Murder in Disguise

by Mary Miley

Overview

1920s script girl Jessie Beckett investigates the murder of a movie projectionist in this absorbing historical mystery.

“Joe Petrovitch was gunned down on a sunny Saturday afternoon in early October, during the ninth reel of Charlie Chaplin’s Gold Rush.”

Employed by Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, Jessie Beckett has a busy time as Script Girl for Pickford-Fairbanks studios. Yet she also has a reputation as a skilled amateur sleuth. So when a projectionist is shot dead and his grieving widow asks Jessie if she can find out who killed him, Jessie is determined to find the killer and his motive. But who was the mysterious man in the red coat who fired three shots at Joe Petrovitch? And how could he enter and leave a crowded theatre without being noticed? To find the answers, Jessie must delve into the dead man’s past and uncover dark secrets from another continent and another era. As she is to discover, the past has a long reach...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781847518224
Publisher:	Severn House
Publication date:	11/01/2018
Series:	Roaring Twenties Mystery Series , #4
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Mary Miley grew up in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and France, and worked her way through the College of William and Mary in Virginia as a costumed tour guide at Colonial Williamsburg. As Mary Miley Theobald, she has published numerous nonfiction books and articles on history, travel and business topics.

Read an Excerpt

  Death visited Hollywood about as often as it did the rest of the country. Children were carried off by polio; grandparents gave way to old age; and the influenza came shopping for victims with sad predictability. But murder? Murder dropped by a little more frequently here than it did other places.
  Joe Petrovitch was murdered on a sunny Saturday afternoon in early October during the ninth reel of Charlie Chaplin’s Gold Rush, gunned down in the projection booth of the theatre where he worked. His young assistant witnessed the crime close up, although shock muddled the story he gave the cops afterward. I had never met Joe Petrovitch, but I attended his funeral on Wednesday at Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery because his wife Barbara worked as a hairdresser at Pickford-Fairbanks Studio where I’ve been an assistant Script Girl for nearly a year.
   “I don’t know Barbara very well,” I whispered to Mildred Young, my friend in Makeup who was standing beside me in the shade of an oak tree as we waited for mourners to gather at the gravesite. I scanned the crowd. “Does she have any kids?”
  Mildred had been hired at the studio just a few months ago, but Makeup and Hair Styling worked hand in glove, so she knew Barbara Petrovitch better than I did. She shook her head. “No children, but she has a few relatives who will help her through this. That’s her sister, over there, in the dark purple suit and sunglasses. And that bruiser on her left is her brother.”
  I studied both siblings, looking for family resemblances. The two sisters had the same sturdy build and thick ankles. Their brother was broad-shouldered and muscular, and carried himself with the self-confidence that comes from being bigger and stronger than everyone else. As Barbara soaked her handkerchief, her siblings maintained dry eyes and tight lips. The sister clutched a black handbag in one hand and a single white rose in the other. The brother looked over their heads toward the casket with hard, narrowed eyes that lacked any pretence of grief. Suddenly, as if he sensed my thoughts, he turned his head and met my gaze with hostile eyes. Embarrassed to be caught staring, I looked away.
   “Did Joe have any family?” I murmured.
   “I don’t think so,” said Mildred. “None that Barbara ever mentioned anyway. They’d only been married a few years. A late marriage for both, I believe.”
  Near us stood our employers, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, the greatest stars in motion pictures. Not only were they, along with Charlie Chaplin, the best-loved actors in the whole film world, they were the only three with the business savvy and gumption to start up their own studio when everyone said it couldn’t be done. A gust of warm wind lifted Miss Pickford’s black veil, revealing a glimpse of her famous flawless skin, but even with her face obscured, just about anyone would have recognized “America’s Sweetheart” from her honey-gold ringlets and diminutive size. She was several years older than I, but we were so close in height and weight that she’d asked me to stand in for her on more than one occasion. From the back, with my own coppery bob covered by a wig from Barbara Petrovitch’s cupboards, audiences could not tell us apart. Miss Pickford’s husband, the handsome “King of Hollywood” and my boss, turned toward Mildred and me, removed his sunglasses, and flashed us one of his famous grins.
   “It was kind of them to give us the time off,” remarked Mildred.

Editorial Reviews

06/19/2017
The shooting murder of projectionist Joe Petrovitch, during a showing of Chaplin’s The Gold Rush at a Hollywood movie theater, propels Miley’s engrossing fourth Roaring Twenties mystery (after 2016’s Renting Silence). The police rush to the theater, but the gunman escapes without a trace. The victim’s wife, a hairdresser at the Pickford-Fairbanks Studio, asks script girl Jessie Beckett, who’s a skilled amateur sleuth, to investigate. With help from Adele Astaire (Fred’s glamorous sister and dance partner), actress Myrna Loy (later to achieve fame in The Thin Man), assorted vaudevillians, and police detective Carl Delaney, spunky, resourceful Jessie sets to work. Aficionados of showbiz history will delight in the technical details of filmmaking in the silent era and the peripatetic lives of the performers. Readers will also get the lowdown on bootlegging, speakeasies, and gin joints. Series fans will be pleased to know that David Carr, Jessie’s love interest, has a tidy subplot of his own. Agent: Natasha Kern, Natasha Kern Literary Agency. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

07/01/2017
In this fourth "Roaring Twenties" mystery, former vaudevillian and occasional sleuth Jessie Beckett is working as a script girl for the Fairbanks-Pickford studio when Mary Pickford asks her to investigate the murder of a projectionist.—ACT

Library Journal

2017-06-06
A woman with a shady past continues to prove a capable amateur sleuth.When Barbara Petrovitch's husband, Joe, is murdered in the movie theater where he serves as a projectionist, she begs Jessie Beckett, who works with her at the Pickford-Fairbanks Studio, to investigate, knowing her success in the past (Renting Silence, 2016, etc.). Douglas Fairbanks agrees to give Jessie some time off, and she soon discovers that Joe, a Serb who sometimes beat Barbara, had a past that was far from an open book. Meanwhile, Helen, one of several women with whom Jessie shares a house, is watching her cousin, Kit Riley, a deaf and mute girl whose mother is off looking for a job. When her mother does not return and sends no word of her whereabouts, Jessie begins to suspect that Kit's hiding her ability to read lips and, indeed, talk. Jessie's beau, David Carr, has just been arrested and Jessie testifies at his murder trial. He beats that rap but is convicted on some lesser charges. Jessie and David both have checkered pasts, but she's now honestly employed, and as far as she knows, David has been successful in selling medicinal alcohol in his drugstores. With a lifetime of background in vaudeville, Jessie, who's been on her own since she was 12, soon figures out that Joe's killer escaped by quickly changing his look and calmly walking out of the theater. She finds several other Serbian men who've been killed in the same way, shot three times in public, but hasn't managed to learn why someone wants them dead. When Kit's mother is found murdered in another city, what Kit has seen and heard in the past go a long way toward helping Jessie solve several crimes. The murders are only the tip of the iceberg in this densely plotted tale. Despite its busy program of felonies, you can't help cheering on the brave heroine and her young helper, both of whom have faced a life of adversity.

Kirkus Reviews