Elliot Harold Paul (1891-1958) was an American journalist and author. After serving in the Army he began writing books and published three by 1925 when he joined the expatriate American colony in Paris, France. He worked on newspapers and journals and wrote novels in his spare time. He returned to the United States following the outbreak of World War II and turned to screenwriting in Hollywood. His mystery series character was Homer Evans, an expatriate American.
The Classic Crime website (http://www.classiccrimefiction.com/elliot-paul.htm) lists the following titles in the series:
- The Mysterious Mickey Finn (1939) aka Murder at the Cafe du Dome
- Hugger-Mugger in the Louvre (1940)
- Mayhem in B-Flat (1940)
- Fracas in the Foothills (1940)
- I’ll Hate Myself in the Morning (1945) includes Summer in December (novellas)
- Murder on the Left Bank (1951)
- The Black Gardenia (1952)
- Waylaid in Boston (1953)
- The Black and the Red (1956)
While most of these books take place in Paris, the seventh one The Black Gardenia (Random House, 1952; Coachwhip, 2015) finds Evans and his sidekick Finke Maguire in Hollywood. The activity is frenetic and nonstop. A trio of thugs from Chicago is moving in on the E Pluribus Unum movie studio. The CEO of the studio is trying to ease a fading star named Shirley Hall out and replace her with a younger one. Shirley is not going quietly and she disrupts a showing of the budding starlet’s screen test, then she disappears. In the meantime the wealthy older businessman who intends to marry the starlet forbids her to act and the movie studio is frantically trying to make him change his mind.
A series of murders turns the story serious, and Maguire is desperate to keep another one from occurring. Evans maintains his cool during some chaotic action involving a short psychiatrist, his Valkyrie nurse, a Dutch gardener, a Javanese grandmother, and a police lieutenant who wants to arrest everyone.
This book was hard to follow, the scenes shift rapidly for no apparent purpose and the cast of characters is large and varied. After I read that Paul was a screenwriter, it began to make sense, as many of the passages are sight gags and would do better on screen than on a page. For instance, the diminutive doctor had a mad crush on his much larger nurse, which visually could be striking, depending on the casting of the two characters. Think Boris and Natasha of Bullwinkle. And while MGM had its roaring lion at the beginning of each film, EPU had a bison flicking its tail at the viewers, which I found hilarious after thinking about it.
The lush gardens where much of the action took place also deserve to be on screen. The Javanese flora zealously tended by the Dutch gardener are beautifully portrayed. Best of all was when Maguire visited the studio zoo and a monkey pulled a handgun out of Maguire’s pocket, managed to turn the safety off, and began shooting. This scene would film magnificently.
The backstabbing and greed underlying the Hollywood film industry are clearly illustrated while the motives and suspects surrounding the multiple murders seem endless. The killer wasn’t revealed until the very end. An interesting piece of period writing and plotting.