In the Name of the Law: novel, Samuel Blumenfeld

Who wouldn't have wanted to be Steve McQueen? Who wouldn't have wanted to have the style of the man known as "The King of Cool"? Remember the panning shot in The Thomas Crown Affair, where the actor embraces Faye Dunaway for what seems like hours. Remember Michel Legrand's music (The Windmills of Your Mind), the race on the beach, but also the blue eyes of Josh Randall in Wanted: Dead or Alive (1958-1961), the series that made Steve McQueen famous, and from which Samuel Blumenfeld's novel borrows its title, in several senses. An only child and an angry young man, who never knew his father, a racing driver who drove Jaguars or Porsches, who loved speed and risk, women and alcohol, martial arts and drugs, The King of Cool readily broke the law, even if it was Hollywood's. Here he is reincarnated.
In November 1980, the son of Isaac and Hannah Bergelson, a young, bespectacled Jew living an uneventful life in a home in the Parisian suburbs, listens as Roger Gicquel announces the actor's death in Ciudad Juarez from cancer. His world collapses. In this novel of bittersweet nostalgia and humor equal to that of early Philip Roth, begins the reconstruction of a blended family: that of the Bergelsons, between failures and a dreamed destiny, and that of Steve McQueen. "He had become one of us. He had joined us in our strange exercise of treading water, to live, in compliance with our tradition, in the name of the Law."