Whispering Wires: The Tragic Tale of an American Bootlegger

Philip Metcalfe has described his role as an author as that of a painter who endows a lost world with the personality and the dailiness it once possessed. In Whispering Wires Metcalfe tells the story of Roy Olmstead one of the principal bootleggers in Prohibition-era Seattle and the first major federal court case concerning the use of wiretaps. He writes Set into motion then was a constellation of conditions that no one could have foretold. Prohibition had produced a shadow universe governed by an aberrant moral algebra. This historical narrative follows the city officials Prohibition agents and rumrunners who chased evaded and double-crossed each other during one of Seattles most thrilling eras.