by Sandra Olivetti Martin
441 pages
 
Fire at the Stymie Club is a memoir and collection of Sandra Olivetti Martin's best writing as a journalist and essayist. She is founding editor and publisher of Bay Weekly, which began in Chesapeake Country nearly 30 years ago. She also has written for the Washington Post, the St. Louis Post-Disaptch and numerous magazines.
Sandra grew up in St. Louis above the legendary Stymie Club, a fine dining and cocktail lounge operated by her father, a charming bookmaker, and her mother, the glamorous daughter of Italian immigrants. The Stymie Club offers an enticing setting for the book's first story with its extralegal doings and the perfumy sensuality of female clientele and the waitresses who look out for precocious little Sandra.
Fire at the Stymie Club includes Martin's prize-winning Bay Weekly columns and stories, profiles and appreciations of legendary Marylanders, and select pieces from her early years as a staff writer for Illinois Times in Springfield, Illinois.