A Graveyard for Lunatics

Halloween Night, 1954.

A young, film-obsessed scriptwriter has just been hired at one of the great studios. Fresh from writing pulp stories, he arrives on the lot to script a monster movie with his oldest friend, an effects artist building miniature dinosaurs on Stage 13.

Before midnight, a typed note on his office desk lures him into the adjacent cemetery, promising a great revelation. Climbing through the dark, he stumbles across a macabre sight that plunges him into a frantic hunt across phantom backlot sets and secret vaults.

An anonymous investigation leads from the giant Maximus Films backlot to an eerie graveyard separated from the studio by a single wall. There he makes a terrifying discovery that thrusts him into a maelstrom of intrigue and mystery—and into the dizzy exhilaration of the movie industry at the height of its glittering power.

Teaming with a cynical Venice detective, he uncovers an escalating conspiracy that hurls him into collision with panicked studio executives.

Two rival cities divided by a single brick wall. One built of glittering movie illusions, and the other anchored in cemetery stone.
Hollywood Noir: Monocled director Fritz Wong commands an unruly Biblical production, while retired screen siren Constance Rattigan braves the midnight surf and guards dangerous memories.Locked Room Mystery: A marble Greek-temple crypt in Green Glades Park conceals an empty sarcophagus, counterweighted steps, and an oiled tunnel hidden beneath the backlot.Historical Mystery: The trail leads back twenty years to an infamous Santa Monica Boulevard car wreck that studio fixers and paid-off coroners buried in silence.Race Against Time: When production abruptly halts and studio cleanup crews rush to purge the stages, every lingering clue risks being shoveled into the backlot incinerator.Also by This Author: Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man.