Hollywood Shakedown

Buddy Chinn, the son of a lauded beat poet from the seventies, is happy to follow the dishonourable family tradition of booze, bets, books and broads.

Then, at Hollywood Park one winter Saturday afternoon, two tough guys persuade him to join them on a trip to Damascus, a sprawling mansion off Mulholland Drive, a palace surrounded by a forest of imported trees and lush vegetation.

There, he meets Mortimer Saxon, a, reclusive obsessive manuscript collector with an edge.

A sharp suited zealot searching for Buddy's dad's fabled Lost Manuscript; a one off, a unique piece worth thousands and thousands of dollars, an American literary icon similar in cult magnitude to Hunter S Thompson's "Call to the Post."

He asks Buddy whether he can help. Buddy hasn't a clue. Not a scooby.

Trouble is, Mortimer doesn't believe him.

Over the finest steak dinner Buddy has ever eaten, the collector makes him a proposition.

Find the manuscript and make one hundred thousand dollars.

Fail to find the manuscript and lose body parts on instruments restored from Inquisition times.

Worse, he's given two weeks and no choice.

Along with a British comic dealer friend, the two men go on a quest for the manuscript which takes them to the biggest library in the world in Venice Beach, a riotous chess tournament in Chicago, a pulsating FA Cup match in London and back again to the City of Angels.

All the time he's worried about his independent minded squeeze Monique, who, like a very independent minded cat, only ever comes home when she wants feeding.

Hoping against hope that the manuscript exists. Avoiding snipers, hitmen, hooligans, the attentions of strange seventies goons and an alluring, hyper-sexy bad girl with a fetishistic interest in low-life big guy writers.

Developing respect and admiration in an age of endangered male friendships, the odd couple face a race against time to find the manuscript, a contest which leads to a pulse pounding climax, one in which Buddy has to face his deepest, darkest fears.