Dead starlets, quirky detectives in Tinseltown

ALTHOUGH scores of them are published every year, mystery anthologies are harder to assemble than you might think. Maybe it was easier for 1920s editors who had to contend with a smaller, albeit rich, universe populated by Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, among others, from the 19th and early 20th centuries. As the number of writers expanded, later anthologists narrowed their focus -- to the P.I. novel, the police procedural or standout work by women, gay and lesbian or African American crime writers.

But in recent years, mystery anthologies with original premises are like variations of those darned green bean casseroles -- there’s only so far you can take them. Houghton Mifflin’s annual “Best American Mystery Stories” are reliable exceptions as is small press Akashic Books’ city-themed Noir series, including this year’s “Los Angeles Noir,” which gives readers a far-ranging, multicultural view of crime from Los Feliz to Belmont Shore. But after reading the fifth single-sport mystery collection or the detective anthology featuring White House pets (sad to say), a reader can become a little jaded.

So I was skeptical upon opening “Hollywood and Crime: Original Crime Stories Set During the History of Hollywood.” But seeing editor Robert J. Randisi’s name attached gave me hope. Randisi, author of more than a dozen mysteries and editor of a score of anthologies, also founded the Private Eye Writers of America in 1981 and co-founded Mystery Scene magazine. But an anthology of new stories crafted around a single intersection, even if it is as famous as Hollywood and Vine, seemed a bit of a stretch, especially when I noted in the Missouri-based editor’s introduction a disturbing conflation of Hollywood crime with notorious killings that have occurred in the Crenshaw District and Brentwood. Perhaps Hollywood is more state of mind than geographical reality for Randisi.

Most of the authors represented in “Hollywood and Crime” have a better handle on their Thomas Bros. Guide, although not enough attention to the editorial nuances or details of their craft, which makes this collection a more frustrating read than I would have liked. As the title suggests, many of the stories concern Hollywood’s history, which is used to great effect in Terence Faherty’s “Closing Credits.”

A richly nuanced story of the 1966 disappearance of a “young hopeful” starlet from Iowa, “Closing Credits” is set partially in the Taft Building, the 12-story, 1924 office building located on the southeast corner of the famed intersection and features his P.I. Scott Elliott, a character who deserves a wider audience.

Voices more familiar to many mystery readers are also represented in “Hollywood and Crime,” including “I Wasn’t There,” an unsettling story of criminal paranoia by veteran Bill Pronzini, whose sardonic evocation of 1930 Hollywood bootleggers and actress Clara Bow’s It Cafe (“That dame’s got it and then some.” “Yeah? Somebody give her a shot of penicillin, then she won’t have it no more.”) is unfortunately undercut by a reference to a drug not widely available until 1941.

Other historical takes on the famed district include: Robert S. Levinson’s meticulously researched yet awkwardly constructed “And the Winner Is . . . “ involving gangster Mickey Cohen and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, whose office was in the Guaranty Building on Hollywood and Ivar and who covered the 1960 Academy Awards ceremony (which play a role in the story) at the nearby Pantages Theatre; Stuart M. Kaminsky’s “Evangeline,” a twisty story set in 1972 about a drifter ex-cop trying to save an out-of-towner from a pair of mysterious goons; and Max Allan Collins and Matthew V. Clemens’ “Murderlized,” a plodding story set in 1937 and featuring Three Stooges straight man Moe Howard turned detective as he laboriously investigates the death of Ted Healy, an early partner in the Stooges’ act.

Despite the notable period work by Faherty and some of the others, the standouts in the collection are the contemporary stories. Dick Lochte’s “Devil Dog” is set among Hollywood’s Russian immigrants and features the welcome return of his P.I. Leo Bloodworth (introduced in 1985’s “Sleeping Dog” and missing in action since the 2000 short story collection “Lucky Dog”), who now listens to jazz on an MP3 player. Besides its believable investigative procedures and welcome acknowledgment of a more diverse world, “Devil Dog” is filled with humorous bits about Lochte’s fellow crime writers, gathered at the 3rd and Fairfax Farmers Market, one of whom “at one time had been called the next Raymond Chandler but who’d given it up for movie gold.” Gar Anthony Haywood’s “Moving Pictures” explores an even darker side of the show business dream and concerns two losers from Kansas City whose delusions about “adventures in the screen trade” contribute to their loss of a lucrative assignment to real-life writer Mark Haskell Smith, among more serious troubles.

Lee Goldberg’s “Jack Webb’s Star,” is a riotous caper crime with a nasty twist that starts in a traffic school class in the Taft building, where among the offenders is a hapless man ticketed for drunk driving in his wheelchair. And last, but certainly in no ways least, is Michael Connelly’s “Suicide Run,” which opens the collection. Featuring redoubtable LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch in an investigation of the serial murders of young actresses, “Suicide Run” is notable for its solid detective work, lingering sadness and Harry’s trademark sense of mission while also supplying fans of the series with a fascinating bit of back story about the early career of Kizmin Rider, Harry’s current partner in the department’s Open-Unsolved Unit. Its position as the first entry in “Hollywood and Crime” will surely whet the reader’s appetite for the other stories, which, on balance, delight slightly more than they disappoint as they chronicle Hollywood’s bloody cosmology.

Paula L. Woods, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, is editor of the mystery anthology “Spooks, Spies and Private Eyes” and the author of the Det. Charlotte Justice mystery series, including the most recent, “Strange Bedfellows.”