Charles Einstein (1926-2007) was a sportswriter (Willie’s Time: Baseball’s Golden Age, The Fireside Book of Baseball, etc), columnist, screenwriter & the author of several novels, including Broken Spur, which became Fritz Lang’s film While The City Sleep. He was the half-brother of actor/director Albert Brooks and comic Bob Einstein (aka Super Dave Osborne).
One of the all-time classic baseball novels is finally back-in-print after sixty years. It's a story that only Charles Einstein, the sports writer beloved by millions in the 1950s and the biographer of Willie Mays, could have told.
Stat Hunter is the manager of a minor league baseball team who is struggling to keep his life and his players together. His wife has left him, he's being threatened by a blackmailer with secrets from his past, and his most promising player is being pressured by gamblers. He knows he should walk away from it all...but he can't. Because the only thing he's ever wanted, the only thing he could ever really do, and the only thing in the whole damn world worth caring about, is baseball.
Fifteen years before the 1970 movie classic "The Conversation," there was "Wiretap!", Charles Einstein's stunning and authentic crime novel about a massive, illegal telephone eavesdropping operation within a major American city. Back-in-print for the first time in over 65 years.
"Part pulp fiction, part true-crime narrative, Charles Einstein’s lurid potboiler 'Wiretap!' [is] perhaps the most famous novel about telephone tapping. Part of the appeal lies in its true-to-life details. A standout." Brian Hochman, author of "The Listerners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States"