Tender Is LeVine

By Andrew Bergman

When their maestro is kidnapped, an orchestra hires Jack LeVine to find him.

Jack LeVine has been in a vicious funk since his father died in 1948. But after more than a year sulking in his apartment, joylessly listening to ball games, news reports, and classical music programs on the radio, the private detective has gone back to work in his freshly renovated office. His depression has passed, but those months glued to the radio are about to come in handy.

His first client is a German violinist, who visits LeVine out of concern for his maestro, Toscanini, the famous conductor of the NBC Symphony Orchestra. The maestro's memory is slipping, his conducting style has changed, and his eyesight is suddenly better than it used to be. The violinist suspects that the conductor has disappeared and been replaced by a double. It's an outlandish suspicion, but LeVine takes the case. After all, somebody has to pay for his new office. Soon enough, LeVine finds out that organized crime is playing the tune . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784083229

Andrew Bergman

Andrew Bergman (b. 1945) is a successful comedy screenwriter and occasional author of hard-boiled mysteries. After receiving a PhD in American history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Bergman sold Tex X, a novella about a black sheriff in the Old West, to Warner Bros. The studio hired him to turn his story into a screenplay, as part of a team of comedy legends led by Mel Brooks and Richard Pryor. The result was Blazing Saddles (1974), which is widely regarded as one of the funniest films of all time. After that early success, Bergman published the first two novels in a mystery series starring Jack LeVine, a hard-boiled Jewish PI. After The Big Kiss-Off of 1944 and Hollywood and LeVine, he continued writing and directing films, producing such classics as Fletch, The Freshman, and Soapdish. In 2001 he returned to LeVine in Tender Is LeVine. Bergman continues to live and write in New York City.