The Glass Heart / The Sleeping City

The Glass Heart / The Sleeping City

THE GLASS HEART Down on his luck, Curt snatches an overcoat and is chased by the police into a Beverly Hills neighborhood where he meets Mrs. Virginia Block. Virginia is expecting a new handyman to show up, and Curt quickly snags the position. He doesn’t realize that this seemingly sweet old woman is a rich miser, and finds himself working for pennies as her gardener, her chauffeur, and whatever else she needs to maintain her huge house. Then Lynn, as aspiring actress, moves in, and things don’t seem so bad there after all. But it isn’t until Curt discovers Mrs. Block’s secret that he finds out what kind of a goldmine he’s sitting on. All he has to do is figure out is how to work it... and then stay alive. THE SLEEPING CITY Officer Wade Reed is given his mission, to pose as a member of the Les Ties gang and infiltrate a local mob. As Jim Cox, he is an out-of-town gunman who has been hired to help with a heist set up by Louie Thompson, an old-style prohibition hoodlum who’s planning a comeback. It’s Wade’s job to find out the details and report back to the Gangster Squad. One false move from Jim Cox, and Wade’s fiancée Betty will have to find a new husband. But Wade doesn’t figure on Thompson’s girl Madge. At first she seems like a real tough cookie. But once she gets under Wade’s skin, he begins to have his doubts about the mission. Can he protect Madge and still stop the heist? "Raw, unadorned, a little brutal, here is the authentic melodrama of the American scene…" --James M. Cain “As odd as the mix of noir and romance was in Fallen Angel, Holland’s brew for The Glass Heart was even weirder, with the antihero … caught up in strange romantic entanglements with a murder-minded landlady, a religious-minded lass, and a woman acting the part of femme fatale …” --Sarah Weinman, Los Angeles Review of Books “The Glass Heart is a grimy, hard-boiled tale of lust, murder and blackmail … Written with great snappy dialogue, the plot oozes noir.” --His Futile Preoccupations…. Marty Holland was born Mary Hauenstein in 1919 in Beaverdam, Ohio. She began writing at 12, and after moving to Hollywood with her family, she got a job as a script typist for the movie studios. Her writing career began with short stories for the pulps before her first novel in 1945, Fallen Angel, which she sold to 20th Century Fox and was immediately filmed by Otto Preminger. She followed this with The Glass Heart, a twisted tale of deceit for which James M. Cain wrote an unfilmed screenplay; and the 1950 story idea for The File on Thelma Jordon, directed by Robert Siodmak and starring Barbara Stanwyck. Holland continued to write stories and screenplays and did uncredited writing for TV before dying of cancer in 1971. Her final novel, Baby Godiva, was published posthumously in 2011.