Geri (geejay) - reviewed #3 in the series on 12/22/2008 + 85 more book reviews

This is one of the more unusual mystery genres out there - a campy noir fifties mystery.

The "detective" in the series is Paige Turner (her parents didn't name her that-she married a man named Turner who died in Korea), who works as a writer, editor, coffee maker and fetcher, and all-around grunt for a real life crime story magazine. Her boss is lazy and she gets taunted and harassed by most of the men she works with.

She longs to write true crime stories and in pursuit of that, gets mixed up in murders. In this story, a famous television actress comes to her for help because she believes someone is trying to kill her. She also thinks it's someone close to her.

Paige has a problem in that she promised her homicide detective boyfriend not to get involved in murder investigations, but Paige reasons that no one has been murdered, have they? Well, not yet anyway.

This is a campy fifties, where half the fun is being amused at the behavior of the characters, which include Paige's best friend, a beatnik artist neighbor Abby, who says "I dig" and believes in free love. Abby's boyfriend is a beat poet who writes very bad and obscure poetry that he takes very seriously and recites at beatnik bars in the Village.

The plotting is pretty good and there's humor. An enjoyable read and an escape to Manhattan in the fifties, where women wear hats and white gloves and the "Negro" is expected to defer to all whites, and women are expected to do the grunt work (except that which is relegated to the "Negro").

It keeps you from getting too nostalgic for those times, although there's still a romance about a night out at the Stork Club and being in the real Village of legend...

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