When journalist, author, adventurer and ex-government agent Ernest Fletcher Quick died at age 104 in 1981 after dancing all night in a New York tango bar, nearly everyone had forgotten that earlier in the century he was a household name, a true rock star of the Gaslight Era.
Certainly no one knew that he had been for sometime writing his memoirs, loaded with shocking revelations about himself, many of the most famous, dangerous and powerful people of the 20th century, and a good many of its most important events.
But now the word is out.
David Patrick McQuade (who also writes moderately popular science books under the pseudonym Chip Walter) has edited the first scandalous volume of the so-called “Quick Papers.”
In this first installment Quick reveals that he, not Teddy Roosevelt, led the charge up San Juan Hill, tells how he managed to not only remember the Maine, but solve the mystery of its destruction, and faced (despite all his best efforts to avoid it) one of the nastiest villains of the 20th century, all while cheating, skulking and running as fast as his legs would carry him.
