Many years ago at one of the first Tannen's Magic Conventions the author attended he met Walter Gibson. He knew many of the great magicians of the 30's and 40's personally including Harry Blackstone Sr. and he had a series of Detective Comic Books. He wrote books about magic and he created the masked crime fighter: The Shadow. D. Angelo Ferri used to listen to The Shadow on the radio when he was a kid. He also watched a lot of early TV shows inspired by those old radio programs, TV shows like Racket Squad, Dragnet, The Untouchables, and The Naked City.
Ferri loves to smoke cigars. One foggy night he was walking through the financial district in downtown San Francisco. It made him think of Sam Spade, and The Shadow.
Ferri began to think about creating his own detective. It had to be about things he was interested in or knew something about. He picked the 1930's and 40's because he loves the music and the clothing from that time. It is full of great sports history, boxing, baseball, horse racing … There were the great radio shows and the comic strips, Dick Tracy, Terry and the Pirates. The world was on verge of war. There was government corruption, Prohibition, the Depression, so many things that interested Ferri.
He created a first generation Italian American Detective, Dominic Di Carini. It is his Italian American version of 'Little House on the Prairie' in that he wanted his stories to be about family as well as crime, political corruption, sports history, and wicked women.
Dominic can handle a deck of cards and does the type of impromptu Close Up Magic that was around in the 30's and 40's. Ferri has included a bonus feature, Dominic's Card Tricks & Bar Bets. These are descriptions of many of the tricks Dominic pulls during the course of his investigations, along with some classic bar bets. Ferri loves Mickey Spillane, the creator of Mike Hammer. Dominic is a hard boiled private eye that isn't afraid to take the law into his own hands if he has to. If you like to see the bad guy get his, you'll like Dominic.
Anyone who likes baseball and boxing history of the 30's and 40's will find a lot of things about those sports to interest them. There are a lot of references to Joe Di Maggio, The New York Yankees, The New York Giants, The San Francisco Seals, Joe Lewis, Max Schmeling, and the World Series.
Ferri believes that Pearl Harbor was a set up and FDR was the guy who set it up. You will find a lot of information to support his feelings on the matter, including a formally highly classified document (Ferri was able to find it on-line thanks to the Freedom of Information Act) prepared for FDR by the Office of Naval Intelligence on how to provoke Japan into committing an overt Act of War in: Di Carini Investigations
1st edition 2010, 505 pages.
word count: 172798 which is equivalent to 691 standard pages of text