Tony Delano wrote the two most important books about the golden age of British Journalism, Slip-Up: How Fleet Street Found Ronnie Biggs and Scotland Yard Lost Him, and Joyce McKinney and the Case of the Manacled Mormon. His fiction is every bit as good.

- William Ham Bevan

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Dateline: Rome. A novel of the Dolce Vita days.

American wire service correspondent SHELBY STONE wins a posting to Rome in the Dolce Vita era of the 1950s. Intrigue and scandal surge between Cinecittá and the Vatican, the Deep South of Calabria and the glittering Via Veneto. Kidnap and lawless cops, dubious movie dubbing, King Farouk gobbling thirty-six cutlets, the weird re-emergence of Ezra Pound the turncoat poet.

Nevertheless, Shelby sticks to the guiding principles of his agency Century News. Tell it like it is. Write it for a soda jerk in Omaha.
He fails to restart his sex life with photographer LUCY but gets a lesson in how Italians go about such things. Neither can he seduce Marsha; she is preparing to marry a Carabinieri officer...

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More Titles

Too Much Too Good

Synopsis

The Sinai Desert or Elaine's on Second Avenue. The Savoy Hotel or the Caravelle in Saigon. Watergate or Pentecost Island. Before news was shot on microchips and delivered on the internet, getting the pictures home could be as dangerous as filming under fire.…

Maxwell

Synopsis

This is the very unauthorised biography written with Peter Thompson, former editor of the Sunday Mirror, before the notorious plunderer tumbled off his yacht and drowned. Recent developments have put the Maxwell name back in headlines, but the book is…

Dateline: Rome

Synopsis

American wire service correspondent SHELBY STONE is posted to mid-20th century Rome, the Dolce Vita era. Intrigue and scandal surge between Cinecittá and the Vatican, the Deep South of Calabria and the glittering Via Veneto. He is taken in hand…

Breathless Diversions

Synopsis

Few sons are blessed with a mother like Anatolia. Freed in girlhood from the sexual and political strictures of the Victorian Age, she makes it her mission to spread liberation among the haughty and powerful captains of the Queen’s Navy.…

Cornelius Noon - Chief Turret Captain USN

Synopsis

Think of Cornelius Noon as Hornblower or Jack Aubrey for the age of steam and steel. With his master gunner’s eye Noon could drop a bird on the wing or punch a five-inch shell through a distant window. This stirring…

Joyce McKinney

Film & TV rights on option to Zero Gravity Management, Los Angeles

Synopsis

Joyce McKinney made blinding headlines in Britain when she stormed over from the United States, abducted a young Mormon missionary and forced him to have sex with her. Her speech from the dock after being arrested and charged, in effect,…

Slip-Up

Synopsis

This is the story behind the sensational triumph of the Daily Express finding the Great Train Robbery fugitive Ronnnie Biggs in Rio de Janeiro and refusing to hand him over to Scotland Yard until it ran the story. It…

They Sang Like Kangaroos

Synopsis

THEY SANG LIKE KANGAROOS. The title comes from a ludicrous poem by Sir Henry Newbolt to commemorate the sinking of the German raider Emden by the Australian cruiser Sydney. It was the first naval victory of the war. "Their hearts were…

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About Anthony Delano

Anthony Delano arrived in London from Australia after an early newspaper career there and was soon a foreign correspondent for the Daily Mirror, which at that time sold nearly five million copies daily. He was stationed in Rome during the Dolce Vita days, in Paris when General De Gaulle was dismantling the French empire, then the United States where he covered, among many other dramas, the civil rights campaign and the assassination of President John Kennedy. Additional assignments took him all over the globe: wars in Africa and the Middle East, tours with the Queen and other members of the Royal Family; most hazardous of all, perhaps, the historic Beatles tour of America. In between there were executive stints in London. He was managing editor of the Mirror when the monstrous tycoon Robert Maxwell took it over. Clearly time to go. He began to teach journalism and research it academically, gaining first a Masters degree at Queensland University of Technology then a PhD from the University of Westminster (his 2001 doctoral thesis, The Formation of the British Journalist 1900-2000, is frequently cited). He became a senior lecturer, senior research fellow and finally visiting professor at the London College of Communication. He lives in the South of France, married to Patricia.