Terence Faherty, Come Back Dead

Terence Faherty, Come Back Dead
Simon & Schuster, 1997
© Terence Faherty 1997
ISBN 978-068483-0841
(Out of print; available as an ebook and from used booksellers)

The second book in the series featuring Scott Elliott, who works for Paddy Maguire and his Hollywood Security Agency, helping the studios contain scandals and protect their interests in a number of ways.  The current issue involves Carson Drury, one-time wunderkind, whose first film (after Broadway and radio triumphs) First American was universally hailed as a masterpiece.  Hi second outing, however, The Imperial Albertsons, was completed after Drury was no longer associated with the studio (RKO), with a completely new ending.  Drury has, 10 years later (in 1955), decided to try to return the film to his original vision—and it appears someone is sabotaging the project.

If this sounds awfully familiar, it’s because Carson Drury is a thinly (including his physique) disguised Orson Welles, First American is a stand-in for Citizen Kane, and The Imperial Albertsons might be better known as The Magnificent Ambersons.  Not that Welles seems ever to have attempted to redo that one.  For me, one of the weaknesses of the book is its too obvious use of Welles and his movies.  Despite which it is a well-done, sometimes remarkable mystery.

Beginning in Hollywood, we are quickly transported to a smallish town in east north central Indiana, the home of one of the people financing Drury’s project (Gilbert Traynor), whose family, whose family-owned company once produced a line of expensive cars and now is a parts supplier.  Gilbert is looking for a way to do something somewhat more glamorous.  Faherty does an excellent job of developing the Indiana setting (as he should—He’s an Indiana native and still lives in Indiana.

One of the treats for me was attempting to pick out the “real” places that might be the inspirations for the fictional locations.  A good deal of early (1900 through the 1920s) auto production in the US was in fact located in Indiana.  (A list, with links can be found here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Motor_vehicle_manufacturers_based_in_Indiana)  In the relevant part of the state, auto manufacturers flourished for a time in Kokomo, Anderson, and Marion.  Part of the action in the book occurs in Middletown—and Muncie, Indiana, was the site of a very famous sociological study published (in 1959) under the title Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture.  Some of the events in the book occur in Indianapolis and make use of actual settings, under their actual names (Butler University, for example, and its (no longer in existence) outdoor theater.[1]

But back to the story.  Even in Indiana, it appears that someone is still trying to sabotage the film.  The Klan seems to have taken a dislike to Drury (and, in the 1920s, and even later, the Klan was a force in Indiana; it was especially strong in Marion).  Drury’s improvised speech responding to the Klan is a brilliant scene.  Drury’s right-hand man is murdered.  And the investigation of the murder threatens to entangle Elliott and hamper efforts to make progress on the file.  Throughout, the aftermath of World War II continues to cast a shadow.  And there is another murder.  Elliott feels obligated to resolve the mysteries (and Maguire arrives to reinforce his efforts).  Eventually, after a number of false starts and some trips down the wrong path, Elliott, Maguire, and the local law enforcement people find their way to the solution.  If that solution is a bit too heavily laden with psychological trauma for my taste, it works within the events of the story and the behavior and characters of the story.  And Faherty does a brilliant job of evoking both the times and the places.  Well worth the time you could spend with Elliott and Maguire—and Carson Drury. [2]

[1] Where, in the 1960s, on an incredibly hot July night, my family saw Yul Byrynner in The King and I.

[2] This is worth only a footnote.  We learn that Elliott’s full name is Thomas Scott Elliott, which immediately made me think of Thomas Stearns Eliot…which I personally found both interesting and amusing.