On the day after Rudolph Valentino’s death, a showgirl’s body is found in George S. Kaufman’s hideaway, and Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott enter an unfamiliar world of murder and mayhem. Helped by semi-corrupt cop Jacob Singer, the two try to get to the bottom of it all, in an affair that starts with someone modeling themselves after Jay Gatsby, and ending with a little known Chicagoan named Al Capone.
I’m not 100% sure what I thought of this book. Don’t know if anyone was the least bit likable, or that the mystery made a hell of a lot of sense. To be frank, the book read more like what I’ve always read meals at the Algonquin Round Table were like, rather than an actual murder mystery book; a collection of insults, wisecracks, pithy sayings, and one-upmanship. I honestly expected a rimshot after every line, because every character talked like a Borscht Belt comedian. Funny that these are all such great literary geniuses, and it takes a barely educated New York cop to suss out the Great Gatsby allusions; though maybe that’s because this crowd doesn’t really think anything is worth reading unless they wrote it (themselves about their own work; they don’t even really think the other members are particularly talented). Who’s who of famous New York and Hollywood bigshots of the time; George Kaufman, Alexander Woollcott, Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, Flo Ziegfeld, Billie Burke (Flo’s wife, and asker of the moral alignment of allegedly Wiccan Kansan girls), Robert Benchley (grandfather of Peter Benchley of Jaws fame), Judge Crater (and the inevitable “one day he’s probably going to just disappear” gag), Rudolph Valentino, Texas Guinnan, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Polly Adler, and George Raft (who appeared as “Spats” Columbo in one of my favorite movies, Some Like It Hot).
Interesting that the book starts out with Woollcott rescuing Dorothy Parker after she slits her wrists, and ends with her waiting for him to rescue her after she slit her wrists; as this apparently was very true to life, I wonder how this woman ever came to write Resume.
(Though that could largely be because the suicide attempts were mainly for drama and attention, because Dorothy Parker was nothing if not an acerbic, dramatic bitch.)
The book had a very rushed climax in my opinion, that to be honest didn’t really accomplish a lot; it was a lot of shouting, and a lot of rushed movements that amounted to, well, something. Will I read the next twelve books in the series, of which the connecting thread (if the title of the series is to be believed) is aforementioned corrupt, uneducated cop Jacob Singer, a character I’m not all too sure what I think of? Maybe over time; as the famous co-stars apparently range from Alfred Hitchcock to Greta Garbo, from Tallulah Bankhead to William Powell and Myrna Loy, they do sound slightly intriguing. But if we keep the plots to basically zipper one-liners strung together with a scanty plot, that might change real soon.
Can’t honestly say I recommend this book, can’t honestly say that I don’t. Not really too sure what I thought of it. It does show that if you really think Prohibition stopped people from drinking, or that speakeasies and brothels didn’t pay the police off to look the other way, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
