The Story Behind the Story: “Dangerous to Know,” by Renee Patrick

(Editor’s note: For this 70th entry in The Rap Sheet’s “Story Behind the Story” series, we welcome Seattle, Washington, blogger and screenwriter Vince Keenan—who recently wrote on this page about Ellery Queen’s The Origin of Evil—along with his wife, Rosemarie Keenan, a research administrator and poet. Under the joint pseudonym Renee Patrick, they’ve now penned two well-received mystery novels, both set in Golden Age Hollywood and featuring the snooping duo of Lillian Frost, a former aspiring actress, and real-life fashion designer Edith Head. The second of those, Dangerous to Know, is due out next week from Forge. Below, the Keenans recall the roots of their interest in vintage Tinseltown and in setting crime fiction there.)

In the beginning, for both of us, there were the movies. We grew up in outer-borough New York City, several subway stations and worlds apart, hooked on Hollywood.

Rosemarie: For me it was 42nd Street (1933). I found it on TV one afternoon and was so entranced that when my friend knocked on the door and asked me to come out and play, I said no. My mother warned me that if I made a habit of it, they might stop knocking. But I had to go back to that world. I loved the camaraderie among the women, the romantic view of the effort it took to put on a show. Above all, I loved Ruby Keeler. Still do. I responded to her lack of sophistication and her desire to be sophisticated. She came across as a nice person willing to work herself to the bone to get what she wanted. I responded to that, instantly.

Vince: Blame The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), from an Eric Ambler novel. Which doesn’t even rank in the top three Sydney Greenstreet/Peter Lorre movies. I was 7 years old when I saw it. What I remember most is my parents commenting on how odd it was, a kid that young held rapt by an old movie. But those faces mesmerized me. And the atmosphere. Dark, sensuous, mysterious. It seemed … adult, in a way new movies were not. I stepped into those shadows decades ago and never came out.

We met in Florida, got married—more than 25 years ago now—and headed west. Not all the way to Tinseltown, but at least we were in the same time zone. Turner Classic Movies was our constant soundtrack, unless the Mets were playing.

Whenever a classic film was revived, we’d be at the theater. 2007 found us in cinephile heaven. That’s when Eddie Muller brought his Noir City Film Festival to Seattle. Double-bills of vintage crime films, every night for a week. We introduced ourselves to Eddie. Within a few years we were manning the Film Noir Foundation table in the theater lobby. Once we even filled in for Eddie, introducing a full day’s slate of movies. Vince was contributing articles to the Film Noir Foundation’s magazine, on his way to becoming managing editor.

Then Rosemarie had an idea. As Jimmy Durante said, “Everybody wants to get into the act.”

Rosemarie: I decided to write an article about costume design in film noir. I started with Edith Head, because of all the classics she’d worked on: Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, the Alan Ladd/Veronica Lake films. I began reading about her and couldn’t stop.

(Left) Rosemarie and Vince Keenan (photo by David Hiller, 2015)

Head’s career remains one of the most amazing in film history. Spanning seven decades, from the silent era of the 1920s to the dawn of corporate Hollywood. For her final film, 1982’s Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, she dressed Steve Martin so he could interact seamlessly with clips from movies she’d designed in the 1940s, even reworking a Barbara Stanwyck costume for him. She would be nominated for 35 Academy Awards, winning eight, the most of any woman.

Unlike her contemporaries and mentors, Head didn’t have a background in fashion. Born Edith Posener, she grew up in Nevada mining camps where no one ever struck a mother lode of glamour. She was working as a teacher in Hollywood—among her charges were the daughters of director Cecil B. DeMille—but sought a better-paying position. Spotting a classified ad seeking sketch artists at Paramount Pictures, she bluffed her way through the interview, passing off her fellow art students’ work as her own. Once in the job, she set about making herself indispensable. Like Ruby Keeler, she was willing to work herself to the bone to get what she wanted. For all her innate talent at costume design, she was an even more accomplished politician, adept at wrangling actresses, pleasing executives, and collaborating with directors. She’d tell whatever story was necessary to achieve her aims; her three biographies frequently contradict each other, and in later years she’d even discredit her own 1959 memoir, The Dress Doctor. About the only point everyone agrees on when it comes to Edith Head is she was a tireless employee.

Time to put a little more on her plate.

Rosemarie: I wanted to make her a detective, not only because she had such a long career and knew everyone, but because of the nature of her job. She deals with performers when they’re at their most vulnerable. She knows their secrets and keeps them.

Vince: As soon as Rosemarie suggested it, I wanted in. Costume design provided a fantastic window into the old Hollywood studio system. Even more exciting, it would be a true collaboration. Rosemarie knew the period, the movies, and especially the clothes. Plus it was her idea.

Our only problem? Edith’s aforementioned workload kept her tethered to the studio. She couldn’t set aside her sketch pad to go chase down a lead at the Trocadero. Clearly, she would require an accomplice. Here’s where our other shared love, of classic crime fiction, paid dividends. We were both huge Rex Stout fans. If Edith was our Nero Wolfe, she’d need a wisecracking Archie Goodwin.

Enter Lillian Frost.

We made her a New Yorker, hailing from Rosemarie’s neighborhood. The promise of a screen test brought her, like so many other young women of the era, to Hollywood. Lillian quickly realizes she’s no actress. But we didn’t want her to join the roster of also-rans and never-weres that haunt Hollywood novels of the 1930s, like The Day of the Locust and Horace McCoy’s underrated I Should Have Stayed Home. Instead, Lillian is savvy enough to realize she can make a life if not a name for herself in Southern California, appreciating that whatever hardships she may face her new home always offers the hope, as the song from the Academy Award-winning musical La La Land says, of “Another Day of Sun.” A levelheaded woman still occasionally susceptible to stardust would make the ideal complement to the no-nonsense Edith Head.

Our debut novel, last year’s Design for Dying (nominated for both an Agatha Award and a Left Coast Crime Award), tells how Lillian came into Edith’s orbit. It features cameo appearances from the likes of Barbara Stanwyck, Bob Hope, and Preston Sturges, and brims with jokes. The follow-up, Dangerous to Know, hews to the same template but broadens the scale and ups the stakes. We wove in plenty of the Hollywood history that fascinates us, including a long-forgotten 1938 scandal in which two of Paramount’s biggest stars found themselves brought up on smuggling charges, and the still-being-unearthed saga of the studio moguls’ clandestine plan to battle the Nazi influence in Southern California in the years before World War II.

All of it viewed through the prism of two career women trying to make their way in a society that didn’t always welcome them. Our ultimate fantasy for the series is to pen a fanciful, fictionalized, female-centered chronicle of the movie industry. If it takes focusing on gorgeous gowns to get there, so be it.

READ MORE: “Dangerous to Know: New Excerpt” (Criminal Element).

The Book You Have to Read: “The Origin of Evil,” by Ellery Queen

(Editor’s note: This is the 146th entry in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books. Today’s contribution comes from Seattle, Washington, blogger, screenwriter, and cultural observer Vince Keenan. A self-described “tippling gadabout,” he wrote Down the Hatch: One Man’s One Year Odyssey Through Classic Cocktail Recipes and Lore. With his wife, Rosemarie, Keenan also co-authored last year’s Design for Dying, the Agatha Award-nominated first novel in a series—penned under their joint pseudonym, Renee Patrick—that’s set in Golden Age Hollywood and stars the snooping duo of Lillian Frost, a former aspiring actress, and real-life fashion designer Edith Head. A second Frost/Head mystery, Dangerous to Know, is due out in mid-April from Forge.)

Sometimes a tourist’s eye is needed to take the measure of a place. Especially when that place is Hollywood. The locals tend to be jaded. Consider Raymond Chandler. In The Little Sister, Philip Marlowe says, “I used to like this town … a long time ago,” and he pines for the days when “Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful.” Ross Macdonald’s local boy made not-so-good, Lew Archer, opines in The Barbarous Coast that “Hollywood started as a meaningless dream, invented for money. But its colors ran, out through the holes in people’s heads, spread across the landscape and solidified. North and south along the coast, east across the desert, across the continent. Now we were stuck with the dream without a meaning. It had become the nightmare that we lived in.”

A visitor’s perspective might be a touch, I don’t know, brighter. As one-half of a pseudonymous mystery-writing duo hailing from New York, but with California dreams, I am naturally drawn to Brooklyn-born cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, who wrote under the name and created the character of Ellery Queen.

The Origin of Evil (1951) did not mark Ellery’s first Tinseltown foray in any sense. The mystery novelist turned occasional sleuth had by this point been the focus of a radio series, a TV show, and several films. The character had ventured west to try his hand as a screenwriter in the 1938 books The Devil to Pay and The Four of Hearts.

He returns there in The Origin of Evil, hoping a change of scenery will jump-start his latest project. As the book opens, Ellery sits in his rented digs considering the victim of foul play: “There she lay under a thin blanket of smog, stirring a little, and they said she was dead. Fair Hollywood. Murdered, ran the post-mortem, by Television.” A scribe can ply his trade anywhere, but “his trade being violent death, a city with a knife in its back seemed just the place to take his empty sample cases.” The occasional signs of life and garish make-up don’t fool Ellery. “Theatres with Movies Are Better Than Ever on their marquees had crossbars over their portals saying Closed; you could now get a table at the Brown Derby without waiting more than twenty minutes … and you could throttle a tourist on Hollywood Boulevard between Vine and La Brea any night after 10:30 and feel reasonably secure against interruption.”

Ellery simply wants to work, but then “every time he came to Hollywood something fantastic happened.” This trip will be no exception. His solitude is interrupted by Laurel Hill—“Probably Miss Universe of Pasadena,” he thinks sulkily of his young neighbor’s good looks—with a story he can’t resist. Her father, Leander Hill, died of a massive heart attack after receiving the unwanted gift of a dead dog. Hill’s partner in the jewelry business also received an anonymous warning, but refuses to divulge its nature. Ellery is initially dismissive. After all, “Hollywood was a playful place. People produced practical jokes on the colossal scale. A dead dog was nothing compared with some of the elaborations of record. One he knew of personally involved a racehorse in a bathroom, another the employment for two days of seventy-six extras.” But when a search of the Hill home turns up the note that accompanied the canine’s corpse, one hinting at a great crime committed years ago that has spawned a decades-long thirst for vengeance, Ellery sets his manuscript aside and starts investigating.

Cryptic offerings pile up at the home of Hill’s partner, the wheelchair-bound tyrant Roger Priam, but he angrily rejects Ellery’s offers of assistance. Priam’s family keeps Ellery close, specifically his seductress spouse, Delia, whose charms weaken even Ellery’s resolve, and stepson Crowe Macgowan, currently living as a modern-day jungle man in a tree house in the hills while he awaits the inevitable collapse of society. “I’m the only realist I know,” Crowe claims, and he may not be wrong given that the Korean conflict erupts in the middle of this book.

Dannay and Lee relish the texture of mid-century Los Angeles life. The maverick used-car dealer “Madman” Muntz has taken to the skies over the city, a pin-up girl is crowned “Miss National Casket Week,” and Ellery must remind himself that “in Hollywood dress is a matter of free enterprise … at least one man dressed in nothing but Waikiki trunks may be found poking sullenly among the avocados at any vegetable stand.” The extravagantly extended Priam clan itself is a singular Southland phenomenon; “Hollywood had always attracted its disproportionate quota of variants from the norm,” Dannay and Lee write, enumerating how Roger and his kin could never truly flourish in Seattle or Vandalia, Illinois.

But it is the eventual revelation of the killer’s identity, motive, and strategy that demands the broad canvas only the City of Angels can provide. “The pattern is fantastic,” Ellery declares once he tumbles to the truth, fearing that his L.A. Police Department ally “still suspects what Hollywood calls a weenie,” the term coined by actress and stuntwoman Pearl White (The Perils of Pauline) that prefigured Alfred Hitchcock’s fabled MacGuffin.

The grandiosity of both characters and scheme sent tremors through the Dannay/Lee partnership. By this stage of their collaboration they had become famous for fabulously ornate plots sold through skilled prose; the twists and turns of their undisputed masterwork Cat of Many Tails (1949) have lost none of their diabolical power. In a January 23, 1950, missive collected by Joseph Goodrich in his book Blood Relations: The Selected Letters of Ellery Queen 1947-1950, Lee praises the Origin of Evil denouement presented in Dannay’s outline: “It is a great concept, bold, original, ‘big’—as a mystery idea well deserving the nomination for ‘classic.’” But he frets about filling in the psychology that would shore up this tale’s Byzantine plot, a task compounded by the “exaggerated, distorted picture of Hollywood” painted by the outsize Priams.

Dannay would have none of it. In his January 27, 1950, response, he wrote, “It seems to me that Hollywood is not only the natural place, but perfect place for this story … you underestimate what people outside of Hollywood think or know of the place. Hollywood has not reformed so much in the last ten years that it has completely lost its reputation for being the home to screwballs and crackpots.” Chandler’s characters, he argued, were “uniformly more vicious and, in my opinion, more exaggerated and distorted” than any he’d conjured up. He believed Origin could be “a milestone—not only for us, as a spectacular book, but also in the detective-mystery field itself. It is a staggering conception, and even now, months after the fact so far as I am personally concerned, I am still staggered by it.”

The cousins set aside their differences and produced a book that, if not quite a milestone, remains a marvel. Clues are literally studded everywhere in The Origin of Evil; to cite even one example would spoil the fun. Preposterous and endlessly inventive, it is not a show-business novel but one that could only play out in Hollywood.