WRITE TO DIE, Hollywood whydunit story & THE HIDDEN KEYS, Quincunx series' fourth entry

THE HIDDEN KEYS
ANDRÉ ALEXIS (Quincunx series #4)
Coach House Books
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Parkdale’s Green Dolphin is a bar of ill repute, and it is there that Tancred Palmieri, a thief with elegant and erudite tastes, meets Willow Azarian, an aging heroin addict. She reveals to Tancred that her very wealthy father has recently passed away, leaving each of his five children a mysterious object that provides one clue to the whereabouts of a large inheritance. Willow enlists Tancred to steal these objects from her siblings and help her solve the puzzle.

A Japanese screen, a painting that plays music, a bottle of aquavit, a framed poem and a model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater: Tancred is lured in to this beguiling quest, and even though Willow dies before the puzzle is solved, he presses on.

As he tracks down the treasure, he must enlist the help of Alexander von Würfel, conceptual artist and taxidermist to the wealthy, and fend off Willow’s heroin dealers, a young albino named ‘Nigger’ Colby and his sidekick, Sigismund ‘Freud’ Luxemburg, a clubfooted psychopath, both of whom are eager to get their hands on this supposed pot of gold. And he must mislead Detective Daniel Mandelshtam, his most adored friend.

Inspired by a reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, The Hidden Keys questions what it means to be honourable, what it means to be faithful and what it means to sin.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm not sure how to tell you about this book. Let me tell you about honorable-thief Tancred:

Tancred was a tall and physically imposing black man, but he was also approachable. He could not sit anywhere for long without someone starting a conversation. This was, his friends liked to say, because his blue eyes were startling and his voice deep and avuncular. So, when he wanted to be alone without necessarily being alone, Tancred answered in French—his maternal tongue—when spoken to by strangers. Few who came into the Dolphin knew the language.

This, I believe, explains Author Alexis's project nicely. He makes a mythic figure, of prodigious endowments of soul and talent, and sets him down at a nexus of Toronto's many worlds. He then seems to stand back and let 'er rip. It feels to me as though Author Alexis more or less "took dictation" when writing this story, and its immediate predecessor Fifteen Dogs (which I read almost a decade ago). The less-than-propulsive pace and the slightly meandering sense of place are, in my observation, best explained by this reality of the creative process. A more plot-driven project, one that was constructed not discovered, wouldn't keep this:

The city had been built by people from innumerable elsewheres. It was a chaos of cultures ordered only by its long streets. It belonged to no one and never would, or maybe it was a million cities in one, unique to each of its inhabitants, belonging to whoever walked its streets.

But, in this structure of discovery, Tancred's observation goes a long way towards making it plain that we are on a quest that surpasses its material goals. Part of the manifestation of this is the quite long time frame of the story...there is time, between Tancred meeting the woman on whose behalf he goes on this quest for and the time he actually begins the quest, for him to suffer an acutely painful personal tragedy...and its, politely said, abrupt ending.

It's a sad, death-haunted quest. It's a life-affirming choice for Tancred to take it on. It's amazing how much fun it is to watch a character decide to give up a past of anti-social thievery and remain a thief, only pro-social now. It's a book with a lot of good aperçus, and a few moments where one wonders what the heck Author Alexis was thinking. Tancred isn't a traditional series-mystery sleuth. The two books featuring him I've read aren't really properly series mysteries. They're no less delightful for that. The puzzle set by, and for, Tancred's client is resolved neatly at the end. Permaybehaps a bit too neatly...the source of the missing star.

But the reason it's got four of 'em is down to moments like this:

“I believe God is an impediment to good. All those people acting in his name don’t bother to think their actions through. They’re incapable of good...No, that’s not right...There are any number of them who accidentally do good. ... What I mean is it’s more difficult to do good with God in the equation.”

Heady stuff, philosophically in my wheelhouse, and not the only example I could've chosen. Spoiled for choice gets a book a good rating.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

WRITE TO DIE
CHARLES ROSENBERG
Thomas & Mercer (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Hollywood’s latest blockbuster is all set to premiere—until a faded superstar claims the script was stolen from her. To defend the studio, in steps the Harold Firm, one of Los Angeles’s top entertainment litigation firms and as much a part of the glamorous scene as the studios themselves. As a newly minted partner, it’s Rory Calburton’s case, and his career, to win or lose.

But the seemingly tame civil trial turns lethal when Rory stumbles upon the strangled body of his client’s general counsel. And the ties that bind in Hollywood constrict even tighter when the founder of the Harold Firm is implicated in the murder. Rory is certain the plagiarism and murder cases are somehow connected, and with the help of new associate Sarah Gold—who’s just finished clerking for the chief justice—he’s determined to get answers. Will finding out who really wrote the script lead them to the mastermind of the real-life murder?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Sarah and Rory, a pair of overprivileged and overeducated entertainment lawyers, deny their hawt, sweet luuuv until they can't anymore. And then they solve a crime committed against people I could not work up enough spit to lob into their faces, still less piss on if they were on fire.

It makes it really hard to review a book when that's one's response.

The prose is prosaic, the story's not relatable because one doesn't relate to such dislikable souls. And there I was, flipping the Kindlepages...I needed to know why, not who, in this story. It was a satisfying why, so I felt my time was well-enough spent that I'm not after getting up a pitchfork parade to get Author Rosenberg. I was a lot less forgiving about The Trial and Execution of the Traitor George Washington, as you'll recall; but that was mostly pique at raised expectations being dashed. The fact is that Author Rosenberg's prose doesn't scintillate but it also doesn't obfuscate.

Easily the most effective use of his prose was the ruminations that Rory entertains as he's going through his legal maneuverings in the various trials he's involved in. Time in Rory's head is among my best memories of the read because he really thinks there in front of us. I am not a lawyer and am fascinated by the way that legal argument affects one's thought processes. It's a shoo-in, therefore, that the story will succeed for me on that level.

Sarah's "Impulse-control disorder" is where the wheels really come off for me. This person has a disorder that, in someone who was a Supreme Court Justice's clerk, would be *disastrous* and a disqualification from ever being considered for such a position. And how many Supreme Court Justices would hire such a person knowingly, as we're told Sarah was? Also, a private-investigator's license might also be unobtainable in California due to this diagnosis. If it isn't, I'm very worried.

So the read's not a hit, not a whiff, just a pleasant-enough way to spend a few wastable hours.

WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN?, a super read and a genuinely good classic Hollywood novel

WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN?
BUDD SCHULBERG
Random House
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Everyone of us knows someone who runs. He is one of the symptoms of our times—from the little man who shoves you out of the way on the street to the go-getter who shoves you out of a job in the office to the Fuehrer who shoves you out of the world. And all of us have stopped to wonder, at some time or another, what it is that makes these people tick. What makes them run?

This is the question Schulberg has asked himself, and the answer is the first novel written with the indignation that only a young writer with talent and ideals could concentrate into a manuscript. It is the story of Sammy Glick, the man with a positive genius for being a heel, who runs through New York’s East Side, through newspaper ranks and finally through Hollywood, leaving in his wake the wrecked careers of his associates; for this is his tragedy and his chief characteristic—his congenital incapacity for friendship.

An older and more experienced novelist might have tempered his story and, in so doing, destroyed one of its outstanding qualities. Compromise would mar the portrait of Sammy Glick. Schulberg has etched it in pure vitriol, and dissected his victim with a precision that is almost frightening.

When a fragment of this book appeared as a short story in a national magazine, Schulberg was surprised at the number of letters he received from people convinced they knew Sammy Glick’s real name. But speculation as to his real identity would be utterly fruitless, for Sammy is a composite picture of a loud and spectacular minority bitterly resented by the many decent and sincere artists who are trying honestly to realize the measureless potentialities of motion pictures. To this group belongs Schulberg himself, who has not only worked as a screen writer since his graduation from Dartmouth College in 1936, but has spent his life, literally, in the heart of the motion-picture colony. In the course of finding out what makes Sammy run (an operation in which the reader is spared none of the grue-some details) Schulberg has poured out everything he has felt about that place. The result is a book which the publishers not only believe to be the most honest ever written about Hollywood, but a penetrating study of one kind of twentieth-century success that is peculiar to no single race of people or walk of life.

My Review: Budd Schulberg got a lot of grief for writing this "anti-Semitic" shriek of outrage at the backstabbing, grasping, greedy, hollow culture of Hollywood. Well, how else could he tell the story? The moguls of the time were almost all Jewish, and they weren't nice little yeshiva boys but street toughs with chips on their shoulders hell bent for leather to make it to the top.

Today it is a lot less true of Hollywood's power elite. Not the behavior, the Jewishness. The behavior is intact! Of this I assure you from personal experience. And people of both genders and all religious and cultural affiliations enact it there. Awful place. As one would expect from any place where there is that much money floating around. *Breathtaking* amounts of money. The greed of these people is utterly beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. "Enough" is what you say to the chauffeur you're firing who complains it's unjust.

Reading this book was a bitter and painful reliving of my education in how "no good deed goes unpunished" and I will never re-read it for that reason. But dayum! What a glorious excoriation of the moral midgets who make our movies, TV shows, and music! I am in *awe* that Schulberg got away with writing it and stayed in Hollywood! Steven Spielberg, that maker of iconically positive movies, said the book should never be made into a movie because it's too anti-movie-biz.

Guess what: It never has been. Even Ben Stiller, who wanted to star and direct, couldn't get it done when he was at his peak of fame and power.

Shows you just how true it was, is, and will remain. *shudder*


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