"Fascinating...
Gripping Reading!"
Publisher's Weekly
The Mystery of Auvers: A portal to thirteen features supporting Exile in the Light, the epic detective novel about a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter in 1955 Paris investigating the curious 1890 demise of history’s most iconic artist.
A Unique Trilogy
of Historical Mystery
Shadowland Revisited: A dialogue exploring the Kafkaesque after-story of Shadowland, the chilling and endlessly controversial 1978 inquiry into the psychiatric commitment of the actress Frances Farmer.
A Tale of Two Presidents: The epic backstory of Empire of Eden, a sequel to Exile in the Light that takes its screenwriter hero to the late-’60s and a web of mystery surrounding the 1923 death of President Warren G. Harding.
China Gate Gallery: A scrapbook illustrating the conception, composition and impact of China Gate, the 1983 blockbuster novel that mixes the history of modern Taiwan with a saga of Americans caught up in the Asian Underworld.
Meet Katherine O’Neal: William Arnold’s wife, the multi-award-winning and USA Today bestselling author of twelve critically acclaimed novels of historical romance, including The Last Highwayman and Just for Her.
The Books
SHADOWLAND -- After seeing a rare revival of a Golden Age film starring the forgotten actress Frances Farmer, a young reporter in mid-’70s Seattle investigates her life and stumbles upon a horror show of political and psychiatric abuse. A classic of historical mystery that has obsessed readers for four decades and spawned an enduring Frances Farmer cult.
SHADOWLAND REVISITED -- A celebrity-packed lawsuit, a precedent-setting trial, a multi-Oscar nominated movie and the suicide of an iconic rock star are all part of the extraordinary after-story of William Arnold’s 1978 Shadowland. A dialogue about the ecstasy and many agonies involved in the publication and forty-year shadow of one bestselling book.
EXILE IN THE LIGHT -- A blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter in 1955 Paris is hired to find a lost letter of the artist Vincent van Gogh and is swept up in a whirlwind of political machination and cultural cover-up. A thriller that reveals an astonishing body of authentic new evidence about what Vanity Fair calls “Art’s Greatest Mystery.”
THE MYSTERY OF AUVERS: A Story of Obsession, a Van Gogh Letter & Art History's Greatest Whodunit -- The nonfiction companion book to Exile in the Light, a look at the incongruities surrounding the death of history’s most iconic artist and a first-person memoir of how thirty years of research into the subject led to the writing of the novel.
EMPIRE OF EDEN -- A sequel to Exile in the Light that finds its screenwriter hero in 1969 Hollywood, where an offer to write an irreverent biopic of President Warren G. Harding turns into a life-threatening adventure that unveils level upon level of startling information about American Presidential History’s most explosive hidden chapter.
CHINA GATE -- The classic gangster saga tracing the rise of an American high school fraternity in early ’60s Taiwan to criminal and corporate success in the Vietnam War and Eastasian economic boom of the ’70s. A bestseller the Portland Oregonian called “a sharply plotted and crisply executed tale of international intrigue!”