Larry Names

Maisy Malone comes to Hollywood to become an actress in the moving picture industry in 1912.

From the moment I read her dialogue I could see and hear Mae West in my minds eye. When you meet Mabel Normand and Maisy together you see two giggling teenage girls sharing confidences. With each character Larry Names developed you can get a vision of a bygone era. An era he richly enhanced with glimpses of the period such as the police use of the Indian Motorcycle or the building construction use of Sears Catalogue Home Plans  or the extras bench where the movie extra would sit hoping to be used in what was being filmed that day.

The mystery is the quality of Agatha Christie or Sir Conan Doyle, you may remember Maisy is Sherlock's smarter sister Shirley. I enjoyed this story immensely and hope that the sleuth Maisy will appear again to solve another mystery.

I recommend this mystery to anyone who wants to take a step back into the past and early Hollywood.… (meer)

I purchased a copy of this book shortly after it came out, but it rapidly became buried under all the other eBooks I downloaded to my brand new eReader. Recently when I was scrolling through all my acquisitions, I couldn't even remember why it was there, so I opened it and began to read. From almost the very first page, I remembered. An historical mystery set in Arizona months after it came a state and featuring real-life figures Charlie Siringo and Wyatt Earp? I was hooked!

The mystery is a good one and certainly kept me guessing. I also enjoyed the journey through Arizona at the turn of the twentieth century-- especially through places like Harqua Hala, which has long been a ghost town. The author had me slapping off clouds of dust and hearing the jingle of spurs while I tried to figure out what was going on.

Unfortunately, a couple of things let down the quality of the writing. One was the fact that there were a few too many historical figures. Earp, Siringo, Patton, Bat Masterson, and Ben Kilpatrick from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid's Hole-in-the-Wall Gang to name a few. Sure these folks may all have known each other, and may even have been in roughly the same place at the same time, but it would have freed up the story to have a bit more fiction and a little less history.

The other thing that let down the story quite a bit was the lack of proofreading and poor-quality formatting. The spelling of two characters' surnames changed back and forth throughout the book. When mines run out of ore, they don't "pay out," they "play out," and most maddening of all, one section of the book was liberally sprinkled with ¼'s.

Did I enjoy the story? Very much so. Names brought the Arizona of that period to life for me, and watching Earp and Siringo solve a mystery was fun. Would I read another of the author's books? Yes, I certainly would, but I would hope the proofreading and formatting would now match the quality of his writing.… (meer)