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Paris in the ‘20s: Cafés. Cosmopolites. Conversation. And Murder.

There was always a dark and violent underside and an air of unreality to the expatriate scene in Paris in the twenties. Paris Metro explores the place where cosmopolitan café life turns deadly and the lines between fiction and reality blur. Between the pages of this novel, new fictional characters mix and mingle with figures from classic American fiction and real-life expatriate celebrities. Paris Metro depicts the glamour, spirit, and decadence of the “lost generation” and at the same time solves the unsolved murder from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.

With a Guggenheim fellowship, Nick Edwards comes to Paris in 1925 to report on the expatriate scene there and to re-connect with romantic interest and Hollywood ingénue, Rosemary Hoyt. He quickly meets and befriends not only Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Stein and their ilk, but also characters out of their novels, most particularly those from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.

Rosemary Hoyt arrives in the company of Dick and Nicole Diver, and Nick is pulled into the turbulence, mystery, and violence that beset the entourage. Nick and his friends indulge in a whirlwind of partying and sexual intrigue that only concludes when a murdered body is discovered in Hoyt’s hotel room.
 
Over the next 18 months, Nick consorts with the expatriate crowd, both in Paris and on the Côte d’Azur, sorts out his romantic life, and tries to answer the questions that arise from his experiences in the City of Light: Did Hemingway give him the right advice about his love life? What exactly is going on between Rosemary Hoyt and Dr. Richard Diver? How did a dead body end up in Rosemary Hoyt’s hotel room? Why did he come to Paris in the first place? Returning to Paris in fall of 1926, Nick celebrates the publication of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises with his expatriate cohorts and finally solves the “Diver case.”

Paris Metro is a thoroughly researched historical novel, which relies on numerous footnotes in to establish its factual veracity, to provide appropriate contexts, and to direct readers to other sources. At the same time it is a portrait of café life in the ‘20s, a coming-of-age novel, and a whodunnit.

Paris Metro is part of a planned tetralogy, the remaining volumes to be set in Hollywood in the ‘30s, London near the end of World War II, and Florida in the ‘50s. Malmgren is currently doing research for the second volume, tentatively titled Hollywood Nights, which finds Nick working as a scriptwriter for Warner Brothers during the long hot summer of 1932, as Los Angeles braces for the start of the Summer Olympics and a serial killer stalks the film sound stages.

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