Kill Me Again

by Terence Faherty

Overview

How do you top your best work? In Hollywood, you make a sequel. That's the plan in 1947 when filming begins on a follow-up to the wartime romance Passage to Lisbon. The screenwriter is accused of being a Communist. Enter Scott Elliott, a former actor and soldier who is struggling to find a place in a changing Hollywood. To save the movie, Elliott must untangle a tale of murder, sin and redemption.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940011347368
Publisher:	The Mystery Company
Publication date:	08/10/2010
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	373 KB

About the Author

Terence Faherty won the Shamus Award for Come Back Dead, the second novel in the Scott Elliott series. He also writes the Edgar-nominated Owen Keane series. Faherty lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, with his wife Jan.

Editorial Reviews

In such previous titles as The Lost Keats, Faherty gave heart and soul to academic, potentially dry topics. In this series debut, he starts with a jazzier premise but is markedly less successful at making it vital. Former actor Scott Elliott now provides hired security in post-WWII Tinseltown as a major studio gears up to shoot the sequel to a blockbuster movie that strongly resembles a real film starring Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart. The screenwriter is boozy and jaded; the producer is driven and brilliant. A secret communication suggests a Communist past for the writer, and, as the House Un-American Activities Committee focuses its spotlight, Elliott is called upon to investigate. The writer dies; authorship of the valuable screenplay is quickly questioned; and hidden pasts of all key players soon matter. Elliott is an affable enough soul, but Faherty doesn't give any new spin to the material of red scares, Casablanca and period Hollywood lore that Stuart Kaminsky and George Baxt have previously put to generally good use. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This tale of postwar Hollywood skips the the tinsel and glamor found in most film industry mysteries to focus on the historic Red scare. Youthful studio security hand Scott Elliott investigates allegations that Warner screenwriter Bert Kramer has Communist ties. When Kramer is murdered before realizing any profits from his sequel to a popular Casablanca-like film, Elliott, a former actor, sorts through jealousy, blackmail, and retribution in search of a motive. Though slow-going at first, the narrative does improve. For larger collections.

Library Journal

Scott Elliot was just beginning to get speaking roles when World War II whisked him away from Hollywood. Now a new crop of young hopefuls has forced Elliott to the back of the line. To stay close to the industry, he parlays his military experience into a security job for a studio. When a writer anonymously accused of being a Communist ends up dead, Elliott finds himself elbow-deep in trouble. Toss in some great-looking dames, a haze of unfiltered cigarette smoke, and large quantities of good booze, and you have a wonderfully entertaining period crime novel. Edgar-nominated author Faherty has a feel for the way we all think Hollywood types act when the cameras aren't rolling, and he feeds our fantasies with deft characterizations and right-on dialogue. Stuart Kaminsky's Toby Peters novels plumb much the same ground, but Elliott is a little tougher than Toby and less likely to see the humor in his situation. For readers who think the last great movie was "The Maltese Falcon", and who like their tough guys in fedoras, Scott Elliott is sure to please.

Wes Lukowsky

Faherty, already a veteran of four Owen Keane mysteries (Die Dreaming, 1994, etc.), takes a time machine back to 1947 Hollywood for a new series featuring Scott Elliott, whose dead- end career as a contract player was mercifully cut short by the war. Now Elliott's working a security job for Warner Brothers, investigating an anonymous allegation that the screenwriter of Love Me Again, the company's peacetime sequel to the wildly popular Passage to Lisbon (think Casablanca afloat), is a Communist. Bert Kramer indignantly denies the suggestion, and nobody can tie him to the Party, but by the time the last negative report is in, Kramer's long since been murdered, his dead hand clutching a screenplay of Love Me Again that's obviously intended as a dying message. In between jaunts around town in his 1940 LaSalle, trips to New York to check rumors of a HUAC industry purge, and agreeably florid faceoffs with Warner publicist Pidgin Englehart—"I tried to stare a blush out of her, but that was a bigger job than one man could handle"—Elliott gives an exhaustive synopsis of the new film's plot, but only the sharpest readers will see its significance, or pick out the guilty party.

More deeply imagined than George Baxt's or Stuart Kaminsky's knockabout nostalgia binges—Elliott's really drunk deep of this postwar disillusionment stuff—but the mystery packs as many curves as Betty Grable.

Kirkus Reviews