The Traces of Merrilee

William Deacon, magazine journalist and sometimes detective, suddenly heard himself say, «Okay, if you want to sail on the Montmartre, I can get us aboard.» He made one phone call, and to the bewilderment of his true love, Twit-Twit, and his true friends, Tom and Betsy Dolan, all four found themselves outward bound for Europe on the supposedly sold-out pride of the line. And thereby lies a trail to America&apos;s sexiest movie star (Merrilee), her fears of a fate worse than a fate worse than death, her nightmares that literally come true, and a Hollywood conspiracy that could baffle the C.I.A.–all packed into the wittiest, most tightly plotted mysteries of the year!<P> Herbert Brean was an American journalist and crime fiction writer, best known for his recurring series characters William Deacon and Reynold Frame. He was a director and former executive vice president of the Mystery Writers of America, a group for which he also taught a class in mystery writing. Aside from his seven mystery crime novels, he also published non-fiction books and articles, and mystery magazine short stories. Alfred Hitchcock used one of Brean&apos;s many articles for Life Magazine, «A Case of Identity» (1953) as the basis for his film The Wrong Man.