One Extra Corpse – Barbara Hambly (Book Two – 2023)
One Extra Corpse is the second entry in Hambly’s Silver Screen mystery series. Emma’s husband died in WWI and, after losing her parents and brother as well, she eventually ends up in Los Angeles with her sister in law Kitty, a gorgeous and untalented star of silent film. This is a light and a well-researched, well-written and well-plotted mystery. Without risking spoilers, Hambly examines the early days of the studio system where stars were made because of how they looked. We learn about the common practice of ensuring notoriously gay actors appear in public with “romantic” people of the opposite sex. Extras were were so expendable that they risked life and limb to appear in crowd scened involving guns or explosives. The casting couch entry to the profession was definitely in place. Hollywood was a small, small town when it came to knowing everyone’s business. Hambly weaves in famous actors and directors whose backstories are known to us. Emma has a cameraman boyfriend, Zal. It’s been four years since she left England and this budding relationship has potential, but she sometimes longs to be back in England continuing her studies at Oxford. In addition to serving as Kitty’s assistant, Emma has work as a screenwriter. This could be problematic as her knowledge of ancient history is frequently set aside when, for example she’s instructed to make a character Christian in a period falling eighty years before the birth of Jesus. I enjoyed this enough to buy the first book in the series so I can fill in the back story. Fun characters, fun geographical background, fun locale, interesting resolution to the murder. Definitely recommend.
Saving Susy Sweetchild – Barbara Hambly (Book Three – 2024)
Barbara Hambly is so versatile. I’m a longtime fan of her Benjamin January series which involves a wildly different historical setting and set of characters than her “Silver Screen” Historical mystery series. With this third entry, I’ve read books two and three with pleasure. They are kind of cozies set in the silent film era. Emma, widowed and orphaned by WWI and Spanish Influenza has landed with her sister-in-aw, Kitty, a gorgeous and untalented movie star. Kitty is the mistress of an important producer/director. Emma serves as Kitty’s dog carer and has gained some positive attention for rewriting “scenarios” when a script needs doctoring. She also has been called in to sort out and identify property from the office of a murdered professor whose student papers are thrown about, whose colleagues took a lot of his books and whose objects from archeological digs are missing. We already know that Emma is a scholar and her father was renowned in the period at issue.
Emma spends a great deal of time on movie sets, caring for her three charges whose doggie personalities are coming out more and more. A Western includes a famous child actor, Susy Sweetchild, daughter of the terrible stage mother Selena Sutton and an alcoholic father relegated to a guest cottage on the property. The only person looking out for Susy seems to be Susy. She is soon going to age out of cute little girl, being 7 or so, and her films are already losing attention. So when Susy, Selena and Susy’s beloved cat Mr. Gray are kidnapped, there are a lot of potential parties with motives. Emma and Kitty along with others get very involved as the only people who actually care about the child. Why was the mother taken? Is the cat okay? And why is it so unclear whether anyone has demanded a ransom?
I am so enjoying this series. Hambly gives us great inside views of the film industry, its players, who gets ahead and why and also a sense of the geography, gangs, crime and peccadilloes of California of the 1920s. Who’s the grownup in the room? Did you need to ]ask? It’s Susy.
They Called me Bookworm 