The Big Perhaps

Thirty years after the unsolved murder of hardboiled fiction writer Dan Fargo, a single orphaned manuscript page turns up that could be evidence of a previously unknown novel by the author.

Private detective Harry Webster is hired by a wealthy fan to prove or disprove the existence of this long rumoured masterpiece, The Big Perhaps.

It appears on the surface to be a tricky but safe assignment, unlike Webster’s previous cases, which have involved him in several brutal murders and a couple of relationships that didn’t end happily.

In search of the Big Perhaps he crosses paths with a stoner crime fiction buff, a slacker bookseller, an attractive wiccan, Fargo’s old agent (a lady as hardboiled as any fictional p.i,) and Fargo’s best friend, a former Hollywood B movie director with a sentimental attachment to the poems of Walt Whitman.

One of them will lie, one of them will die as Webster races to find the elusive manuscript, pitted against an invisible enemy who seems determined the Big Perhaps should stay lost for good and is prepared to kill to make sure it does. There are essentially three mysteries to be resolved – the fate of The Big Perhaps, the killing of Dan Fargo and the identity of a present day killer.

The answers involve untangling the dead author’s turbulent past, which stretches back through Hollywood in the McCarthy era to immediate post-Nazi Germany , where Fargo’s part in one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the Second World War is revealed.