WHERE THE TRUTH LIES

Sly young reporter digs into the seamy past of a comedy team who are no longer on speaking terms.

Edgar/Tony/Emmy award-winning playwright/singer/songwriter Holmes hangs his splashy and amusing plot on an unsolved murder in the bitter past of a song-and-laff-riot team unmistakably modeled on Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis—nuances may be lost on post-boomer generations, but they’ll still enjoy the naughty bits (there are plenty), the jokes (ranging from Borscht Belt to Seinfeld), and the sardonic musings of our heroine K. O’Connor (full first name never given), an ambitious, clever, and foolhardy writer in her 20s. O’Connor’s New York publisher has managed to extract a million-dollar contract from Vince Collins, the famously discreet singing half of the now-parted duo. Her goal is to get to the bottom of the scandal that immediately preceded Collins’s split from Lanny Morris in the early ’60s. The scandal had to do with the discovery of a beautiful bellhop drowned in a bathtub in New Jersey, a thousand miles from her job at the Versailles Hotel in Miami, where Collins and Morris had just performed their final polio telethon. O’Connor is unsurprised when her knees buckle in the presence of the gorgeous Vince, but she’s flabbergasted when, on a flight to New York, she succumbs to the unsuspected magnetism of Lanny Morris, who is absolutely nothing like his repulsive screen image. Immediately complicating her life and setting up the story, O’Connor pretends to be her schoolteacher girlfriend Beejay Trout and lets Lanny take her to the moon. Readers who can accept the possibility of a really cool Jerry Lewis and a twentysomething reporter with the sharp wit of a fiftysomething comedy genius will have a swell time finding out how the beautiful corpse came to lose a couple of toes and what really came between the former chums.

Slickly funny showbiz romp with lots of great scenery.