Pearsall's Books

After yesterday's sudden burst of reasonably warm weather here in New York City it's back to grim, gray, and rainy. So, via John, I was pleased to find this bizzare story from the New York Times:

"LOS ANGELES, March 4 - During the murder trial of Robert Blake, the public has been privy to one bizarre tale after another, grist for a true-life pulp novel.

Over the past two months, observers in Van Nuys Superior Court in Los Angeles have been fed a steady diet of comic-book-style characters, a tattooed mobster turned preacher, two strung-out stunt doubles who say they were solicited by Mr. Blake to double as hit men; accounts of space aliens, experiments with crack-smoking monkeys and salacious details of a love child.

These are the bits and pieces of the strange world of Mr. Blake, the former television detective "Baretta," who is accused of murdering his wife and soliciting the stuntmen to participate. His wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, was a woman with a reputation as a grifter and gold digger, who the defense contends trapped Mr. Blake into an unloving marriage by becoming pregnant with his child."