Book Review : Who’s Guilty of the Real Crime Here?

The Killing Game by M. R. Henderson (St. Martin’s Press: $17.95; 304 pages)

Another cozy little book about a serial killer and his final comeuppance. This one may be pleasant for Los Angeles readers because it’s set in the Los Feliz district--all the fine little social distinctions about whether you live above Los Feliz Boulevard in a big house or below Los Feliz in a stuffy apartment--whether you hang out on Fountain Avenue or Vermont--all these are dually observed. One segment of the readership for “The Killing Game,” then, includes graduates of John Marshall High School.

Others who might like “The Killing Game” are those who collect Hollywood or movie novels, either for a hobby or for purposes of scholarship. As long as the genre of the “movie novel” has existed (as far as I know, since “Love Story of a Movie Star,” 1905), the hoary question of appearance-and-reality has been addressed in it.

“Love Story of a Movie Star”: a band of nomadic movie makers roams the streets of New York. A woman leans out of a burning building, holding a bundle: “Help! Save my child!” But first the movie-gypsies film the real disaster; only then do they save the desperate mother and her baby. . . .

Implausible Plot

So, here in “The Killing Game,” a nice girl named Jeanne from Minneapolis is hired by her old teacher to be an assistant director in a Hollywood movie. (If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.) Jeanne and her husband, Glenn, move out here, and within the first few days, Glenn is crunched in a freeway accident that puts him hors de combat and in a permanently bad mood for the rest of the book.

Jeanne is stuck in a depressing Los Feliz apartment with grumpy convalescing Glenn. But she meets, in quick order, Mark Bonner, the pleasant neighbor down the hall; Terry Faust, her film’s director (she knew him already; he gave her the job); Brad Raven, the mean producer; Wray Jarvis, the handsome leading man of this movie, which is . . . The story of a serial killer! But listen to this! Even as Jeanne keeps working on the film, a serial killer begins a crime spree right there in the Los Feliz district, and each murder directly follows the circumstances in the script. So, odds are that the killer is somebody involved in the movie, or at least somebody who’s read the script.

“The Killing Game” goes on that way, really very much like a game: First a chapter for the killer, then a chapter for Jeanne, then a chapter for the killer, then a chapter for Jeanne, and so on.

Not a Bad Book

And, because there’s absolutely nothing scary about this book and because it’s well-written, and because if you haven’t guessed the murderer yourself by now, it’s not a bad novel to take to somebody in the hospital or to buy when you’re going on a long trip. “The Killing Game” is OK.

But I’d like to bring up the question, since life does so often imitate art, why can’t some of these authors who write about serial killers turn that job description into some kind of equal opportunity employment? Why do these bozos always have to be killing pretty young women? I, personally, get a little bored reading about terrified young girls getting their eyeballs jabbed out with ice picks, or getting strung up with twine and hacked to death while their killer is having an orgasm.

Isn’t there anybody else in this society who deserves killing? How about an unfairly taxed maniac going after every bureaucrat in his local branch of the IRS? How about an assistant professor, denied tenure, killing off every member of his department? You could title that one “Murder by Degree,” right? How about a crazy man, on a sugar-high, going after the makers of every weird brand of frosted flakes? That way he really could be a “cereal” killer.

It’s just a thought.