“Blood Herring”

“Blood Herring”

Photo credit: Janet Donovan

“James Bond meets Austin Powers meets Marco Polo meets Warren Buffett meets the World’s Most Interesting Man in this brilliant pastiche of humanity.” Frank Harrison, hedge fund manager, Rye, New York.  Harrison is referring to Blood Herring, a novel by Douglas Eby who celebrated the publication at Cafe Milano in Georgetown with his literary friends.

Douglas Eby

The financier turned writer joined best-selling author Dan Moldea who recently hosted Robert DiNiro at his authors night at Old Europe; Olympian and former Congressman Tom McMillen; and Mike O’Harro of Tramps, Champions and all around guru of Washington nightlife in the mid-seventies and eighties.

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Mike O’Harro and Dan E. Moldea

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Robert Shields, Marilyn Thompson and Dan Moldea

The party was hosted by Gary Steinberg, Rich Wiedes and Rick Rickertsen. Gary met Douglas five years ago. “I was sitting in Peacock Café on a Sunday afternoon where I used to go for my lunch hoping to meet people. I bumped into Douglas, we started talking; pretty soon we knew in that conversation that we were going to be friends. We have the same interests: sports, business, reading, and we’ve become really great friends. Douglas is very keen on branding people. You know, when he meets people he brands them. He brands me the IMF, the man of finance, but that’s just because I work at the IMF. I brand him, and he knows this, I brand him the polymath.”

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Mike O’Harro, Doug Eby and Gary Steinberg

“Does anybody know what the polymath is?  A polymath is somebody who’s exceedingly good at everything he turns his hand to,” added Steinberg. “That is Douglas. He is a polymath. He’s a brilliant cook, a competent golfer. He’s a brilliant businessman. He’s a brilliant investor and we know he’s a great emerging writer. I’ve read the book more than once and I know we have a great talent in terms of his writing abilities. More than any of that I consider him to be a great friend and I’m really proud that I’m here tonight standing in front of you because if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here.”

“This is really touching for me,” responded Eby. “This is a twist in my career. Being part of the creative process and to write is very, very rewarding….very interesting. Most of my career I’ve spent in the investment-management business making rich people richer – not exactly a high calling in life, I don’t think, but rewarding, nonetheless. This business, the actuality of creating something from-scratch and watch people derive pleasure from it is really, really interesting. People have asked when I was signing the book if it was  difficult. It was extremely difficult. J.D. Salinger said that writing a novel is so torturous, so difficult, that one would have to be practically insane to want to try. He was a writer, so you could imagine how hard it was for me. It’s the kind of thing where if you knew what was really involved at the outset … really what was involved in the whole process, kind of like marriage, you would never do it.”

Hollywood on the Potomac sat down with Eby before the festivities began:

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