Giveaway - Shrewd Little Sleuth by Scott Leckie
If they killed Marilyn, they killed him too...
He was Hoover’s golden boy… until he wasn’t. A.B. Leckie slipped from Bureau legend to shadowy ghost, tangled in Monroe’s final days, Cold War paranoia, and secrets buried deep.
This is the story of my grandfather, Arthur Bernard Leckie, a shrewd little sleuth who might have known just enough to get him killed.
About Shrewd Little Sleuth
Something went terribly wrong. In just one year, Hoover's praise turned to condemnation. What triggered the FBI director's sudden shift, from close ally to alleged adversary? Despite his controversial ousting in 1939, A.B. Leckie remained in contact with Hoover for over two decades. Why? And why was Leckie found dead with Marilyn Monroe's unlisted number in his pocket—reported to have died in four different ways, five if you count murder?
He died just two days before Marilyn, in the same upscale LA neighborhood, after weeks of spying for—or on—her. He worked for Lockheed Aircraft Corporation alongside Robert Mitchum and Norma Jean before she became Marilyn. Did their connection endure? What secrets did he carry from his FBI years, his wartime stint in Pearl Harbor, and his role in securing the founding meeting of the UN in 1945? How did he track down Howard Hughes in hiding, not once, but twice? What about the Hollywood careers ruined by his anti-communist surveillance for McCarthy's House Committee on Un-American Activities?
Leckie knew too much. Did he die because of it?
As his grandson, and a progressive human rights lawyer, I'm left grappling with the legacy of a man who may have helped dismantle the very freedoms I fight to protect. Was he secretly gay, crushed by the era's homophobia? Or did other demons drive him to the bottle? What do you do when your family history is entangled in the machinery of repression? How do you reconcile a legacy built on silence and control when it's etched into your own family line?
You do the only thing that makes sense: you write it all down, and hope the truth finds its way through.
About Scott Leckie
Scott Leckie is a world citizen who has lived in more than a dozen countries. His early life was spent on the West Coast of the United States, where he attended the University of Oregon. He departed the US permanently in the mid-1980s and then lived in various countries throughout Europe and Asia and the Pacific. Scott has worked on human rights issues in more than 80 countries. His interventions helped to protect hundreds of thousands of people against planned forced evictions in popular communities in the Dominican Republic, Panama, Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, Zambia and around the world, and led to additional hundreds of thousands of refugees and IDPs being able to repossess their homes. For the past 20 years, he has worked with many communities threatened with displacement due to climate change.
Scott has taught and designed several human rights courses in top-100 universities and law schools around the world, developed the world’s first law school course on climate change and displacement, which he has taught at the College of Law of the Australian National University, The University of Melbourne Law School, Monash Law and Mahidol University.
He has written 26 non-fiction books and over 300 academic articles and reports. He has also written two novels in a seven-book series, the Pacifica Series, as well as two biographies on his paternal grandfather and maternal uncle, both of whom led extraordinary lives. Scott loves, lives on and is entirely dependent upon planet Earth – just like you.
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