Cheryl Crane is now one of my favorite writers and her autobiography DETOUR will live forever as a document of revenge and redemption. Her biography of her mother, screen legend Lana Turner, isn’t bad either. Crane’s recent turn to detective fiction is a bit of a surprise, but when you think of it, she’s seen life and death from both sides and, like Anne Perry, she makes the most of her own deep, deep knowledge of human frailty and passion. And her mother is still at the center of her life: the titles of her series are clever plays on her mother’s films. The Bad Only Die Twice reminds me a little of Lana’s great dramatic turn in The Bad and the Beautiful, and also of her famous noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice. I have to confess, I can’t be the only guy who grew up thinking that Turner Classic Movies (TCM) was in fact operated by Lana Turner, they showed that movie so often where she’s young and married to old Spencer Tracy? Cass Timberlane. And now she returns in her daughter’s new detective series as Victoria Bordeaux, the beloved and eternally popular much married Hollywood actress who knows everyone, high and low, and knows where all the bodies are buried. Crane uses Bordeaux so brilliantly, she’s not on stage on every page, but she makes wonderful cameo appearances, while the novel is narrated by her daughter, realtor Nicolette (Nikki) Harper.
You will learn so much about what a high-end LA realtor’s life is life. I honestly had no idea but Crane plunges the reader into the excitement of the chase for the right client for the right property.
I understand that Crane has also worked in the real estate industry. There are two factors which prevent total identification between the real life and fictional characters. Unlike Lana Turner, Victoria Bordeaux’s career seems to have begun circa 1960—so she is a star of ther generation of, say, Jane Fonda or Raquel Welch perhaps. And instead of having a 70ish daughter like Cheryl Crane, Nikki seems to be in her 30s perhaps.
I presume Crane is playing it like that because it would be fairly difficult to believe that a 95 year old woman, even a screen legend, could get up to the shenanigans Victoria Bordeaux keeps up, even to the youthful beauty.
And it leaves Nikki in a state of youth, and involved in a difficult romantic relationship with a man who has children. Yes, Nikki is straight and for once, that works. Victoria has been married nine times—to seven husbands. The case they get tangled up in is the second death of Artemis Rex Beach, found dead shortly after his return from his first death from a plane crash in hideously cold and unsearchable Alaska. Nikki and her realty partner, the jaunty, vivacious Jessica, have been representing Edith Beach, Rex’ widow, in trying to sell her mansion. She is fifty and rather frumpy, lacking the perfect Hollywood bikini body of all of her friends, and yet she has attracted the attention of young Thompson Christopher. The enigma of the Edith=Thompson relationship is the central mystery of the book, and I’m sure that my true crime friends will quickly figure out that Cheryl Crane, as adroit a plotter as Jeffrey Deaver, knows that the original “Edith Thompson” was convicted of murder in a famous boy-toy case of the early 20th century, in England.
Every page has both a wry comment by Nikki, and a verbal snapshot of Hollywood as it is lived now, as well as some practical advice should I ever decide to become a real estate broker in the glamorous enclaves of Beverly Hills. They are ladies of the Canyon.
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