The Sepia Siren Killer
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Prior to World War II, black actors were restricted to mainstream film roles as chauffeurs, maids, night club entertainers, and comic buffoons. But there was a second Hollywood, a BLACK Hollywood, where great producers and directors like Oscar Michaud created films with all-black casts for exhibition to black audiences. Some of the actors worked only in black productions. Others, like the talented Eddie Anderson, could play comic roles in white productions and serious roles in all-black films. When a cache of long-lost African-American films is discovered by cinema researchers, the aged director Edward
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Despite occasionally stilted prose and some dubious police procedure, the latest in the Hobart Lindsey/Marvia Plum series (after The Bessie Blue Killer) is an effective puzzler in which the appealing interracial team (Lindsey is white; Plum is black) explore the early days of black filmmaking in California. Insurance investigator Lindsey checks out the fire at the Pacific Film Archive in which a graduate student died and learns from his significant other, Berkeley police officer Plum, that the fire was caused by arson. The next day, 90-year-old Edward MacReedy appears at Lindsey's office to collect on his recently deceased wife's 1934, $25 whole-life policy; while he's there, his retirement-home room is torched, destroying the records and mementos of his years as a film director. Determining that the second fire was a case of arson similar to the first, Lindsey doggedly sniffs out what MacReedy knows and tries to figure out why, and to whom, the old director's memories are a threat. With a perspective on black filmmaking and skillful pacing, Lupoff makes the most of both period and suspense elements in his mystery.
