Stuart Kaminsky: Show Business is Murder

© 2004

Introduction copyright © 2004 by Double Tiger Productions, Inc.

“Small Time in His Heart,” copyright © 2004 by Carolyn Wheat

“Money on the Red,” copyright © 2004 by Edward D. Hoch

“Razzle Dazzle,” copyright © 2004 by Annette Brafman Meyers

“Arful,” copyright © 2004 by John Lutz

“Blonde Moment,” copyright © 2004 by Elaine Viets

“Lah Tee Dah,” copyright © 2004 by Angela Zeman

“Just Another Hollywood Ending,” copyright © 2004 by David Bart

“The Search for Robert Rich,” copyright © 2004 by Bob Shayne

“Murder at the Heartbreak Hotel,” copyright © 2004 by Mark Terry

“Bring Me the Head of Osama bin Laden,” copyright © 2004 by Gary Phillips

“Line Reading,” copyright © 2004 by Parnell Hall

“Arrangements,” copyright © 2004 by Susanne Shaphren

“A Berlin Story,” copyright © 2004 by Libby Fischer Hellmann

“Goin’ West,” copyright © 2004 by Charles Ardai. All rights reserved.

“All Said and Done,” copyright © 2004 by Gregg Hurwitz

“Fred Menace, Commie for Hire,” copyright © 2004 by Steve Hockensmith

“The Dying Artist,” copyright © 2004 by Shelley Freydont

“On the Bubble,” copyright © 2004 by Robert Lopresti

“Slap,” copyright © 2004 by Mat Coward

“Break a Leg,” copyright © 2004 by Double Tiger Productions, Inc.

“ THE PLAY’S THEthing wherein we’ll catch the conscience of the king.”

Hamlet was playing detective and using show business, a troupe of traveling players, in an attempt to get the killer to give himself away. Hamlet, being Hamlet, can’t resist the urge to step in and tell the actors how to do their job.

Shakespeare was not the first to use a show business/mystery tie-in. Hamlet wasn’t the first would-be show business detective.

But he may have been the first truly famous one created by a major author. Excuse me, the major author in the English language, if we ignore George Bernard Shaw’s somewhat disingenuous dismissal of the bard.

But I digress.

The icons of mystery fiction have always been drawn to show business. An actress took in Sherlock. Poirot was constantly running into theater people. Dorothy Sayers wrote a novel about murder in a publishing house.

It’s hard to think of a mystery novelist who wrote more than five books who wasn’t drawn to show business.

And then came Hollywood.

Show business mysteries went far beyond and deeply into Hollywood. In his novel The Little Sister, Raymond Chandler set the tone of fascination with, and repulsion by, Hollywood. Ross MacDonald… I could go on with a list that would include almost every major mystery writer of the last century, but let’s focus, at least for a paragraph or two, on one quirky byway of the show business mystery.

A popular, and generally forgotten, young readers’ genre in the 1930s and 1940s featured the movie star as detective. I read books with detectives like Bonita Granville and Shirley Temple. I think Jackie Cooper even solved a murder or two.

Andrew Bergman picked up the idea of using real show business figures in mysteries with his LeVine novels, and I, George Bagby, and others kept the books coming. The public that loved mystery movies also seemed to love mystery novels about movies and stars.

This is not to say that other sides of show business were being neglected by the fleet fingers of those of us who like to kill performers and artists on our pages.

Let’s jump to this collection of stories. If it has a design, besides the obvious one of show business as focus, it is variety-variety in style, subject matter, media, and seriousness. Some of the stories, like John Lutz’s tale of a talking dog and mine about an inept vaudevillian, are meant to be funny. Some, like Annette Meyers’s tale of a failed show business marriage, are clearly tragic.

Just for fun, we’ve included a script by Gary Phillips and Ed Hoch’s near-fantasy about a performance artist whose act consists of her being a roulette ball.

And media? We have stories about television, movies, theater, the music industry, and even a woman who hires a private detective to find Elvis. We have actors, producers, writers, and musicians who solve the crimes or become the victims.

We have stories set in England, Germany, Chicago, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and an imaginary small town.

We have traditional first-person private-eye novels and third-person not-so-traditional tales from the perspective of killers and victims.

Our tales take place in time over the past 70 years.

If anything else holds this collection of whimsy together, it is that show business is possibly at its most interesting when it is, indeed, murder.

– Stuart M. Kaminsky

THEATRE80 ST. MARK’S

The Movie Musical Theatre

Screening Schedule, September-October 1972

SUN-THURS:

Girl Crazy

11 AM, 3:30 PM, 8 PM

Mickey and Judy put on another show, this time at a Western college. Great Gershwin songs stitch together a paper-thin plot; Judy shines as always.

For Me and My Gal

1 PM, 6:15 PM, 10:15 PM

Gene Kelly’s first feature for MGM has him high-stepping with Judy and then breaking her heart by dodging WWI draft (ahead of his time?). Great period fun.

Birch Tate, 1972

WALKING ALONG EIGHTHStreet from the Village, you first crossed Sixth Avenue, under the benevolent eye of the Jefferson Market Courthouse Library. With its turrets and narrow leaded windows, it looked like a fairy-tale castle. You could picture Rapunzel letting down her long thick hair, which made Scotty laugh when Birch said it, because Scotty remembered when the old Women’s House of Detention was there and prisoners leaned out of barred windows, yelling at boyfriends and girlfriends on the street below.

Rapunzel, Scotty said again, and laughed.

If there was one thing Birch was getting tired of, it was being young. Too young to remember the Women’s House of D. Too young to remember Busby Berkeley. Too young to care much about seeing Judy Garland in a movie; to her, Garland was a boozy concert singer with a drug problem and a ruined voice. Which was cool when it was Joplin, but Judy Garland was old.

She was not, Scotty had decided, going to spend one more day in this abysmally ignorant state. Theatre 80 St. Mark’s in the East Village was running a Garland double feature and Birch was, by God, going to know by the end of this afternoon precisely why Judy Garland was the greatest star Hollywood ever produced.

They passed Orange Julius and the wedding-ring store, pushed through the crowd at Macdougal, and met the boys on the corner of Sullivan. Patrick and Stanley were even crazier than Scotty when it came to old movies. Patrick liked to say he was the reincarnation of Ann Miller, which was supposed to be funny because Ann Miller wasn’t dead. Stanley preferred somebody called Lubitsch whom Birch had never heard of, and then Scotty said, “But he didn’t do musicals,” and Stanley arched his eyebrow and asked, “What about The Merry Widow? ” and Scotty said, “Oh, you mean that blatant ripoff of Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight? ”