Show Red For Danger is a 1960 novel by the writing team Frances and Richard Lockridge, authors of the famous mystery series starring “Mr. & Mrs. North” - entertaining puzzlers in which the Norths discover murder in society or while travelling, and often by chance or intuition, solve the case.
Show Red For Danger is a different series featuring New York Detective Captain Heimrich, lately transferred upstate.
This was not a pleasure to read, however. The opposite of breezy, I found this talky and pedantic - and filled, as one may find, with sentences broken, and choppy, convoluted without resolution, and stopping suddenly, as if interrupted.
Until -
Captain Heimrich is a large man, who thinks someone as 'fun' as Susan Faye would not be interested in him. Did he just call her ‘fun’? More like beautiful. With Susan herself just waiting for him to make a move, he certainly takes his time. The movie business has invaded a small upstate town, filming almost complete. The young starlet Peggy Bedford is visiting the home of local artist Brian (a man she was once married to), a man who built that very house for her at one time. When Heinrich and Susan go to the house to see Brian’s new fabric designs, they discover Peggy and Brian dead - she bikini-clad on the floor and he slumped in a chair - an obvious case of .38 caliber murder-suicide. There is a small cast of culprits to choose from - the recently widowed Producer; his impetuous young daughter with movie stars in her eyes; the male lead Francis Dale (another ex- husband of Peggy); Mr. Fielding - not in the business (but yet another ex-husband tired of paying Peggy alimony); a temperamental Czech director dubious of her talent. She was a flighty, ‘diamonds-are-a-girls-best-friend' type of actress, not sorely missed.
A mystery novel about a movie crew should be more interesting than Heinrich and the local sergeant endlessly interviewing and visiting the crime scene. After discovering the murders, Susan has enough foresight to survey Brian’s studio for the fabric design - only to find it marred by splashes of red paint. A deliberate act? Did Brian intend this a vital clue to his killer, or did the killer try to eradicate evidence? Either way, an intriguing development that is never explained, even at the denouement where Heinrich deigns to reveal what actually happened - because we the readers were not privy to any of it - the why’s and how’s not divulged for us to detect for ourselves.
I don’t mind being kept in the dark if the characters are engaging, the plot swift, and the banter witty. This has an unusually stilted way of replicating conversation, with half sentences, overlapped dialogue, and an unfortunate laboured pace. At the climax, as the culprit is about to be revealed, Susan spends two pages talking about letting the dog out.
Really uninvolving. I haven’t read a Lockridge novel I didn't like, so this was a surprise, especially as Merton Heimrich starred in 22 Lockridge mysteries, of which this is number 12. The other Lockridge title I reviewed is Voyage into Violence.
1960 / Hardcover / 191 pages
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