Okay, this will be short and not very insightful. I read Robert Bloch's private eye novel Shooting Star (Ace 1958). It was reprinted by Hard Case Crime rather recently as a nice double book - and a good thing it was reprinted, since the original edition goes as far as $350 in Abebooks! The original also seems to be an Ace Double, so it's fitting the new book is also a double.Okay, back to the book. This really doesn't seem to be going to be very short. As many of you probably know already from reading the book or reviews, it's a Hollywood novel, with a one-eyed private eye trying to clear a B-film actor's reputation so that a producer can put his old films into television. The cultural history here is very interesting and Bloch gives intriguing and authentic-looking glimpses of movie and TV industry - which he both knew from first-hand experience. The hero of the book, Mark Clayburn, is also an agent for pulp writers and a true-crime writer himself and Bloch gives a glimpse of that life, too, mentioning, at least, Anthony Boucher by name (I think some others, too, but I forgot who they were). I think I could've read more of the writer's life.
Bloch is a sure-handed writer, capable of making quick observations, and his dialogue is snappy at best. However, the book lags in the middle and I kind of lost interest - well, it's easy to lose interest with my kids around. But the first half of the book is very good, also with very acute social commentaries. It seems that Bloch could've written a more serious novel than the Ace Double format allowed him to. This isn't your typical private eye novel, though - the hero does get knocked out couple of times and there are nice babes around. I don't mind those clichés, but I minded more some of the sloppiness: one of the supposedly bad guys is suddenly revealed to be another supposedly bad guy's brother, which made me go: "Oh really?"
It was interesting to read this just after I'd finished a Toby Peters novel by Stuart Kaminsky. I can't remember the title now, but it also dealt with old B-films being shown on television. It was like I was given a lesson on the Hollywood history from the fourties and fifties. I also give you the original cover for the Bloch book, and the Hard Case one, too, by Arthur Suydam. It's nice, all right, but I don't really think anyone had those kind of boobs in the early fifties, not even in Hollywood.
And no, I haven't still read the other novel of the double, Spiderweb, which seems to be more psychological suspense.
There's one problem with double books. Kauto or Ottilia took a photo of me reading the book and it looks like I'm a total moron reading a book the wrong end up!
Should I go on? This really didn't turn out to be very short.
I prefer the original cover. Nice leg art.
ReplyDeleteI think Bloch was consistently torn in his ambitions with his crime novels...in fact, most of his novels (certainly his sf novels are also more of a compromise between making the deadline so as to make the rent and larger ambitions, too, from the way I read them). His shorter fiction, as with many writers, often seems to me to be more fully realized. Not true of such (notably short) novels as PSYCHO and THE KIDNAPPER. I wouldn't be surprised if he half harbored a desire to make AMERICAN GOTHIC a bug-crusher, but he did well there, too, at shorter length.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Todd, for your comment. I have read some of Bloch's short stories and they have been excellent. There's a good retrospective collection in Finnish from the nineties. It's been too long since I read Psycho, Dead Beat and another novel the title of which I can't remember at the moment to be able to comment. Psycho II was pretty good, as I recall.
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