John Hoerr tells the story of three men—his uncle, Congressman Harry Davenport, union leader Tom Quinn, and Father Charles Owen Rice—whose lives became intertwined during the anti-Communist witch hunts of the McCarthy Era. The story helps illuminate one of the more repressive periods in American history, when thousands of Americans guilty only of enlisting in leftist causes were caught up in dragnets cast by overzealous Communist hunters on behalf of the House Un-American Activities Committee and other bodies. Much has been written about well-known cultural figures (the Hollywood Ten), and prominent writers (Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman) who contended with HUAC. Hoerr tells of mostly ordinary Americans who were largely unknown at the time, but whose stories are nonetheless remarkable.

Writing from personal experience with the title characters, as well as archival research, Hoerr recreates the events of the 1949 HUAC hearings, where rigged testimony by a few workers cast suspicion on their union brothers.  The results would echo through the years, causing people to lose jobs, marriages, and self-respect. Hoerr traces the paths followed by Harry, Tom, and Father Rice and relates their individual experiences to the great conflict between anti-Communist and Communist forces in the American labor movement, leading to the eventual demise of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations).

Izrael Zachariah Deutsch was born on March 15, 1934, in Komjata, Czechoslovakia. The second youngest child, Izrael lived a bucolic existence with nine brothers and sisters on a farm, differing from them only in that he was deaf. When he was six, his mother took him to Budapest, Hungary, and enrolled him in a Jewish school for deaf children, where he thrived. Soon, however, the Nazi regime in Germany and the Arrow Cross fascists in Hungary destroyed Izrael’s world forever.
       Izrael realized that by being both Jewish and deaf, he faced a double threat of being exported to the gas chambers in Poland. But at every lethal junction, he found a way to survive, first by buying and reselling pastries for extra money that later saved his life in the Budapest ghetto. Still, Izrael was close to death from starvation when he was liberated by Russian soldiers on January 18, 1945.
​       Izrael survived the war only to learn that his parents and two brothers had been murdered by the Nazis. The rest of his brothers and sisters scattered to distant parts of the world. Forced to remain in Budapest, Izrael finished school and became an accomplished machinist. He avoided any part in the Hungarian uprising in 1956 so that he could secure a visa to leave for Sweden. From Sweden he traveled throughout Europe and Israel, using an amazing network of Holocaust survivors, relatives, and deaf friends to ease his journey. He finally settled in Los Angeles, where he married a deaf Jewish woman he had met years before. Along the way, he changed his name from Izrael Deutsch to Harry Dunai.

"As engaging a tale as I have encountered in months of looking for something really amusing to read.”—Kelsey Guilfoil, Chicago Tribune

“A pleasantly muted mystery that is genuinely funny fantasy as well.”—New York Times

On the outskirts of a small English town, young Arnie discovers the body of a middle-aged man in the woods. Three people are convinced they are responsible for the death: the captain thinks he accidentally shot the man while hunting rabbits; the local spinster thinks she may have done more damage than she intended when she hit him with her shoe—and Arnie’s mother, most damningly of all, reveals that the man is her long-lost husband, Harry, and that she had smashed a bottle over his head when he suddenly reappeared.

The police are called in to investigate the crime, but free-thinking artist Sam Marlowe becomes a good-natured sleuth, helping the townspeople to bury, dig up, and rebury the corpse in an effort to evade the authorities and discover the truth. While no one is particularly troubled by Harry’s death, everyone feels some guilt over the apparent murder. In the end, two couples fall in love, Arnie has a new father, and the mystery is happily solved.

First published in 1949, The Trouble with Harry was one of Jack Trevor Story’s early successes. Written with wit and insight, the novel was a bestseller and praised for both its succinct style and its original blend of mystery and humor. The story was adapted by Alfred Hitchcock for his film of the same name in 1955.