Among the choicest settings for a mystery novel is surely Hollywood, a world that traffics in and profits from deception and illusion. With its glamorous cast and frequently opulent milieus, Craig Russell's The Devil's Playground is a lavish production of the golden age of Hollywood, albeit one featuring a glitter-free leading lady with a crime to solve--or at least clean up.
Mary Rourke is no starlet: she's a middle-aged fixer for Carbine International Pictures, which hasn't quite wrapped shooting The Devil's Playground when she's informed that its female lead, Norma Carlton, has been found dead in bed. As Mary surreptitiously questions people in Norma's orbit, others involved with the production suffer mishaps and worse. Mary becomes half convinced that the film, which is being promoted as "the greatest horror movie ever made," is, as everyone's saying, cursed.
Mary's story, which unfolds in 1927, is threaded with chapters set decades earlier that involve the occult, with which Norma was infatuated. All of this is framed by chapters set in 1967 that center on a film historian who has been hired to track down the rumored lone surviving copy of The Devil's Playground. Russell, a Scotsman who has won the McIlvanney Prize for The Ghosts of Altona and Hyde, is clearly something of a film historian himself, using his deep knowledge of Old Hollywood and behind-the-scenes industry workings to shape his nesting doll of a novel. Deliciously, the cool, hard-bitten tone of Mary's chapters is in lockstep with that of a classic noir. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer