Tony Quinn

Anthony Quinn is the author of four novels, the latest of them 'Curtain Call' January 2015). He was the film critic of The Independent for 15 years, and now writes reviews for the Guradian.

Murder, ambition, ugly politics and dangerous love in London's Theatreland - another moving and compelling novel from the author of the much-acclaimed novels, The Rescue Man, Half of the Human Race and The Streets On a sultry afternoon in the summer of 1936 a woman accidentally interrupts an attempted murder in a London hotel room. Nina Land, a West End actress, faces a dilemma: she's not supposed to be at the hotel in the first place, and certainly not with society portraitist Stephen Wyley. But once it becomes apparent that she may have seen the face of the man the newspapers have dubbed 'the Tie-Pin Killer' she realises that a refusal to come forward may endanger another woman’s life. Jimmy Erskine is the raffish doyen of theatre critics who fears that his star is fading: age and drink are catching up with him, and in his late-night escapades with young men he walks a legal tightrope that may snap at any moment. He has depended for years on his loyal and longsuffering secretary Tom, who has a secret of his own to protect. Tom's chance encounter with Madeleine Farewell, a lost young woman haunted by premonitions of catastrophe, closes the circle: it was Madeleine who narrowly escaped the killer’s stranglehold that afternoon, and now walks the streets in terror of his finding her again. Curtain Call is a comedy of manners, and a tragedy of mistaken intentions. Bad faith underlies the mood of late 1936, when Mosley's Blackshirts are causing mayhem, policemen entrap 'queers' in public lavatories, and the King himself risks his throne for the sake of an American divorcee. From the glittering murk of Soho's demi-monde to the grease paint and ghost-lights of theatreland, the story plunges on through smoky clubrooms, tawdry hotels and drag balls towards a denouement in which two women are stalked by the same killer. As bracing as a cold Martini and as bright as a new tie-pin, it is a poignant and gripping story about love and death and a society dancing towards the abyss. The author Anthony Quinn was born in Liverpool in 1964. He is the author of The Rescue Man, which won the 2009 Authors' Club Best First Novel Award, Half of the Human Race and The Streets, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Walter Scott Prize.