Reviews

Hollywood fixer Mary Rourke is a wonderful protagonist; smart, tenacious, intuitive, and a little mysterious. It's 1927, and her studio, Carbine International Pictures, is in a hurry to finish and release its latest blockbuster before any of those rumors about talking pictures and a shaky national economy come true. "The Devil's Playground" is an immense effort, staring the luminous Norma Carlton, who, Mary has just discovered, is dead. Suicide? Heart condition? Murder? The picture will be completed, but it will be destroyed in a huge fire, and all copies will disappear except for the one that is rumored to exist, somewhere.

Craig Russell shows us a vibrant late-'20s Los Angeles, assured in details and confident in ambiance. Also wonderfully strange is a film professor's 1968 trip to an abandoned hotel in the middle of the Mojave where a copy of the film may be hidden. "As a mystery, there's not a false note in The Devil's Playground," with Mary and her crooked cop poking their noses into sensitive places as the story becomes increasingly sticky and strange.

As a horror story, the tale didn't gel. There were plenty of devotees of the psychic and weird in silent Hollywood, but these didn't come off as creepy enough. Diversions into the bayous of Louisiana and the Nebraska prairie seemed just that, and let's to get back to Mary. There's a huge denouement, fantastic and horrible, which makes a good case why "The Devil's Playground" should never be seen.

This is a gripping read, and I would love to meet Mary Rourke fix another early Hollywood mess.