Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot:
Back to Brussels
My girlfriend was studying the Radio Times. “Did you know Agatha Christie lived nearby?” she said. “In a mews house on 22 Cresswell Place in Chelsea. You know what? Cresswell Place is only a step from here. Tomorrow we’ll walk there.”
“You must be joking,” I said.
“Aren’t you excited?”
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On the ivy-covered, white-painted brick wall a blue ceramic plaque marked the previous owner’s identity. The plaque said: AGATHA CHRISTIE 1890-1976 Author and playwright lived here.
22 Cresswell Place was on the market for a little over £2 million.
“You’re such a lucky man,” my girlfriend said.
“Am I? Why is that?”
“I’m going to buy this place.”
107 pages
$3.35
To order: Link
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Available again
The History Press, the UK's largest specialist history publisher, is reprinting my Arthur Moeller van den Bruck biography The Man Who Invented the Third Reich, due in April 2010. Here's the
new paperback book jacket.
"Moeller van den Bruck emerges here as a brilliant, tortured, and strangely sympathetic character unable to cope with the political demons he helped to unleash."---Jay Freeman, Booklist, USA
"Brilliantly tantalizing, puzzling and revealing, yet dangerous."---Amazon
To order from Amazon.com, CLICK HERE...
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Still available: "Dali & I: The Surreal Story" by Stan Lauryssens
Thomas Dunne Books/St.Martin's Press
An extraordinary memoir of fortune, fraud, and the master of modern art
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Art dealer Stan Lauryssens made millions in modern art, but he sold only one name: Salvador Dali. The surrealist painter's work was a hot commodity for the newly rich, investors, and businessmen looking to launder their black market cash. Stan didn't mind looking the other way; he just hoped the buyers would look the other way as well. The artworks he sold came from some very shady sources. And he soon discovered that the shadiest source of all was Dali himself. The more successful Stan became, the closer he got to Dali's inner circle, until he found himself living next door to the aging artist.
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There, while Stan hid from Interpol's detectives, he learned more about Dali's secret history, the studio of artists who produced his work, and the money-making machine that kept Dali's extravagant lifestyle afloat long after his creativity became to flounder.
Dali & I offers a behind-the-scenes view of the commerce and conspiracy that can go hand-in-hand in the art world, written by a man who has been to the top only to discover it was no different than the bottom.
STAN LAURYSSENS was an art dealer specializing in works by Salvador Dali for over a decade. After spending time in prison for the sale of bogus Dali's, he turned to writing
crime fiction. He won Belgium's Hercule Poirot Award in 2002 for best crime fiction of the year. He divides his time between Antwerp and London.
Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press also publishes Dan Brown, Arnaldur Indridason, Desmond Morris, Wilbur Smith and Michael Palin.
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"Crass, callous, sordid and cynical—thus, utterly true to the spirit of Dalí and a certain bestseller."
---Kirkus Review
"I read this book in one day. Fascinating, shocking, and a lot of fun. Hope to see the film soon."
---Amazon.com
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"It feels as a smooth fluid story. You do not even realize you are reading a crime novel. What Stan Lauryssens sets out to do, he does superbly well."
---Library Thing
Book reviews and other literary stuff
"A Belgian boy with easy morals and a smooth tongue, Lauryssens worked his way up from writing invented celebrity interviews to selling fake prints by Spanish surrealist master Salvador Dalí to swindling greedy suckers out of vast sums of money for fake or nonexistent works by Dalí."
---The Boston Globe
"Dalí & I " is so good. Stan Lauryssens is an excellent story teller.
---Scene4.com
"I LOVED IT! Finally ... a good, satisfying read ...My verdict? A MUST READ!"
---HookedonBookz.com
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A Curry at Night and Sex on Sunday
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This is a boy-meets-girl, man-meets-woman story. The woman is from India but lives in London. The man is Belgian and lives in Barcelona. She gives him a present. A present? A book, the Kama Sutra—and head over heels they plunge in the fantasy world of the Kama Sutra, the oldest sex Bible in the world.
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 © Charel Cambré
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269 pages, $3.27
To order: Link
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My Brave New World
The Life and Loves of Maria and Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley’s Belgian-born wife Maria was desperately in love with Virginia Woolf and became the third partner in a Hollywood love triangle with Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. She doctored the typescript of D.H.Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and rewrote substantial parts of her husband’s classic bestselling Brave New World.
In the Albertina Royal Library in Brussels, the author discovered three thousand letters Maria Huxley wrote to her sisters.
Arriving in Hollywood in 1937, Maria wrote: “I’ve met Gary Cooper. He has the most lovely eyes in the whole world. We met Greta Garbo. She is
such a beautiful woman.”
In a 9-page handwritten letter,Maria Huxley writes: “We inject ourselves with a dose of sodium penthotol and slide in a hypnotic trance. Aldous participates in all my séances.”
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469 pages, $3.27
To order: Link
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The Dalí Killings
Crime Fiction Based On A True Story
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The Dalí Killings is the true story of a second-rate Hollywood actor and Al Pacino body double who stars in the Salvador Dalí part in a Dalí biopic. For the thrill of it, he recreates the surrealist artist’s cruel and bizarre whirlpool paintings full of erotic obsessions—but instead of using oil paint on canvas, he hunts the local red-light district and uses real body parts, arms, legs, heads and intestines to construct his morbid fantasies.
356 pages, $5.96
To order: Link
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The Eichmann Legacy
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Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann escaped the ruins of World War II. After thirty-five years of meticulous investigation, Stan Lauryssens wrote chillingly about the Nazi mass murderer’s life in hiding, including a day-by-day account of his recording, on tape, of the most gruesome war memoirs in living history.
The main character in The Eichmann Legacy, apart from Adolf Eichmann, is Dutch SS-officer Willem Sassen, himself a fugitive from justice. Stan Lauryssens stayed at Sassen’s hide-out in Argentina and listened to the 67 tapes on which Eichmann recorded his concentration camp recollections.
An unlikely character in The Eichmann Legacy is Alfred Hitchcock.
221 pages, $3.35
To order: Link
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In Translation
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Italian cover
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Dutch cover
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Polish cover
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Dutch cover
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Dali and I: The Surreal Story by Stan Lauryssens
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Nero Books, Melbourne, 2008, 292pp, $27.95. ISBN 9781863952316.
By JEFFREY BROWN, Solicitor
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Stan Lauryssens is not an artist. He is not even an art expert. Despite the title, Dali and I is not concerned with the surrealist movement, nor is it a serious attempt to understand its most famous son, Salvador Dali. Dali and I is a book about money, and a very entertaining one at that.
» Click here and read the Australian review ...
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Tantor Unabridged Audiobooks
Tantor Media (US) acquired USCP Audio rights for CD and MP3: "Publishers Weekly named Tantor Media the number one fastest-growing independent publisher. Tantor has a dedicated library department, and releases over twenty new titles each month, including classics, award-winners, and bestsellers."
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"Sensational stuff. Fantastic"
(The Daily Telegraph)
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Readers' reviews on the Amazon page have been amazing so far.
"I read this book in one day. Fascinating. Shocking."
"Very interesting. Hope to see the film soon."
"My advice: read this book, it's a lot of fun."
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“The art market is a dark circus of hope and deceit. Lauryssens provides us with an intimate portrait of Dalí, its mustachioed ringmaster: as eccentric as he is ingenious, as manipulative as he is fascinating.”---Noah Charney, author of The Art Thief
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“A highly readable blend of memoir and picaresque, Stan Lauryssens’s book explores the differences between the genuine and the bogus, not only in the business of art, but more important, in human relationships.”
---James Sexton, editor of Selected Letters of Aldous Huxley
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