Peter Sellers

The Last Martini is a wry and amusing look at the prevalence of the hangover experience through the history of literature. It is the first survey of some of the most vivid, hilarious, and moving descriptions of hangovers and their sufferers that has ever been compiled. While the book is far from comprehensive—the list of hangover scenes is a lengthy one—it is a unique and intriguing introduction to the field. The Last Martini is not a book of hangover cures and placebos, unless they are methods and recipes detailed in works of fiction. Instead, it is a celebration of the countless different ways in which authors have described the experience. While the book includes the sardonic, understanding humour most writers have found in those dismal mornings after, it also features excerpts, such as those by Hubert Selby Jr and Charles Jackson, that reflect the real life tragedy and pathos that excess can bring. The Last Martini is the kind of book that can be read cover to cover or dipped into at random. It can be enjoyed by everyone who has ever had a hangover and by everyone who's never had one and wants to know what they've been missing.

In settings as diverse as a struggling advertising agency, a book store, and a large computer company, the protagonists in Kickback and Other Stories find duplicity, betrayal, and sudden violence. As so often in life, there are no heroes, and it's often hard to tell who is the greater villain. A four-time nominee for the Crime Writers of Canada's Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story, and winner of the 2001 Ellery Queen Readers' Award, Sellers' stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Down & Out Magazine and numerous anthologies. "Closing Doors", which appears in this collection and originally appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, recently was awarded the 2020 Arthur Ellis Best Crime Short Story Award. Don Hutchison, acclaimed author of Great Pulp Heroes, said of Peter Sellers' stories: "A typical Sellers story there is usually one bad decision made, and on that hangs the plot—as well as the perpetrator.

Sellers' fluidity as an actor made for a terrifying madness that grew like a slow metastasizing cancer throughout his adult life. The story of Peter Sellers concludes with his premature death at the age of 54 sick at heart and alone in those sunless hotel rooms so recoiled from intimacy that no one really knew him anymore.