Kickstarter for the Louise Brooks - inspired Dixie Dugan novels

I realize this is last minute, but longtime Louise Brooks Society supporter Beth Ann Gallagher just alerted me to an incredible Kickstarter campaign to bring three Louise Brooks-inspired Dixie Dugan novels by J.P. McEvoy back into print. More about this Kickstarter campaign, which runs through January 18th, can be found HERE.

As Brooks' devotees may know, Show Girl was the first novel to feature a major character or story-line inspired by the actress. First serialized in Liberty magazine in 1928 (and quickly published in book form by Simon & Schuster), Show Girl told of the life and adventures of a character named Dixie Dugan. That novel and its two follow-up books, Show Girl in Hollywood and Show Girl in Society, proved especially popular. So much so that they spawned a long-running comic strip which lasted into the 1960s, "Dixie Dugan," as well as a stage play, Show Girl, and two movies which unfortunately did not star Louise Brooks.

Here is a wonderful newspaper ad for the novel's serialization in Liberty magazine, when the visual identity of Dixie Dugan was closely aligned with the look of the actress. (A few of these illustrations, as well as some of the early comic strips, were based on films stills from Brooks' first films, such as The American Venus.)

Nevertheless, I pledged $29.00 toward this worthy campaign, for which I will receive a copy of the book and have my name listed on an acknowledgements page. I already own vintage copies of these books, including one signed by McEvoy, but am looking forward to receiving this omnibus edition. Yowza, yowza, yowza.

Here is some more information about this Kickstarter campaign from it's page.

"Between 1928 and 1932, J. P. McEvoy published six ingenious novels that unfold solely by way of letters, telegrams, newspaper articles, ads, telephone transcriptions, scripts, playbills, greeting card verses, interoffice memos, legal documents, monologues, song lyrics, police reports, and radio broadcasts. Three of them, collected here for the first time, record the wild career of a jazz baby named Dixie Dugan (modeled on actress Louise Brooks, whom McEvoy knew). The best-selling Show Girl tracks Dixie's zigzagging path to success on Broadway; in Hollywood Girl, she heads out West for further risqué adventures, and impulsively marries a rich playboy; in Society, Dixie mingles with high society both in Europe and the U.S. before returning to Hollywood to resume her show-biz career."

"Beneath the novels' hellzapoppin' energy and jazzy lingo, however, McEvoy exposes the dark underside of the times: sexual predation, tabloid journalism, political corruption, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and the fatuous lifestyles of the rich and famous. But it's the blend of humor and bite, of success and failure, of ridicule and irony—shaken and stirred with linguistic and formal ingenuity—that makes The Dixie Dugan Trilogy "a madcap, mordant masterpiece," as critic Steven Moore writes in his informative introduction. Out of print since the 1930s, these "avant-pop" novels deserve a revival."

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