| Vintage Pulp | Jan 28 2023 |
Some actresses consider it a role to die for—literally.
This is a beautiful Robert Maguire cover, somewhat different from his normal style, that he painted for Patrick Quentin's 1957 mystery Suspicious Circumstances. Quentin was a pseudonym used by various authors, but in this case Hugh Wheeler was behind the façade. The cover blurb describes murder breaking down the Hollywood star system, and that's basically what you get, as the book centers around nineteen-year-old Nick Rood, nervous son of globally adored actress Anny Rood, and follows his suspicions that his mother has killed in order to steal a plum movie role. The book is written in amusing and affected fashion, and is filled with characters speaking in ways no humans do, or likely ever did:
“It's positively Greek. Sophocles would purr. Aeschylus would run not walk to the nearest papyrus or whatever he wrote on.”
How very arch. Thanks to various crises, third party manipulations, and suspicious deaths, the coveted film role repeatedly falls into and out of Anny Rood's lap, while fragile Nick flips and flops from suspecting his mother of murder to not. Meanwhile a newcomer to the entourage, a young secretary named Delight Schmidt, turns Nick's head with her beauty and sweetness, but may be just ambitious enough to have a hand in everything that's occurring. Mid-century authors seem addicted to portraying Hollywood in comical or farcical fashion, but we can't argue with the results here. Suspicious Circumstances is well written, generally interesting, and occasionally funny as hell.
| Vintage Pulp | Nov 15 2012 |
Clean the toilet? Take out the trash? Sigh. I was expecting twice the sex, not twice the chores.
Here’s a nice cover for Patrick Quentin’s, aka Hugh Wheeler’s murder mystery The Man with Two Wives, which was published in hardback in 1955, and appeared in this paperback edition in ’59. In the story, a man’s wild child first wife reappears to complicate his orderly existence with his second. His problem gets worse when his first wife’s lover is killed, and the only way he can get her off the hook is by admitting to the police—and his current wife—that he was with the first wife when the murder happened. Complicated? No doubt. An interesting bit of trivia: the flim rights were bought by David Niven, but he never managed to get the project made. The art here is by Robert McGinnis.
