The First Three: A Dorothy Parker Mysteries Anthology

by Agata Stanford

The First Three: The first three photo enhanced novels of Agata Stanford’s mystery series, The Broadway Murders, Chasing the Devil and Mystic Mah Jong! Pull up your chair at the Algonquin Hotel’s famous daily luncheon and enjoy a tossed salad of bon mots, all while sleuthing about with Parker and her partner in crime-solving, Robert Benchley. Enjoy the adventures!

The Broadway Murders : When Broadway producer Reginald Ignatius Pierce is found dead in his luxurious apartment, it is believed he choked on a cherry tomato. That he was not murdered is a surprise for Parker, Benchley. But for the fact that RIP was allergic to tomatoes, his death might have been deemed accidental.

Chasing the Devil: New York City, Christmas of 1925. Watch alongside Dorothy as balloons explode over the spectators at the first R.H. Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, step out of your Duesenberg to storm the staid University Club with the Marx Brothers, do the rounds of speakeasies, attend a Noel Coward’s play opening night on Broadway, and then dance at the cast party, while searching for clues to find an assassin.

Mystic Mah Jong: Halloween 1926, and while across the nation people are glued to their radios, New Yorkers are packing in the new Yankee Stadium to watch the Babe knock another ball out of the park in the World Series games against the St. Louis Cardinals. It is the era of sensational newspaper coverage by sob-sister reporters dishing out trial coverage of women accused of gunning down the men who dun ’em wrong—‘gin and guns, either one is bad enough, but together they get you into a dickens of a mess’— Parker and Benchley confront gun-toting criminals of their own while investigating a rash of murders of psychics who should have seen it coming.

883 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 19, 2011

About the author

AGATA PUCCIO STANFORD trained as an actress, singer and dancer, beginning with her attendance at the prestigious High School of Performing Arts in New York City. She continued her studies with Bobby Lewis and William Hickey; musical comedy with Merv Nelson, and dance with Tony Award Winning Choreographer, Henry La Tang. A past member of Actors Equity and Screen Actors Guild, Agata co-founded The Nucleus Theatre on West 54th Street in NYC. There, she acted in/or directed 14 Equity productions. Agata has performed on tour, on and Off-Broadway, as a nightclub performer in New York and resort clubs and appeared in more than fifty films and 30 stage plays. Retiring to raise a family, Agata returned to theatre in 1990 when she and friends formed non-profit Original Works Repertory Theatre in the Saratoga & Lake George region of upstate New York, at The Playhouse at Goose Crossing, presenting new and classic works for the stage. She has written seven plays and two musicals. She is currently at work on the fourth novel of her Dorothy Parker Mystery Series.
“As a student at The High School of the Performing Arts, when it was located on 46th Street, I’d often walk by The Algonquin Hotel. I was fascinated with the stories of the famous Round Table luncheons and its eclectic membership, from Harpo to Heifetz. As a person of the Theatre, I’d read countless theatrical biographies over the past 40 years, many about the lives of Round Tablers. After awhile I felt I knew so many of them, not so much as figures from the past, but as living friends. Now, in telling my stories of mystery and murder, I have employed the art of witty conversation, as I imagine my main characters would have demanded of me, had I been asked to lunch. The action is set against the exciting background of the times in which they lived – the greatest period in American Theatre and literature, when New York City had twelve daily newspapers, Prohibition was a dirty word, and the Jazz Age unleashed a new kind of music and art. ”