Fiction
Marc Bolan Killed in Crash
By Ira A. Robbins
Laila Russell is an ordinary 15-year-old schoolgirl living in London with her father, who is morose over his wife’s accidental death.
In the spring of 1972, Laila spots a lost pocketbook on the Underground and returns it to Amanda Charles, a fashionable young woman employed by an aging rock star. With glam music on the rise, Chaz Bonapart is going out of style. His manager, Francis Guy, comes up with a plan to get him back in the game by feeding him song ideas that teens would respond to, and he enlists Laila to be his secret weapon.
Thrust into a new world at an age that awakens sexual desire, Laila develops crushes on Amanda and a handsome friend of hers. Encounters with an American store clerk, a vicious skinhead and an eccentric artist further expand her horizons.
Amanda tries to manipulate Laila into a doomed romance as a perverse form of inspiration, but Laila finds her own source of song ideas, and Chaz begins having hits with them. Frank recognizes Laila’s potential and plots to make her his star client.
The second part of the story finds Laila a has-been, no longer certain who she is. She is crushed by a discovery about her mother and threatened by an old nemesis. But when she becomes a victim of shocking violence, it’s from a completely unexpected source.
Published 2020.
$20.00
Paperback ISBN 978-0-9842539-4-4 / E-book 978-0-9842539-3-7
"Ira Robbins brings a lifelong immersion in pop music's wish fulfillment to this detailed and note-perfect recreation of a glitter-tinged moment of generational transformation in pre-punk 1970s England. He plays his characters like members of a band, each with their own verse and chorus, I found myself waiting for the soundtrack to come, singing along." —Lenny Kaye, Patti Smith Group guitarist, journalist, author, producer
"Transporting us from glam to punk to corporate offices, with period-perfect jargon and keen details about the way the music business manipulates fantasy and reality, Ira Robbins’ rollicking Marc Bolan Killed in Crash isn’t just the poignant tale of the way musicians and fans alike are swept up in the power of pop music, it's also a novel that reads like history.” —David Browne, author, Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, CSNY, James Taylor and the Lost Story of 1970.
“A deep, abiding love of music and an inexhaustible knowledge of it blend seamlessly in Ira Robbins' moving new novel, Marc Bolan Killed in Crash. He unerringly explores the endless shadings of the English glam-rock scene of the ‘70s and why it meant — and continues to mean — so much. He is an astute, feeling writer who effortlessly summons the zeitgeist of that time — and, intriguingly, ours as well.”
—Anthony DeCurtis, Author of Lou Reed: A Life
“In Marc Bolan Killed in Crash, Ira Robbins evokes the mood and mystery of the 70's Glam Rock n Roll zeitgeist.” —Blondie drummer Clem Burke