LA private eye Christopher Marlowe, searching for his dead partner's killers, is lured into a web of murder, deceit, lust, despair and, coincidentally, a frantic quest for the Holy Grail. Doped, duped, pistol-whipped, framed by the cops and going nowhere fast, Marlowe enters a nightmare world where Robert Frost, Norman Mailer and Edmund Wilson drink in the gloom of a London pub; where Auden is glimpsed entering the men's room; where Henry James, Aldous Huxley and Richard Wagner share an ice cream aboard a Thames pleasure steamer; and where, out of luck and out of clues, Marlowe finally tracks down T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound. And he wants answers . . .