Monopoly: A Novel of Atlantic City

By Wolcott Wheeler

In the classic hardboiled tradition of Dashiell Hammett's RED HARVEST and Raymond Chandler's FAREWELL, MY LOVELY, MONOPOLY by Wolcott Wheeler is a powerful new kind of private eye novel that tells for the first time the inside story of how the Mafia muscled into Atlantic City. On Labor Day weekend 1981, burnt-out New York private detective Scott Lawrence is driving down to the Jersey shore for a vacation when he picks up Debbie Miller, a pretty eighteen-year-old hitchhiker. When Debbie is victimized by small-town seashore cops, Scott comes to her defense, and in seeking to get her justice, he peels away the layers of corruption that surround Atlantic City and comes up against the Mafia in the midst of the terrifying New York-Philadelphia gang war of 1981-83.MONOPOLY is a vivid evocation of Atlantic City in the boom years of the early Eighties. It represents a new direction in private detective fiction, demonstrating an advanced stage of social and political consciousness seldom if ever seen in the genre before. With echoes of Norman Mailer's THE DEER PARK and Ross Macdonald's BLUE CITY, it brings to life the corruption of an American community against the bigger picture of postwar and post-Vietnam America in the age of Ronald Reagan. It's also the story of what one man can do when the bad guys take over the town.Wolcott Wheeler is a writer who lives in New York. Shortly after graduating from Princeton University, he became a screenwriter for Columbia Pictures in Hollywood and later lived in Japan. He is a historian, journalist, published haiku poet, comic book creator, and literary and political essayist who has published academically.Between 1980 and 1981, he was the Aide to the Mayor and Speechwriter to the Mayor of Atlantic City, Joseph Lazarow, who introduced legalized casino gambling to Atlantic City. The position gave him an unparalleled vantage point to write MONOPOLY. While living in the Atlantic City area between 1963 and 1987, he spent his summers on the island of Brigantine, NJ (the model for the fictional Beach City of MONOPOLY) between 1963 and 1977. Between 1977 and 1987, he lived fulltime in Brigantine, except for a year he spent in Hollywood as a screenwriter for Columbia Pictures. Most of MONOPOLY is based solidly on fact.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1095641522
• ISBN13: 9781095641521
• Release Date: April 2019
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 344 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.9" x 6.0"