The Devil's Playground - Softcover

Russell, Craig

 
9780593468319: The Devil's Playground
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593468317 ISBN 13: 9780593468319
Verlag: Vintage, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

A riveting 1920s Hollywood thriller about the making of the most terrifying silent film ever made, and a deadly search for the single copy rumored still to exist, from the internationally acclaimed author of The Devil Aspect.

"An excellent, engrossing historical horror novel."—New York Times Book Review

"Rich and riveting...a masterful thriller." —Lincoln Child, #1 New York Times bestselling author

"Addictive." —A.J. Finn, author of The Woman in the Window

"Totally engaging." —Kathy Reichs, author of the Temperance Brennan series

1927: Mary Rourke—a Hollywood studio fixer—is called urgently to the palatial home of Norma Carlton, one of the most recognizable stars in American silent film. Norma has been working on the secret film everyone is openly talking about... a terrifying horror picture called The Devil’s Playground that is rumored to have unleashed a curse on everyone involved in the production. Mary finds Norma’s cold, dead body, and she wonders for just a moment if these dark rumors could be true.  

1967: Paul Conway, a journalist and self-professed film aficionado, is on the trail of a tantalizing rumor. He has heard that a single copy of The Devil’s Playground—a Holy Grail for film buffs—may exist. He knows his Hollywood history and he knows the film endured myriad tragedies and ended up lost to time.  

The Devil's Playground is Craig Russell’s tour de force, a richly researched and constructed thriller that weaves through the Golden Age of Hollywood and reveals a blossoming industry built on secrets, invented identities, and a desperate pursuit of image. As Mary Rourke charges headlong through the egos, distractions, and traps that threaten to take her down with the doomed production, she discovers a truth far more sinister than she—or we—could have imagined.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

 CRAIG RUSSELL is an award-winning Scottish author whose books have been translated into twenty-five languages. His previous works include The Devil Aspect, the Fabel series of thrillers and the Lennox series of noir mysteries. He is the only two-time winner of the McIlvanney Prize (2015 and 2021) as well as the winner of the 2008 Crime Writers' Association Dagger in the Library prize. He lives in Perthshire, Scotland, with his wife.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

1967
Sudden Lake

It takes hours to find, as he knew it would.

Smooth highway asphalt yields to blacktop cracked into snakeskin scales by a caustic sun, which in turn yields to powder-­dry dirt track. Paul Conway’s Rambler makes its dust-­cloud-­waked way across an ocean of scorched earth navigated by no other cars, unbroken by any truck stop, gas station, or island of habitation where he can pause to ask directions. The only other vehicle he encounters is the rusting wreck of a truck on the side of the road, forsaken, flaked, and faded, slowly being comminuted into the desert by twenty years of excoriating abandonment.

Other than that, all there is, is the vast, pale, hot-­as-­hell desert stretching gray and white, yellow and rust, all the way to where the mountains rumble dark on the horizon.

Conway remembers someone once saying there was a special beauty to the desert. But he can’t recall who said it, or even if it had been a real person or just a character in a movie. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s gotten the two universes confused. Maybe they hadn’t even been talking about a real desert, but a set: a cinematographer’s idea of a desert. Whoever said it, Conway doesn’t see any unique beauty. For him, the desert is empty of beauty. Empty of anything. Dead space.

Then again, Conway knows he doesn’t see or experience the world the way others do. He never has, and it led him to the profession he now pursues, now excels in. Part of that innate otherness means scenes from movies—­whole and flawlessly recalled—­play out continuously in his head, holding up confected celluloid realities against the harsh mundanity of daily life.

Now, unbidden, as he drives across the desert, the final scene of von Stroheim’s Greed is projected onto the screen of his mind. For Conway, no other scene in movie history so confuses the real and the unreal. He knows that von Stroheim, in his near-­insane drive for authenticity, filmed and refilmed the scene in Death Valley in midsummer, at midday. Actors and crew returned from the months-­long shoot blistered and burned; one died, many were hospitalized, almost dead from heat exhaustion; co-­star Jean Hersholt began vomiting blood when his insides ruptured in the heat.

But shit, thinks Conway, what a scene: the character McTeague under a blazing sun, keylessly handcuffed to the man he has just killed, the money he has schemed and murdered for lying just beyond his reach, the last of his water spilled and evaporating from his bullet-­punctured canteen.

Tantalus in Death Valley.

Maybe that was the truth of the desert. The desert as death, as desolate judgment and arid purgatory.

Conway pushes the scene from his mind. He scans the road ahead for any landmark to indicate he’s getting closer to his goal.

After several dust-­fumed stops to check a map that refuses to yield to folding, he has all but given up when he finds the turnoff he’s searched for, little more than a dirt trail opening like a dry, dead mouth at the side of the road. An ancient wooden sign, long separated from its post, lies on the ground, half propped up against a rock. The sign is so sun-­faded and grit-­scoured that if Conway didn’t know the name he’s looking for, he wouldn’t be able to make it out. But he does know the name, and he mentally traces its faint outline on the sign.

SUDDEN LAKE

The desert growls and crackles beneath the Rambler’s tires as he turns up the even rougher track. He sees it almost immediately, and it is a bizarre and intimidating sight: black and jagged, like some dark malignancy growing on the bleached skin of the desert. As he comes nearer, he gradually makes sense of it: a huge old house, tall and stark, with a jumble of mock-­Victorian gables and mansard roofs stabbing the sterile pale-­blue shield of sky. The house backs onto a long, wide depression, like a vast shallow crater, a mile wide and two long, paler than the desert beyond it and almost white in patches. The skeleton ribs of other buildings lie scattered around the depression’s rim as if they have died of thirst at its waterless edge.

He slows as he approaches the house and sees that the wood of the roof shingles, the deep eaves and clapboard siding has been stained dark and restained darker over the years, until the house has become an impossible black silhouette in the desert, impervious to the scalpel-­sharp sunlight.

Christ, he thinks, it’s like a movie set. He gives a small laugh at the weird appropriateness of the thought, but at the same time it sits uneasily with him, as if he struggles to decide to which of his universes the scene should belong.

He now realizes that the building is too big for a house. A hotel? Out here in the middle of nowhere? Whatever it is, nothing could look more out of place in this setting.

Outside the house itself, an old Packard of indeterminate vintage stands rusting on rotted tires; a newer Airstream trailer blade-­gleams in the sun. An even newer sedan is parked in the shade of a lean-­to port.

She is waiting for him.

As he pulls up outside, she stands at the top of the steps in the main doorway, her shoulder holding the screen door open, her face in the shadow of the dark-­tanned blade of hand she uses to sun-­shield her eyes. He guesses that she must have followed the cloud of dust the Rambler kicked up all the way along the half-­mile access road to the house. Why, he thinks, would a woman of her age choose to live so far away from anything, with no neighbor or help for miles? Then again, he pretty much knows the answer to that.

Conway steps out from the air-­conditioned cocoon of the car, and the heat hits him instantly: dry and sharp and relentless. He takes a step toward her, and a dog—­a huge, dark beast of a dog—­emerges from doorway shadow and sniffs the air as if it has caught the odor of fresh meat.

“It’s okay,” she says. She makes the slightest of hand gestures, and the dog sits. “He’s harmless.”

“Hello, boy,” Conway says nervously as he approaches the foot of the steps. The dog sits unresponsive, looking down at him impassively. “What’s his name?” he asks.

“Golly.”

“Golly?”

“Short for Golem.”

“Oh, I see. . . . He’s your protector. . . .”

“Of sorts. I named him for an old friend.”

“A friend from back then?” Conway asks.

“Come in.” She ignores his question. Another hand gesture: the dog follows her, and both are swallowed by the black mouth of the doorway. Conway, like the dog, follows her command.

He slips his sunglasses into the breast pocket of his shirt, and it takes his eyes a moment to adjust to the inner gloom. When they do, a large lobby is revealed. It’s now clear that this is a hotel, or at least it has been at some long time past. There’s a pervading sense of desuetude in the lobby, but it is nonetheless scrupulously clean. He imagines it must be swept daily to remain free from the constant, importunate probing of the desert’s dusty fingers.

“This is quite a place,” Conway says at last.

“It was built in the early Twenties,” she explains dully. She has her back to him as she leads the way across the lobby. “The big salt pan out back was Sudden Lake back then.”

“So there was a lake?”

“For about thirty years. It was called Sudden Lake because it...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Vintage
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593468317
ISBN 13 
9780593468319
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
368
Kontakt zum Hersteller
EDITIONS GALLIMARD
ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it

Via Verdi, 8.
Assago Milano
20090
Italien

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780385549011: The Devil's Playground

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0385549016 ISBN 13:  9780385549011
Verlag: Doubleday, 2023
Hardcover