The Devil's Playground

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The only readers who will be disappointed will be those with an appetite for gory horror, this book is a lot more subtle than that, and all the better for it. Michaelides takes a literary turn in his latest novel, employing an unreliable narrator, the structure of classical drama, and a self-conscious eye to dismantling the locked-room mystery. The Luminal, the note, the wearing of a memento of her most famous role: it all points to suicide, and suicide is scandal for the studio. The Devil’s Playground conjures rich and riveting elements – 1920’s Hollywood, a terrifying silent film, an elusive and inscrutable killer, and an eerie sequence set in the Louisiana bayou – all of which come together to create a masterful thriller. The movie came to be known as both the subject of a curse, and as the greatest horror movie ever made.

Other than that, all there is, is the vast, pale, hot-­as-­hell desert stretching gray and white, yellow and rust, all the way to where the mountains rumble dark on the horizon. Michaelides seems also to be dipping into the world of Edgar Allan Poe, offering an unreliable narrator who feels more like a literary exercise. He also tosses out a bit of humor, giving a hulking studio heavyweight the nickname Golem, a nod to Paul Wegener’s partially lost 1915 film. She wears the Vulture Crown of ancient Egypt, topped with a golden Uraeus cobra, its rearing head in turn sun-disk crowned. This breathtaking tale–set against America’s favorite backdrop, Hollywood–seamlessly blends noir, gothic, and mystery.Here the 1927 story dominates, with the evil that lurked in Louisiana now looming over Tinseltown and Rourke’s investigation of Carlton’s killing. He senses a greater absence: no photographs grace the walls or punctuate the bookshelves; no painting hangs from the picture rail. Such is Carlton’s serenity that, for a moment, Mary Rourke can believe she is asleep, rather than dead, and expects to see the chest rise to take a dreamy breath.

Is this simply bad luck or is there something exceptionally sinister going on that has devilish roots in the past? He knows that von Stroheim, in his near-­insane drive for authenticity, filmed and refilmed the scene in Death Valley in midsummer, at midday. Beneath his shirt he feels a trickle of sweat run down between his shoulder blades, like a tepid fingertip tracing his spine. Why did the witch, supposedly haven convinced everyone of her death by suicide, make one female fixer believe she died by murder thus starting an investigation? Now, unbidden, as he drives across the desert, the final scene of von Stroheim’s Greed is projected onto the screen of his mind.This is a tremendous work of historical noir… The mastery of silent film history was also exceptional… Expertly written and plotted, this excellent novel is a deeply satisfying amalgam of mystery and horror. For most of the book, though, we’re with studio ‘fixer’ Mary Rourke in 1927 as she experiences the Devil’s Playground curse first-hand, starting with the death of leading lady Norma Carlton. After the war and the post-Armistice economic chaos that followed in Europe, the until then dominant French, German, and Danish film industries had been all but wiped out. Her sections often have a noirish tone that sets them apart from the somewhat gothic atmosphere in the other time frames. There’s witchcraft and Voodoo, gunplay, arson, and premature burial…nothing is what it seems to be amid the artifice of Hollywood….

The comparison really made the - for me - short-comings of this book more unfortunate than might have been the case had I not read the two books one right after the other. But lately he’s stepped away from crime fiction novels to produce a group of books that are a complete departure from what’s gone before. Indeed, Tinseltown aficionados and fans of the likes of James Ellroy and Raymond Chandler will devour The Devil’s Playground, as will any reader who appreciates a tightly plotted, propulsive story filled with multilayered characters. The house backs onto a long, wide depression, like a vast shallow crater, a mile wide and two long, paler than the desert beyond it and almost white in patches. Norma Carlton, one of the most famous actresses of her time and leading lady of the still in-production movie The Devil’s Playground, has been found dead of an apparent suicide in her mansion.Biblical, his science-fiction novel, has been acquired by Imaginarium Studios/Sonar Entertainment, four Jan Fabel novels have been made into movies (in one of which Craig Russell makes a cameo appearance as a detective) for ARD, the German national broadcaster, and the Lennox series has been optioned for TV development. The Devil’s Playground is the third novel I’ve read by Craig Russell, and my favorite of his work so far! Out there, in the backswamp, the water slid sleek and black into darkening mists; pale wraiths of Spanish moss hung shroud like from the cypresses; the shadows were denser, fuller. Yes, this is a movie with a dark, horror themed edge, so perhaps it’s not entirely unexpected, but in a novel that, superficially at least, speaks more to Curtis Hanson’s LA Confidential or Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, than it does William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, there is something in it that has the capacity to make the skin crawl, and certainly kept me on edge. Maybe they hadn’t even been talking about a real desert, but a set: a cinematographer’s idea of a desert.