TURROU, Leon G. [Jimmy Starr].
Nazi Spies in America.
New York: Random House, 1939.
$1,250.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-152476
+$500
First Edition of Nazi Spies in America; Inscribed by Leon G. Turrou to Screenwriter and Journalist Jimmy Starr
First edition of this classic firsthand account of the FBI special agent who helped break up the German espionage ring operating in the United States in 1938. Octavo, original publisher's cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “To Jimmy Starr - a great journalist - in the hope you enjoy it - Sincerely, Leon G. Turrou.” The recipient, Jimmy Starr, known in Hollywood by his nickname "Stage Door Jimmy," was a prolific entertainment journalist, screenwriter, columnist, and press agent whose career spanned more than four decades in the film industry. Born James Atherton Starr in Clarksville, Texas, he began his Hollywood career at fifteen as an office boy at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. By 1924 he was writing film reviews, gossip, and features for the Los Angeles Record. He then moved to the Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express, where he wrote a daily film column from 1930 until 1962. He was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1931, only four years after the Academy's founding. He also worked as a screenwriter for Mack Sennett, Warner Brothers, Paramount, MGM, and Columbia Pictures across various periods of his career. His papers, donated to Arizona State University, constitute one of the most significant archives of Hollywood golden age journalism and film ephemera in existence. Very good in a very good dust jacket. A desirable example, inscribed by the author.
Nazi Spies in America is a firsthand account by Leon G. Turrou (1895-1986), a Polish-born naturalized American FBI special agent whose investigative career encompassed some of the most consequential cases of the interwar period, including the Lindbergh baby kidnapping investigation and a shootout with "Pretty Boy" Floyd, before culminating in the case that made him famous. In 1938, Turrou led the FBI's investigation into a Nazi German spy ring operating in the United States, and the book, ghostwritten with David G. Wittels and expanded from a series of articles Turrou had contributed to the New York Post, presented the American public with a detailed and alarming insider account of the methods and scope of Nazi intelligence operations on American soil in the years immediately preceding the Second World War. The narrative focused on the significant German spy ring exposed through the arrest of Guenther Rumrich in February 1937, revealing German efforts to obtain United States military secrets, and the investigation is also notable as the probable first use of the polygraph by the FBI in an espionage case. After the successful conclusion of the Nazi spy case, Turrou resigned from the FBI to write the book, and his newspaper articles were subsequently adapted into the 1939 Warner Brothers film Confessions of a Nazi Spy, which drew a formal protest from the German government and caused considerable diplomatic controversy in a nation not yet formally at war with the Third Reich. Turrou went on to serve on General Eisenhower's staff as an intelligence officer, was awarded the Bronze Star in 1945, and was instrumental in the rounding up of approximately 35,000 suspected Nazi war criminals at the war's conclusion, giving his earlier public exposé of Nazi espionage an additional retrospective weight as the first significant American intelligence memoir of the war he had helped to win.
Nazi Spies in America.
$1,250.00
In Stock