Jazz-age Paris was the center of the artistic and literary world, and the center of the center was Gertrude Stein’s salon, where the famous and aspiring creative talents gathered to gawk at Stein’s Picassos and vie for status. Young Midwesterner Ida Caine arrives in Paris with her husband Teddy, a would-be Hemingway who thinks he can adventure first and write later. When Teddy falls in with the Stein set, he brings Ida to the salon, where she is shunted into a corner with the wives of famous men. She burns with resentment, and wonders if she can ever develop into a real artist herself. A few days later, Gertrude Stein’s partner Alice B. Toklas vanishes. Stein calls upon Teddy to investigate. Soon after, he vanishes. Forced to seek out her missing husband, Ida follows his trail through a milieu including strange Surrealist rituals, Tarot card readings, and the catacombs beneath the city. She falls in with a young American poet, T.S. Eliot. An unlikely passion grows while they seek answers to the shocking disappearances.
Praise for Alice B. Toklas Is Missing
“Robert Archambeau’s clever and witty love letter to Jazz-age Paris sparkles with cameos of the writers, artists, and quirky personalities who defined the era. 1920s Philosophy and Art frame a romp of a literary missing-person case that sends Ida Caine on a scavenger hunt through the landmarks and catacombs of Paris. Searching for Alice B. Toklas, Ida discovers her true self and becomes an unlikely hero.”
—Liza Nash Taylor, author of Etiquette for Runaways and In All Good Faith
“Paris in the 1920s—artists, poets, writers, musicians, the whole modernist mélange, Cubists, Surrealists, Futurists, Hemingway, Eliot, Pound—caught here in a wonderful innocents-abroad, comic thriller. Ida Caine is at the center of it all, finding Alice, saving Paris—a perfect, wide-eyed and dauntless heroine, with T.S. Eliot as her companion. Not since Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife has a novel taken us so thoroughly into the Paris of the lost generation.”
—Michael Anania, author of Nightsongs & Clamors
