London Review Book Box - July

Alfred Hayes had a strange career. He wrote the words to Paul Robeson’s beautiful union anthem ‘Joe Hill’; he co-wrote the screenplay for Bicycle Thieves; he wrote scripts for the Twilight Zone; and somehow in between all this he completed seven astonishing novels, gradually being bought back into print by Penguin Random House after a long period of unavailability. My Face for the World To See shows us, in spellbindingly forensic style, the dark side of golden age Hollywood, something Hayes knew first-hand; Nicholas Lezard has called him ‘the master ofthe withheld detail’.