Last Night on the Gorilla Tour: A Novel
About the Author                       ABOUT THE AUTHOR Hugh Gilmore lives in Philadelphia, where he owns and operates an old and rare book business, and also writes a weekly newspaper column called "The Enemies of Reading." He is the author of  "Malcolm’s Wine," a noir crime novel and the just-published "Last Night on the Gorilla Tour," a quirky romance/adventure tale. Just when he entered his thirties, Hugh Gilmore developed a yearning for adventure. He pursued a degree in anthropology, focusing on apes and monkeys. He spent extensive time in both Africa and the Caribbean doing field studies. His special interest was social communication, including the question, Do apes and monkeys have language? Hugh writes: “My studies back then led me to develop a deep and lasting interest in the work of  a strange, American original – Richard Lynch Garner (1848-1920), a self-taught, pioneering researcher of gorillas and chimpanzees in French Equatorial Africa. Garner was a colorful and interesting character who led several Smithsonian Institution expeditions back in the days when hardly anyone in America had ever seen a live gorilla. Zoos and museums worldwide were competing to be the first to bring back specimens, dead or alive. “I knew that Garner died during a fund-raising tour in Tennessee in 1920, and I felt compelled to write a story based on creating a backstory to that event. While the essence of Garner's research efforts is portrayed accurately in this book, many of the plot details are purely inventions of mine.  “Both I and “Professor” Garner were doing fine with this book until certain characters like Clara Talbot and Linder and Eddie Charles crawled into the story. All hell broke loose after that.”