The death of Martin Amis sent me back to his fantastic memoir Experience, where, amid much dazzling insight, there’s an odd little interlude in which he gets all man-crushy over Pulp Fiction–era John Travolta (whom he profiled for The New Yorker). They share “intimate dinners” and warm embraces, while Amis flicks away concerns about Travolta’s Scientology beliefs. Which just goes to show, movie stars can make mugs of the best of us.
Cut to two new novels about deception, Hollywood-style, featuring two women whose jobs involve making mugs of the movie-mad public.
Both begin as actresses and pivot to important behind-the-scenes positions when their careers wilt. One is a studio fixer and the other a gossip columnist. They are tenacious and likable but wield their power to cover up awful things and betray those who won’t play the game.
And there’s a lot for Carbine International studio fixer Mary Rourke to cover up in Craig Russell’s The Devil’s Playground, which spans three time periods.
It begins in 1967, with a film scholar who thinks he’ll find the only surviving print of “the greatest horror movie … of all time” at a desolate hotel in the desert with only one resident. And her large black dog.
Meanwhile, the main action swirls around late-20s Hollywood, at the dawn of the talking picture and the height of Prohibition. Boozy stars like John Gilbert and John Barrymore are running amok, requiring constant damage control, which is where a fixer comes in.
One night, Mary is called to the home of “the most desirable woman in the world,” Norma Carlton, to find her laid out—gorgeously dead—in bed. Mary and the studio’s house doctor deduce that this is not a suicide, despite efforts to stage it as such. Carlton had almost completed work on The Devil’s Playground, and her death is the latest misfortune to curse the debt-ridden production.
Mary’s boss wants her to look further into Carlton’s death, so she ventures into a baffling hall of mirrors where no one is who they appear to be, having had their original identities altered in favor of more wholesome, fan-friendly ones. It’s a dangerous business, since some people’s previous selves contain worse secrets than a Bowery twang or a dowdy last name.
The novel’s third strand reaches back to Louisiana bayou country in 1893, to the origin story of a striking beauty whose parish neighbors suspect she’s a voodoo witch. Over time, she brings down supernatural havoc on her enemies and then disappears with her alluring daughter.
The three narratives are expertly intertwined in this richly textured and erudite Hollywood gothic. Disparate plot elements well in hand, Russell brings the decadent L.A. scene alive with a vivid mix of real and fictional characters. He returns often to the image of the Ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail; make of that what you will.
There’s more Hollywood malfeasance in Lindsay Lynch’s Do Tell, whose narrator, Edith O’Dare, is wrapping up her acting career as the book opens. She’s already been selling bits of tattle to the queen of Hollywood dish, Poppy St. John, and soon challenges Poppy with a column of her own. If this reminds you of the epic Louella Parsons/Hedda Hopper rivalry, you’re not wrong.
The main action in Craig Russell’s The Devil’s Playground swirls around late-20s Hollywood, at the dawn of the talking picture and the height of Prohibition.
The book’s plot hinges partly on a teenage actress’s accusation of rape against a swashbuckling actor named Freddy Clarke, which echoes an episode involving Errol Flynn in 1942, though Flynn had two young accusers. There was a trial, and of course the popular star was acquitted.
In a rare show of conscience, Edie provides some private support to Clarke’s victim, who doesn’t stand much of a chance in court, but that’s as far as she goes. Edie encourages confidences, then betrays the people she gets close to, ruining a few careers in the process. For her, it’s all about the column.
Lynch has clearly done her homework, sweating the period details at some cost to the story’s momentum. But this is nonetheless a clever first novel; it should be catnip to devotees of Golden Age Hollywood.
The plot of Lindsay Lynch’s Do Tell hinges partly on a teenage actress’s accusation of rape against a swashbuckling actor.
Since I have Martin Amis on my mind … One of the touchstones of his life, something that haunted him always, was the murder of his cousin, Lucy Partington, by the serial killer Frederick West. The evil that such men do is explored by Megan Abbott and Clémence Michallon in their novels about two women who are, respectively, trapped and imprisoned by men.
In Megan Abbott’s Beware the Woman, the entrapment creeps in stealthily. A short vacation sounds great to pregnant schoolteacher Jacy when she and her husband, Jed, drive to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to visit her father-in-law, a retired doctor and widower.
And, at first, it is. The house is like a grand hunting lodge and the suave Dr. Ash is solicitous and gallant, calling Jacy “sweet girl,” and mixing up fancy virgin cocktails. She’s unsettled by the presence of the regal Mrs. Brandt, however, who calls herself “the caretaker” and seems to have wafted in from another era.
As does Dr. Ash’s attitude toward women, which slithers out after Jacy starts bleeding and visits the complicit local G.P. Though it turns out to be just a scare, the genial dad reveals himself to be an icy control freak when he makes it impossible for Jacy to leave or contact the outside world. Jed stands right with him, a man-child unable to challenge his father.
Setting this dark fairy tale in the Upper Peninsula was an inspired choice by Abbott, whose descriptions of this remote place are almost hyper-real and whose knowledge of its regional quirks and suspicion of outsiders is prodigious. Once again, this gifted writer inhabits the unique literary space she’s created with specificity and febrile intensity.
In Megan Abbott’s Beware the Woman, entrapment creeps in stealthily.
While Jacy has the illusion of freedom, the woman in the shed in Michallon’s first novel, The Quiet Tenant, lost that long ago. She has been locked up there for five years and abused sexually by her captor. The man has let her live as an object to be dominated, unlike the other unlucky women he has targeted, so she clings on to her pathetic scrap of a life by never crossing him.
We learn that the shed is on the man’s property, and that he is the devoted father of a 13-year-old girl and a grieving widower whose wife has recently died. Presentable and hardworking, he’s an admired member of his Hudson Valley community, the last person who’d be suspected of such cruelty.
When he is forced to move, his captive—he renames her Rachel—convinces him she can remain with him, as a tenant in his new house with a hard-luck cover story. She’ll be handcuffed to the bed all day, but it’s a giant step up from the shed and brings her new hope.
The story is told mainly by three women: Rachel, the man’s daughter, and his potential next victim. Through them, Michallon lets information trickle out at just the right emotional pace. What sets The Quiet Tenant apart from the typical serial-killer thriller is the stripped-down gravity of its approach; it is never prurient and doesn’t try to explain the killer’s psychology. This is about the women he has hurt, not his difficult childhood or flawed gene pool. I think Amis would have approved.
Lisa Henricksson reviews mystery books for AIR MAIL. She lives in New York City