The Devil's Playground

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The white shields of wall are broken by vibrant modern paintings and pieces of hacienda-style furniture, the jacaranda wood twisting and rippling like dark muscle and sinew. A Packard 533 coupe pulls up at the curb behind a parked police wagon, and the driver, a woman of about forty, steps out onto the sidewalk.

She clearly thrived in her life as a Hollywood Studio Fixer and while she balked a bit at investigating a possible murder, she jumped in feet first and followed every lead to the inevitable conclusion. In Rourke he has a strong character who carries much of the narrative as she digs into the money, power, and corruption of 1920s Los Angeles, allowing Russell to play with some colorful Hollywood names and legends. A rivalry that their respective studios had had to play down with picture articles of the two socializing, playing tennis, doing good works together—anything other than clawing at each other’s faces, which was how one photo session nevertheless ended up. Craig Russell has captured that spirit of the twenties, of the excess of the Hollywood set of that era just perfectly. The novel starts off with a murder, and with seven people trapped on an isolated Greek island lashed by a "wild, unpredictable Greek wind.There is a row of Spanish Colonial armchairs, the seat and back of each thick-padded and dressed in tooled blood-red leather, the naked wooden armrests lion-clawed. Characters: Protagonist and Hollywood fixer Mary Rourke, who is terrific and deserves her own full book, plus a wide and distinctly varied supporting cast in all three time periods. This breathtaking tale--set against America's favorite backdrop, Hollywood--seamlessly blends noir, gothic, and mystery in a way that's unique to crime fiction. The Devil’s Playground is the third novel I’ve read by Craig Russell, and my favorite of his work so far!

Beneath his shirt he feels a trickle of sweat run down between his shoulder blades, like a tepid fingertip tracing his spine. But if you like having to keep track of tons of characters in all their separate storylines over multiple timelines with endless amounts of description, then have at it, I guess.She knows—as everyone in Hollywood’s inner circles knows—that Norma Carlton and Veronica Stratton are— were—bitter rivals. I was initially drawn to his books featuring Jan Fabel of the Hamburg Murder Squad and then a short series set on the gangster-ridden streets of Glasgow in the 1950s.

The harsh, hot, bounded here-­and-­now of the room and the harsh, hot, boundless desert beyond is all there is.

An ancient wooden sign, long separated from its post, lies on the ground, half propped up against a rock.

Craig Russell’s The Devil’s Playground is a lavish production of the golden age of Hollywood… Deliciously, the cool, hard-bitten tone of Mary’s chapters is in lockstep with that of a classic noir.Now all that’s left at the site is a shell of a thriving town that could have once rivaled Hollywood, and it is here where Paul hopes to learn the whereabouts of the legendary lost film. When the stars did get in trouble, PR and fixers like Mary Roarke for Carbine International Pictures, smooth things over, just as she does with the apparent suicide at home of the film legend that is Norma Carleton.