TWO O’CLOCK EASTERN WARTIME

Grandly romantic, nostalgic WWII epic of radio days, summer nights, and Nazis lurking about New Jersey, from the highly regarded book collector and mystery-writer (The Bookman’s Wake, 1995, etc.).

Stepping outside the conventions of his own genre, Dunning aspires to literary greatness and beat-the-bad-guys suspense with this doorstopper-length chronicle of a drifter searching for redemption in a fictional Jersey shore town during the summer of 1942. Jack Dulaney, a novelist whose life is on the skids (despite his big-name agent), escapes from a California chain-gang with the help of Pat Kendall, an acquaintance who makes spare change doing voices as a radio actor. The two agree to meet in the Pennsylvania coal town of Dulaney’s lost only love, Holly Carnahan. Dulaney bums his way cross-country to find the Carnahan home an empty wreck with Kendall’s corpse tossed inside. Some clues lead him to Jersey’s whistle-stop Regina Beach, where Dulaney, now under an alias, finds Holly under an alias singing in a jazz band that occasionally broadcasts from station WHAR. Dulaney joins the studio crew as a writer, discovering a new joy in the loose, anything-goes magic of radio while staying one step ahead of German thugs. Holly, uncertain whether to let their romance reignite, is searching for her father, who had an affair with one of the station’s habitués before disappearing inexplicably. Dulaney soon learns of a homicidal Nazi sympathizer hiding behind the good-natured wartime solidarity of his radio troupe. Attempting to expose him, Delaney writes a series of radio plays about prison camp victims—a series that will draw him ever closer to the truth.

As moody and meandering as a Hemingway epic (Dulaney gets part of his alias from bell-toller Robert Jordan), Dunning’s magnum opus celebrates the forgotten genius of radio, and the winsome heroics of ordinary people caught up in the passion of the great war.