…last updated: 18th April 2012…

Welcome to…

…a series of novels following three naïve hopefuls as they leap and lurch, win and lose their way though Hollywood’s golden years. If you love Armistead Maupin’s
Tales of the City books, you’ll want to get lost in The Garden of Allah.

 

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Book 1 – “The Garden on Sunset”

In 1927, violet-eyed Alla Nazimova, the highest paid and most famous actress in the world, converted her Sunset Boulevard movie star mansion into a hotel and dubbed it The Garden of Allah. Before you could say Prohibition-Schmohibition, it became the fabled dream residence of ambitious hopefuls in Hollywood. The likes of Tallulah Bankhead, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Bogart & Bacall, Gary Cooper, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Errol Flynn, Harpo Marx, Orson Welles, and others walked, wobbled, wandered, and wafted through its doors and sometimes into its pool. Drunk. Or naked. Or both. And rarely alone.

Drawn to this hallowed haven is Marcus Adler. His father has run him out of Pennsylvania and there is only one address he knows: 8152 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood—the home of the luminous Nazimova, a diaphanous vision in lavender tulle who once visited him when he was a child sick with diphtheria. “Come visit me any time,” she whispered into his ear. He takes her at her word, but finds her home is now a hotel. With nowhere else to go, he checks in and thinks, Now what? There he meets Kathryn Massey, who has run away from her overbearing stage mother to pursue a career as a journalist—God forbid a girl in Hollywood would actually want to use her brains—and Gwendolyn Brick, a hopeful actress from The Other Hollywood—Hollywood, Florida—who has come to try her luck in Glitter City. The girl is blessed and cursed with a pair of lips the men in this town would be lining up to have a go at. She won’t be able to fight them off on her own.

They band together: three naïve hopefuls madly dog-paddling against a tidal wave of threadbare casting couches, nervous bootleggers, human billboards, round-the-world zeppelins, sinking gambling boats, waiters in black face, William Randolph Hearst, the Long Beach earthquake, starlets, harlots, Harlows and Garbos. READ MORE

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Coming late 2012

The Garden of Allah novels: Book 2

“The Trouble with Scarlett”

Summer, 1936: Gone with the Wind is released by first-time author Margaret Mitchell and becomes an international sensation. Everyone in Hollywood knows that Civil War pictures don’t make a dime, but renegade movie producer David O. Selznick snaps up the movie rights and suddenly the talk around dinner tables and cocktail parties across the country is fixated on just one question: Who will win the role of Scarlett O’Hara? READ MORE

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The Garden of Allah novels: Book 3

“Citizen Hollywood”

It’s 1939 – Orson Welles, the enfant terrible of New York, is coming to Hollywood to make his first movie. Tinsel City is agog! Can he even direct a movie? What will it be about? Will he scandalize the West Coast the way he’s shocked the East Coast? And, more importantly, who will he bed first and does he kiss-and-tell?

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→ Learn more about ALLA NAZIMOVA

→ Learn more about the GARDEN OF ALLAH HOTEL

→ Follow Martin on FACEBOOK (“gardenofallahnovels”)

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→ Check out Martin’s The Garden of Allah Novels blog

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Copyright © 2011, Martin Turnbull. All rights reserved.

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