Any Resemblance to Actual Persons

A Novel

“Mix Nabokov’s Pale Fire with James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia” for an anarchic comic novel by a Donald Barthelme Prize-winning author (Jim Krusoe).

English professor Paul McWeeney’s sister has written a book accusing their late father of murdering Elizabeth Short in the notorious unsolved Black Dahlia case of 1947. Paul has every right to be outraged. It’s based on the highly questionable memories her therapist has allegedly helped her to recover. Or imagine. In penning a furious cease and desist letter to the publishers, Paul hopes to refute his sister’s outlandish claims. With a wildly divergent recollection of their Hollywood childhood, Paul begins to make his case in defense of their father’s name and legacy.

But Paul, a failed novelist, soon finds himself on an obsessive, consuming, elliptical exploration of both his family’s history and his own conflicted memory, threatening his relationships with those closest to him. The letter becomes not the intended refutation but rather a disturbing and wildly comical psychological self-portrait of a man caught between two increasingly unstable versions of the past.

“By turns broad and sly, and occasionally, shocking” (Booklist), Any Resemblance to Actual Persons “sneaks a highly personal story into the near-mythic world of the Black Dahlia case. Allardice gets all the details right, from the scarily plausible explanation of the crime to the dark shadows of literary obsession and familial dysfunction to the outsize absurdities of fleeting fame”(Will Boast, author of Daphne: A Novel).