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
A New Fiction Title
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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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.