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.
