernest Hemingway and toward the end tells him about the Nameless's adventures. Hemingway thinks about adapting the story for his own. Fitzhugh and Hemingway's wife, writer Martha Gellhorn, also meet and feel some mutual stirrings--and give in to them.

Riley Fitzhugh is recruited by the OSS for temporary duty as a naval spy in Morocco. Riley's assignment is to kidnap a French river pilot and extract him from Casablanca. Riley meets an old flame from his days in Hollywood and these two have some surprises waiting for them.

Riley Fitzhugh is temporarily assigned as officer in charge of the naval guard on board the SS Carlota, a merchant ship assigned to deliver bombs and aviation fuel to the Sebou River during Operation Torch.

From the summer of 1942 until the end of 1943, Ernest Hemingway spent much of his time patrolling the Gulf Stream and the waters off Cuba’s north shore in his fishing boat, Pilar. He was looking for German submarines. These patrols were sanctioned and managed by the US Navy and were a small but useful part of anti-submarine warfare at a time when U boat attacks against merchant shipping in the Gulf and the Caribbean were taking horrific tolls. While almost no attention has been paid to these patrols, other than casual mention in biographies, they were a useful military contribution as well as a central event (to Hemingway) around which important historical, literary, and biographical themes revolve.

In February 1861, the twelve-year-old son of Arizona rancher John Ward was kidnapped by Apaches. Ward followed their trail and reported the incident to patrols at Fort Buchanan, blaming a band of Chiricahuas led by the infamous warrior Cochise. Though Ward had no proof that Cochise had kidnapped his son, Lt. George Bascom organized a patrol and met with the Apache leader, who, not suspecting anything was amiss, had brought along his wife, his brother, and two sons. Despite Cochise's assertions that he had not taken the boy and his offer to help in the search, Bascom immediately took Cochise's family hostage and demanded the return of the boy. An incensed Cochise escaped the meeting tent amidst flying bullets and vowed revenge.What followed that precipitous encounter would ignite a Southwestern frontier war between the Chiricahuas and the US Army that would last twenty-five years. In the days following the initial melee, innocent passersby-Apache, white, and Mexican-would be taken as hostages on both sides, and almost all of them would be brutally slaughtered. Cochise would lead his people valiantly for ten years of the decades-long war.Thousands of lives would be lost, the economies of Arizona and New Mexico would be devastated, and in the end, the Chiricahua way of life would essentially cease to exist.In a gripping narrative that often reads like an old-fashioned Western novel, Terry Mort explores the collision of these two radically different cultures in a masterful account of one of the bloodiest conflicts in American frontier history.