An Obsession with Tchaikovsky

On the evening of July 31, 1961, a horrifying incident took place atop the roof of one of Manhattan’s most iconic venues. Despite an intense investigation, covertly ordered by Mayor Robert Wagner, the motives for this bizarre event continued to baffle the authorities. Neither the EMS, the NYPD, the Investigative Detectives nor a team of Bellevue Psychiatrists could discover a credible explanation. After the recent death of one of its key figures, new and startling evidence was discovered among their personal effects. The author has been given exclusive access to those documents and by culling fact from fiction and painstakingly retracing nearly six decades of obfuscation, finally unravels the mystery in Swan Song.

Holloway’s first novel, THE UNAUTHORIZED LETTERS OF OSCAR WILDE, won the coveted Hemingway Prize and a brace of laudatory reviews along with invitations to speak at University of Bologna, the University of Adelaide, UCLA, USC and the One Institute in Los Angeles. MY LETTERS FROM LUDWIG, Holloway's second novel, received glowing reviews, as has each of his subsequent works, WRETCHED EXCESS, CHARLIE THE WONDER CAT and DANGEROUS CROSSING. SWAN SONG (originally titled Dancing to Tchaikovsky) was completed after ten years of research and rewrites and made the 2017 Faulkner/Wisdom shortlist. His screenplay, “JEAN LAFITTE, PIRATE & PATRIOT” won the Blazing Quill and Gotham Film Awards. C. Robert, as he prefers to be called, has worked as designer in Films, TV, Commercials, Music Videos, Opera, Theatre and Ballet, taking him across the USA, Canada, Latin America, England, Germany, Greece and South Africa. His production design for TWO SOLDIERS, the live-action short film based on the Faulkner short story, is acknowledged for helping win the 2004 ACADEMY AWARD. His Production Design for the Marigny Opera Ballet’s full length ballet ORFEO, (sets, costumes, lighting, video projections) garnered extraordinary acclaim at its world premiere in 2015. One critic declared “The production of Orfeo has altered the cultural landscape of New Orleans.” Currently, C. Robert devotes his time to researching, writing and designing at his circa 1810 Slave Quarter and patio-garden in New Orleans' historic French Quarter, urging everyone in the film and service industries to “Do good work”.