Shooting Star by Robert Bloch

Sure, like the hammy preacher said, it was tragic to see someone ruthlessly trample a white rose.  But it's always a tragedy, even when someone tramples a weed.  No one has that right.  And who is even fit to sit in judgment, to separate the weeds from the roses?

Weeds.  Marijuana was a weed.  A weed that made some people high, made them feel that they did have the right to judge, made them feel like trampling.

If you search for "Robert Bloch" at the internet archive one of the things that comes up is a 2008 Hard Case Crime paperback of two 1950s novels, Shooting Star and Spiderweb.  (Shooting Star's cover is by comics creator Arthur Suydam; it is OK, but generic and obvious and flat, totally unlike his idiosyncratic and sometimes astonishing work in Heavy Metal or Demon Dreams or other titles.)  We liked Bloch's 1972 Night-World, so let's give 1958's Shooting Star, which first appeared as an Ace Double with another Bloch title, a shot.

Our narrator is Mark Clayburn, a Los Angeles literary agent who writes "true detective" stories on the side.  As an agent he is paid to sell other writers' stories to magazines (Anthony Boucher, editor of F&SF when this novel was published, is one of the peeps Mark sends stories to) and movie studios.  As an author of true detective "yarns" he more or less acts as a journalist, investigating crimes and producing stories about them to sell to magazines.  To facilitate this journalism, he has a private investigator's license.

Mark is at a low point in his career.  He was in the hospital for a while after an accident, and while he was gone his business collapsed, his clients and employees abandoning him (Bloch is always ready to run down Hollywood, and Mark suggests that leaving your friends and colleagues high and dry when they are in a jam is an "old Hollywood custom"); after emerging from the hospital with an eye patch he had to start his business fresh, practically from square one. 

As our story begins, one of the friends who abandoned him, Harry Bannock, comes back into his life.  This guy has a crazy story, and an opportunity for Mark.  You see, while Mark was in the hospital, actor Dick Ryan, star of 39 cowboy films in the role of Lucky Larry, was murdered, and the cops never did find out who did it.  Rumor has it that at the scene of his death were found lots of "reefer butts," and that Ryan may have been connected to a drug ring.  Nowadays people may think smoking pot is some kind of cure-all therapy, but things were different in the early Fifties, and the possibility that Ryan was a pothead is more damaging to his reputation than the fact that he was a serial adulterer.  The owner of the Lucky Larry films feared they had become worthless, and sold them to Bannock.

Bannock knew Ryan, and is confident Ryan didn't smoke dope.  Bannock thinks he can sell the rights to show the Lucky Larry films on the boob tube at a substantial profit if he can clear Ryan's name of the stain of being associated with weed.  And he is willing to pay Mark a lot of money to solve the murder and get the facts that will clear Ryan's name.  

I thought this an entertaining set up for the story, a little convoluted but easily comprehensible, fun and amusing but believable, not absurdist farce silliness.         

What follows is the expected detective stuff.  Mark goes to the library, reads lots of old newspapers.  Mark and Bannock receive threatening phone calls and threatening notes, and Mark gets beat up by thugs.  Mark talks to a legion of secondary and minor characters, including several attractive women whom he thinks might have clues about who killed Ryan and left those "reefer butts" at the scene of the crime; these people's motives and allegiances are a puzzle he tries to solve, and their status as suspects or victims is always in flux.  When one of the attractive women, a movie star, expresses willingness to give Mark a clue, she gets murdered.  (Detective fiction is full of people who say "I will tell you what you want to know, but not right now, I'll tell you later" and then get killed before "later" arrives.)  Mark attends the movie star's funeral, and one of Bloch's extended jokes is comparing the elaborate service to a major motion picture with a cast of thousands; a fun touch is naming the funeral director, whom he likens to John Ford and Daryl F. Zanuck, "Hamilton Brackett."

Three-quarters of the way through Shooting Star we learn the terrible truth about that accident Mark was in that kept him from his desk--Mark himself is a recovering marijuana addict!  While high, he drove off the road to Vegas, where he was taking his girlfriend so they could get hitched!  In the crash he lost that eye, and she lost her life!  Mark didn't just agree to take this case to get the money he needs to jump start his business, but in hopes of striking a blow against the dealers who are flooding Hollyweird with the insidious weed that these creatives can't seem to resist!  

More people get murdered, the cops start chasing Mark when he ruffles the feathers of an important individual, Mark gets beaten up a second time, and finally figures out who the killer is--one of the attractive women--Bannock's faithless recovering pot-addict of a wife!  Mark confronts her, and we get several pages of explanation of how and why she did it and how Mark figured it out.  Mrs. Bannock gets the jump on him and is about to kill him, but then the cops arrive and save Mark by shooting her dead.  

The novel ends tragically, with nobody better off.  Bannock has lost his wife, whom he never suspected of any of the indiscretions and crimes it turned out she was guilty of, and he and Mark never speak again--he doesn't pay Mark for finding out it was his wife who was the murderer, so growing Mark's business is going to be a long slow process of grinding away.  The pot selling ring which Mrs. Bannock and so many of the characters were mixed up in was disrupted, but on the last page of the story Mark looks out the window at La La Land and knows it is still full of drug dealers and drug addicts, murderers and murder victims, just like every other town in the world.

Bloch does a good job, as far as I could tell, with the intricacies of the mystery plot; I didn't notice any plot holes and people all seem to behave in a believable way.  I'm sort of indifferent to the mechanics of the clues and detection, however; being more interested in human drama, in character and suspense, I enjoyed Night-World, the meat of which is portrayal of a psychopathic personality and depiction of fear and violence rather than figuring out who done it, a bit more than Shooting Star, though Shooting Star has the later novel beat in at least one category.

The final conformation of Shooting Star is better than that in Night-World, but they both have something noteworthy in common--it is the police who destroy the villain, not the main protagonist.  I guess this adds to the fear element with its suggestion that we mere mortals are unable to foil evil or even preserve our own lives without the aid of big powerful collective institutions, but I think it also is a way for the hero to evade the moral responsibility that comes with killing another human being--in the case of Shooting Star, an attractive woman.  I'm skeptical this is a good literary strategy; don't we want characters who are active, who fail or succeed based on their own decisions and personalities?  And if we agree it is acceptable to kill malefactors to protect society and/or kill attackers to preserve our individual lives, shouldn't we squarely face the moral and psychological cost of doing so by having the major characters whom we are invited to identify with do the killing, and not be content with having this responsibility fobbed off on minor characters who represent vast collective institutions that dilute responsibility?  

Bloch's social criticism in Shooting Star is more focused than it is in Night-World, with its pervasive theme of the dangers of drug addiction.  I enjoy Bloch's portrayal here of Hollywood as a cesspool of amoral and out of control jerk-offs who degrade themselves and each other (the women are almost all victims of sexual abuse and/or using their bodies to get what they want out of men), and was a little disappointed to see Bloch soften the blow by having narrator Mark multiple times and at some length tell other characters and us readers that many people in the film industry are good and the unflattering picture we get of Tinseltown is distorted because the press focuses on the bad eggs, and that all industries have bad apples.  I suppose this is a respectable and maybe even believable argument, but a character who makes respectable rational arguments is not as exciting or entertaining as one who is driven by passions, and don't we kind of want to read (in our genre fiction, at least) about settings that are extreme, that are remarkable?  When Mark says stuff like "Not that Hollywood is any different than any other city, or the motion pictures different than any other industry" after a description of sunny California depravity, it is sort of an emotional letdown, defuses the tension he has generated, and not in a satisfying way.  

(I'm no expert on the mystery genre and its subgenres, but when Mark doesn't shoot the female murderer himself the way Mike Hammer does in I, the Jury, and when he says Hollywood is no worse than any other town, I thought that Bloch was maybe drifting out of the hard-boiled or noirish territory I thought this book was located in and taking on some of the characteristics of what I guess people call "cozy" mysteries.)  

I'm not sure if I want to say Shooting Star is on the high end of acceptable or actually good, but let's be nice and call this a positive review.

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Next time, more 1950s genre literature and paperback cover criticism!