Amagansett Author Pens First Mystery

Amagansett author Allan Retzky's debut novel Vanished in the Dunes: A Hamptons Mystery begins with a flash of a pink-and-white dress at the 86th Street Jitney stop (in front of Victoria's Secret). From there, readers are whisked from the tables outside to the and other familiar Hampton locales, as an innocent encounter traps a vulnerable man in a web of lies with deadly consequences.

"Authors get ideas from common place things," Retzky recently told East Hampton Patch.

"In my particular case, I was, in fact, taking the Jitney from Manhattan out to Amagansett and I'm sitting behind a man sitting on the seat in front of me and a woman sits down, attractive, nothing drop dead, but pretty sexy looking," he said. "And you're sitting right behind them so you can't avoid picking up little bits and bobs of the conversation and she basically was hitting on him and he was very polite, but he basically said, 'no,' and stuck his face back in a newspaper, and I said to myself what if he had said, 'Yeah, I'll show you around the area," somewhat innocently, and then something happened..."

Retzky's agent Ellen Levine, executive vice-president at Trident Media Group, likens the mystery to Scott Turrow's Presumed Innocent or a Hitchcock classic.

"It has this mood and this tension and it's full of surprises. You think it's going one way and there is another twist, and another twist. It's a real psychological thriller."

Retzky, now 74, had a career in international business before he began the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literature at Stony Brook Southampton. International travel, he said, exposed him to a wide spectrum of people and cultural values which he was able to draw upon in his writing.

"When you are abroad and trying to do business," Retzky said, "you find yourself in situations where you want to find out what's a good approach to this particular individual to help your ability to do business...with some of that comes the revelation of certain vulnerabilities people have. Without meaning to, you pick up on certain things and that kind of made me interested and I sort of would jot down story ideas."

As he explained, "I like to explore, what I would call, certain flaws in human behavior."

In the case of the novel's central character, Amos Posner, Retzky said, "Circumstances made him very vulnerable to flattery. His particular flaw was that he was in a downer in his life. A lot of things had not been going his way and, sure enough, when somebody flattered him he was prepared to step over the line."

Retzky and his wife, Susan, have lived in Amagansett full-time for the past 10 years and have summered here for 30. He said he tried to "incorporate the Hamptons as a separate character in the book. The backdrop of the location is pretty dramatic, so why not pull it in as a part of the book."

Vanished in the Dunes has received advanced praise from best-selling authors Susan Isaacs and Helen Simonson, author of Major Pettigrew's Last Stand who was a classmate of Retzky's in Southampton.

"I'm inordinately proud of Allan and his success," said Lou Ann Walker, a faculty member in the MFA Program.

Oceanview Publishing will release Vanished in the Dunes nationwide on July 3. Retzky will be doing readings locally at Southampton Writers Conference, The , and the .