Set in 1940s Hollywood, a young screenwriter finds herself at the center of a murder investigation when the most feared film critic in the business is found dead in mysterious circumstances.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and first two chapters from Last Night at the Hollywood Canteen by Sarah James, which is out now!
Perhaps the best place in 1943 Hollywood to see the stars is the Hollywood Canteen, a club for servicemen staffed exclusively by those in show business. Murder mystery playwright Annie Laurence, new in town after a devastating breakup, definitely hopes to rub elbows with the right stars. Maybe then she can get her movie made.
But Hollywood proves to be more than tinsel and glamour. When despised film critic Fiona Farris is found dead in the Canteen kitchen, Annie realizes any one of the Canteen’s luminous volunteers could be guilty of the crime. To catch the killer, Annie falls in with Fiona’s friends, a bitter and cynical group―each as uniquely unhappy in their life and career as Annie is in hers―that call themselves the Ambassador’s Club.
Solving a murder in real life, it turns out, is a lot harder than writing one for the stage. And by involving herself in the secrets and lies of the Ambassador’s Club, Annie just might have put a target on her own back.
Chapter One
When I tell you this story, I’m going to sound like a stalker. You have to trust me that that’s not the case.
I was only sneaking around the side of the building that night because the back door of the Hollywood Canteen—the one volunteers entered through when we arrived—was locked, and I was heading around to the front of the building. There was a concert going on. In between all the jitterbugging with movie stars and the endless supply of free sodas and sandwiches, the Hollywood entertainers put on all kinds of wonderful shows for the servicemen at the Canteen. Nearly every evening in that converted old nightclub, you could see someone there you’d have to pay big money to see anywhere else. Sure, you had to stand packed like sardines with six hundred buck privates, but who cared when Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington, or Dinah Shore was your entertainment?
July 25, 1943, was no exception. Victor Durand was there, playing the solo in Henry Hilbert’s piano concerto. I had heard him play on the radio before and never thought too much of it, but something about that live performance had enraptured me. The full-body effort it seemed to take, the pain of it. The only problem was that I had neglected to fill out some of my volunteer paperwork, so I’d been banished to an unfinished room upstairs, experiencing the work of our greatest living composer played by our greatest living pianist through a thin sheet of glass. It simply wouldn’t do. So once I finished filling out the forms, I headed downstairs.
I came out the stage door into the alley and tried to go back in through the volunteer entrance just a few yards up, but like I said, it had been locked. I could have gone around the block, but the concert was almost over. I decided cutting between the buildings would be faster. It was nighttime and it was dark—the streetlights having been turned off completely due to the war—but enough light was coming out of the window from the Canteen kitchen that I thought it would be okay.
So it wasn’t that I wanted to “see the fruits of my handiwork” or whatever else the papers printed about me. In fact, I’d do anything to unsee the image I saw through the window that night. When I close my eyes, I can still see the three of them, posed like some sick mockery of a Renaissance painting—Jack doubled over, wailing; Terry’s wide eyes, her arm outstretched, calling for help that was already too late; and Fiona Farris, a cup of coffee tumbling from her hand, her eyes seeing nothing—bathed in the warm, patriotic light of the building that stood for how good and selfless we in Hollywood could be.
Chapter Two
March 1943
New York City
Not to be dramatic, but being a playwright half an hour before curtain is the worst situation a human being can possibly experience. Everyone else has business to be doing: actors have makeup to put on, stage managers have props to set, wardrobe has hems to finish up and shirts to iron. The director is probably the only other person in the building without a task to distract him, but he can’t relate; directors don’t get the blame for a bad show, just the credit for a good one. No, being a playwright half an hour before curtain is like being tied to the tracks of an oncoming train. Everyone’s about to discover you’re a hack, and it’s too late to do anything about it now.
And that’s before I found out what I had just found out.
I barged into Bev and Adam’s shared dressing room without knocking. Adam was already in costume, his silver glasses and a book of Auden’s poems in his hand the only things keeping him Adam Cook of the Upper West Side rather than Fitzwilliam Abbott of the Newport set. Bev was still in her underwear, her sandy-blond hair in rollers, lining her lower lid in white with a preposterously steady hand.
“You won’t believe what one of the producers just gave me,” I said, holding up the telegram with my shaking gloved hand.
“What?” said Bev, swiveling around on her stool, eye pencil midair.
Adam, more sensibly, held up a hand. “How about a drink first, darling?”
“I simply couldn’t,” I said.
“Not even a martini?”
“Fine.” I took a deep breath as Adam pushed himself up from the chair, then slunk over to the gold bar cart that had been stocked in the dressing room in anticipation of opening-night celebrations. “I probably shouldn’t even tell you two,” I said. “I don’t want to upset you before you have to go on.”
“Now you have to tell us,” said Bev.
“Come on, we’re unflappable,” Adam added, using tongs to drop a few ice cubes from the bucket into a cocktail shaker.
“Fiona Farris is in town,” I began.
Both of them seemed unimpressed by that, at least. Adam poured a few glugs of gin into the shaker. “So the reign of terror has begun.”
Fiona Farris had been the notoriously brutal theater critic for the New Yorker in the early thirties. She had personally ended the careers of five composers, three playwrights, and too many chorus girls to count. One particularly devastating review of Titus Andronicus in ’33 had resulted in not a single production of Shakespeare himself being mounted in the greater New York area for eighteen months. When she’d moved to California around ’35, she switched to covering movies for the Hollywood Dispatch, and anyone who had ever dreamed of a career in the theater on the East Coast breathed a sigh of relief. Then the Dispatch editors decided it would be amusing to send her back to us for one week a year to cover dozens of shows playing on Broadway all at once. Fiona’s annual visits were like a tornado, leaving a trail of shuttered shows in its wake.
“Is she seeing our show?” asked Bev.
I waved the telegram in my hand. “She already has.”
That got their attention. Adam slammed the cocktail shaker down on the bar, and Bev leapt to her feet. “We haven’t even opened yet!” she cried.
“She came last night to the preview,” I explained.
“Critics aren’t allowed to come to the previews. It’s an ethical violation,” said Adam.
“She doesn’t bat an eye over ruining people’s lives—why would she care about an ethical violation?” I said.
“Is that it?” asked Bev, nodding toward the telegram.
“Not all of it. Just a few choice quotes. One of the producers has a pal in the Dispatch offices. He sent it over.”
“You haven’t read it?” she said.
I shook my head no.
The three of us shared a look, all thinking the same thing but none of us wanting to be the dummy who gave the thought a voice. Finally, Bev piped up. “Maybe it’s a good review.”
“It’s not,” Adam and I replied, practically in unison.
“Fiona Farris doesn’t write good reviews,” Adam continued. “If she filed one at all, it’s mixed at best.”
My heart was pounding so hard in my chest I could see the black crepe of my new dress rising and falling. “Let’s not read it now,” I said. “We’ll read it at the party, with the others, when there’s more booze to go around.”
“If we wait until after the show, we’ll all spend the whole performance distracted,” countered Beth.
“Let’s get it over with,” agreed Adam.
I pushed the cursed telegram into his hands. “You read it, then.”
Adam turned the telegram over as I headed for the bar cart, straining my gin into a gold-rimmed glass and then taking a sip. He had forgotten to add vermouth, but straight gin seemed more appropriate anyway. After a moment, Adam folded. He handed the telegram to Bev. “You read it,” he said. “I can’t.”
Bev wasted no time in unfolding the thing and holding it up. She was always the brave one, Bev. Adam was too concerned with being liked, and I was too concerned with being asleep, for either of us to engage in much courage, but Bev approached everything like a Girl Scout: rosy-cheeked and ready to fix things. “‘Altogether Too Many Murders is a perfectly serviceable murder story—’”
“‘Serviceable’!” said Adam happily. Bev held up a finger to quiet him.
“‘—even if discerning audience members will find the twist obvious from the first scene.’”
“Most audience members can’t even discern where their seats are. I’m not too worried,” I said.
“‘The show features two lovely performances from real-life married couple Adam and Beverly Cook,’” Bev went on.
“This is a fine review,” said Adam. “What were we all worked up for?”
“‘Playwright Annie Laurence writes so lovingly for her two leads one wonders if the three don’t spend their off-hours running lines among an extra-large bedroom set.’”
I felt all the blood drain from my face. Bev lowered the telegram, looking at me. I glanced at Adam, who was worryingly biting his lower lip.
All of us were silent, each privately scanning our history for the moment that had done us in. Had someone been round to ours for a party and snooped in the bedroom? Had we all shown up at rehearsal together one too many times, left a party—all three of us—while the wrong person was watching? Adam and I had gone to the Cloisters a month ago and held hands the whole time; had someone spotted us? Bev and I had gone dancing at a nightclub uptown two weeks ago; had someone figured out my hands were a little too tight around her waist for the two of us to be just friends?
“How did she…? How did she know?” I finally asked.
“She doesn’t,” Bev assured me right away. “It’s a joke.”
“Some joke!” cried Adam. “My parents read the Dispatch. We can’t have this out there. Can John call his friend and make her change it?”
“I’ll ask him,” I said.
“No, don’t. That’ll only make it worse,” said Bev. “Fiona Farris thinks she wrote a meaningless quip, and then she gets a call from her editor saying we’ve gone over her head to make her change it? She’ll know for sure it’s true after that.”
“She’s nuts. Didn’t she try to slit her own throat once? Who lets people still write for the trades after they try to slit their own throat?” muttered Adam.
“No one who doesn’t already know about us would think this is anything but a cheeky one-liner from a woman who is known for writing cheeky one-liners,” said Bev. “Really, put it straight out of your heads. It’s a decent review from Fiona Farris! That means the Post, the New Yorker, they’ll all be raves—we’ll run for a year!”
A stage manager called fifteen minutes from outside the door, and Bev was suddenly off in a flurry to put on her costume. I leaned into Adam, resting my cheek on his tweed-clad shoulder. “I do write lovingly for you two, you know. I hear your voices with every word I type.”
He wrapped an arm around me, twisting one of my red curls around his finger. “The future’s at our feet. You, the wildly successful mystery playwright. Us, your doting muses. We’ve worked so hard for this, and now it all begins tonight.”
I leaned up to kiss his cheek before pulling away to take a sip of my not-quite martini. “Did the telegram say anything else, Bev?” I called out.
Even though she’d been standing around practically nude for fifteen minutes, Bev had ducked behind the lacquered privacy screen to put on her costume. “Just that Mrs. Farris thinks the murder weapon? The cherry laurel leaves? She thinks it wouldn’t actually kill anyone in real life.”
I snorted, a bit of gin burning my nostrils. Adam and I shared a look. “Oh, it would,” I muttered. “She’s welcome to try it on herself if she doesn’t believe me.”
Two hours and twenty minutes later, the drama of whatever Fiona Farris had written about our love life was entirely forgotten. I could tell by the way the audience leapt to their feet the show was a hit; by the way they screamed for Bev, tossing flowers at her feet, she was a star. We drank champagne until the sun rose and then slept all day. When I woke at 6 p.m., with Mr. Cook on one side of me and Mrs. Cook on the other, stage makeup still staining the corners of their faces, I thought of the future Adam had promised me that was now here. I thought I must be the luckiest person in the world.
That future lasted six weeks.
It was after they got back from the show one night. We were all in the living room, listening to the radio and talking, but something seemed off. They were both acting distant, which didn’t itself bother me—humans are entitled to their moods—only they were both pretending that they weren’t being distant, getting lost running their fingers through the carpet pile and then immediately acting as if everything were normal. Then there were the looks. They kept sharing meaningful glances between them. That happened sometimes with an arrangement like ours. Some nights, two of the three were on the same page, and the third felt left out. I was trying my best not to be too bothered by it.
There was a lull in whatever stilted conversation we were having, and Adam cleared his throat and announced there was something we needed to discuss. I was actually relieved. At least now, whatever it was would be out in the open. At least now, we could all three deal with it together.
Judy Garland was on the radio, crooning out some sad old Hilbert tune about being foolish for falling in love so hard. How aptly trite. Adam was on the couch, the new green velvet one we had all recently picked out together. Bev and I were lying on the carpet—pale green and dotted with geometric pink roses, bought at the same time. What had brought us to lie on the floor, I no longer remember. All I recall is glancing over at her, blond curls framing her head like a halo, and the smile she gave me. It was the last time I knew, without a doubt, she loved me.
My first assumption to Adam’s declaration was that Bev must be pregnant, which would put a dent in our cozy little situation but wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. It could be nice to have a baby in my life, especially one I didn’t have to grow and push out myself. We could take her to the zoo, watch her run around and imitate tigers. We’d share a knowing look whenever Adam or Bev referred to me as “Aunt” Annie. It could be fun.
The news was not a baby.
“We’ve been offered contracts at MGM,” said Adam.
How naive, that my first reaction was pride. “Oh my!” I cried, propping myself up on my elbows, a grin spreading across my face. MGM was the tops; everyone knew it. Paramount, Pacific, Columbia—sure, they made a good movie now and then, but an offer from MGM was real validation of their talent. Not that they would ever take it, of course. The money was better out there, but theater had always been what we wanted to do. “That’s incredible!”
I could see from their faces that my reaction had not been what they were expecting. A sour taste crept up the back of my throat as I began to sense the storm coming for me. “You want to take them?” I asked.
Adam didn’t seem to have the guts to say it, only exhaling loudly and casting his gaze to the floor. Bev sat up and placed a soft hand on top of mine. “They want to turn us into stars. Whole movies made for us, makeovers, money… It’s not the kind of offer you pass on.”
“So we’d move to California?” I asked. The very thought was making the room spin. I sat up and pulled my hand away from Bev’s, then pressed it to my temple. Maybe this was all a trick of the martinis I’d been drinking. “I don’t know about that. I like it here. I like New York. It’s closer to my family, and all our friends are here—and I don’t know the first thing about writing for pictures.”
They were looking at me with both pity and guilt, as if I were an injured animal they had tried to put out of its misery but was refusing to die. “Annie,” said Bev gently. So very gently. “Adam and I would move to California. Just the two of us.”
A few years ago, my brother Joe and I had been in a car crash. He’d been telling me about the girl he was seeing, laughing at her ingenious technique of scheduling a second date later in the night so she would have an excuse to leave early if Joe was boring her. Out of nowhere, a driver had run a red light and made direct contact with the tail of Joe’s brand-new Ford, sending us spinning out of control. Other than a few bruises and bumps, we’d both been fine but badly shaken up. You think events like that—that are so momentous, so frightening—you think you will see them coming. Their gravity is so massive, their impact so pronounced, how could you not? How could you be laughing about a sneaky girlfriend one moment and screaming for your life in the next? How could you not feel at least the air shift around you beforehand, sense that the universe was coming for you?
“What about the future?” I managed to stammer out.
“What future?” asked Bev.
What future…! The future where I would continue to write plays, and Bev and Adam would continue to star in them, and all three of us would become enormous stars and go home every night to collapse on our couch, laughing and embracing. The future where I’d keep getting too anxious on opening nights, and Adam would calm me down with a hand in my hair. The future where we’d continue to humor Bev’s attempts to cook Christmas dinner before giving up and going out. The future where we’d one day have enough money to buy a vacation house upstate or sail to Rio or open up a theater of our own. The future! I didn’t know how else to put it.
“We would of course finish out our contracts in your show,” said Adam, looking at me with an expression so earnest it made my eyebrows raise in anger. Is that what they thought I meant by the future? Our business future? And since when was it my show and not our show?
Miss Garland had switched to “Don’t Get around Much Anymore,” and Adam leaned over to switch off the radio, the tune distorting before it gasped away. In the awkward silence, Beverly began smoothing down her hair, which had gone askew from lying on the floor. I hated her for doing that, suddenly. Who are you preening for? Just leave it a mess.
I looked at Adam, who looked away like the coward he was. His eyes met Beverly’s mid–hair pat, and I was stabbed with the thought of a conversation that had revolved around me but did not include me. Had it been whispered under bedsheets while I was in the shower? Backstage in the wings on a night I didn’t attend the play? When had they carved out their little moments to plot how they would ruin my life?
“So this is it,” I said finally, looking again at Adam. He was running an unlit cigarette between his fingers. I willed the same jolt of hatred I’d just felt for Beverly to appear for him, but I couldn’t do it. He was a horrible coward, a meek little worm of a man, and I loved him so much. I loved both of them so much. “You’re ending everything we have to run off to Hollywood together.”
“It doesn’t have to be the end…” began Beverly, but I knew it was a hollow offer even before Adam cleared his throat and shot her another look. A tear slid down her cheek, which didn’t impress me all that much because she cried on command eight times a week in Act Three of Altogether Too Many Murders. That is the hazard of falling in love with actors. “It’s only because MGM wants complete control of our lives. Movie stars are products the whole world buys. We have to keep a wholesome public image.”
“No one has to know,” I said. “We’ve kept it secret all these years—”
“Not very well, if Fiona Farris is writing about it openly in her column,” said Adam.
“You said that was a joke—that no one would know—”
“Well, it was a joke L. B. Mayer got,” said Adam. “We had to assure them there was no merit to it. If they find out we lied? All it would take would be Fiona seeing us out to eat once, and that’s it—our careers are over!”
“We have to sign a morality clause as part of the contract,” added Beverly. “If they even catch a whiff that we’re involved in a scandal…”
I knew that some people—most people, perhaps—would call our lives scandalous, but to me it was only our lives. That Adam and Beverly had apparently already denied our lives felt like a stab in the heart. “Then don’t take the jobs,” I said.
“We told you,” said Adam, “it’s not the kind of offer you turn down.”
“Of course it is,” I tried to say, but it came out in a babble. I was on my feet, although I don’t remember standing. “Of course it is, if you love me.”
“Of course we love you,” Adam said.
“But not enough,” I said.
Neither of them spoke.
In the silence, something began grasping at my chest, my throat. I gasped for air, turning away so neither of them would see me losing it.
“It doesn’t mean that all the time we’ve had together wasn’t—” said Adam, stopping abruptly as Beverly no doubt signaled to him to can it.
“I’m not waiting for you,” I said, whipping back around to face them. “If you go out there and—and—and you hate it, and you want to come home, and you want to come back to this life, it won’t be here. I won’t be here. If you do this, I am done with you. Done forever.”
“Oh, Annie, maybe you’re right—” began Beverly, but this time it was Adam who cut her off, with a gentle “Bev” in a tone of We talked about this. My threat didn’t matter, I realized. The shift had already happened. They were done with me. We had been “the three of us” for years, but the second they had gotten off the phone with MGM, we became “the two of us and Annie” in their minds.
Their contracts in the play lasted six more weeks. They were on the train to California before the curtain touched the stage floor, and I was alone.
With the two stars leaving, the producers decided to close the show at the end of April. Beverly and Adam didn’t even bother to come to the closing-night party. Technically, I shouldn’t be sour about this, as they’d asked and I’d given them my blessing to skip it. “MGM is insistent we’re there to start shooting a picture first thing on Monday, and it’s a three-day train ride now that civilians can’t take airplanes…” What could I have said? Sure. Fine. Go.
I’d been living out of a hastily packed suitcase at the Algonquin for the last six weeks, keeping up appearances only out of sheer determination not to let the two of them know they had won. Once they left, they offered me the Upper West Side place since the lease wouldn’t be up for a few more months. I didn’t want to take anything from them, but writers whose shows close after three months don’t have “live at the Algonquin indefinitely” money, so I did. I braced myself as I slipped the key into the lock, certain the emotions I’d been suppressing would come rushing back to me upon seeing the rooms where I’d once been so happy.
Only Beverly and Adam had stripped the place bare.
The rose-patterned rug, the green velvet couch, the grand piano we never had room for but Beverly insisted we keep anyway, even the mahogany end tables that had belonged to my grandmother—they’d all disappeared. They were kind enough to leave me the portable Electrola record player in a sleek black leather case I’d blown all my savings on four years ago, which was hardly a sacrifice for them since Adam had a much nicer model in its own oak cabinet. They did not, however, leave me any records. In the kitchen, the telephone remained—probably because it had been bolted into the wall. I found some uninspiring-looking apples in the refrigerator and a half-eaten box of Adam’s favorite molasses cookies in the otherwise bare cupboards. The bedroom had nothing but the curtains, white and rippling gently from the cracked window. I had a bare, yellowing wooden floor, the clothes I’d managed to shove into a suitcase while fighting off tears the night they had dumped me, my typewriter, and nothing else.
I made an attempt that afternoon to buy furniture. I’d spent the last six weeks gritting my teeth and pretending I was all right—what was one more day? I packed myself into the crowd of sailors on leave on the IRT and went to the Macy’s on 34th, where I ordered myself a mattress to be delivered right away. It was when the salesgirl in the horrible cotton day dress trimmed with an inscrutable amount of lace took me up the wooden escalator to the bedroom sets that I began to unravel. There were so many choices. Metal or wood, classic or modern, painted or stained, four-poster or plain. All I wanted, I realized as a flush came to my cheeks and something began to well up in my chest, was the bed we had been sleeping in. Yet when I found one that was similar—dark walnut, ornamented appropriately with walnut carvings—I hated it, thought it tacky and outdated. What I missed, of course, was not the bed frame but sharing the bed with them. Every wall I’d put up began to come crashing down. I choked out a thank-you to the salesgirl in the hideous dress and fled back uptown.
It was me. That was the part I’d been pushing down. Something about me was the problem. If I were different—more attractive, maybe, or more successful—when MGM had called, the answer would have been “Thanks, but no thanks.”
The realization sent me into a stupor. I spent the next several weeks lying on my mattress, watching the light coming in through the window grow long and fade out, trying to figure out exactly what was wrong about me. Had I been too anxious, too needy? Had I not been born rich enough? Was I too boring? Not boring enough? What person besides Annie Laurence could I have been that would make me lovable for longer than just until a movie studio came along?
Friends came round to see me; I mostly blew them off. My mother came up on the train from Philadelphia to cheer me up; I told her to leave me alone. The producers of my plays wanted to know what I was working on next; I laughed in their faces. Eventually, everyone stopped trying to reach me, which I had thought was what I wanted but turned out to be far worse. I heard from the Cooks exactly one time, when they sent a letter with their new address and telephone number, so I could “update my Christmas card list.” It was a generic greeting they had clearly sent to everyone they knew, and I was furious at myself when I didn’t have it in me to burn it. I barely went outside anymore, barely ate, barely slept. I subsisted off cigarettes and self-pity. And just around the time I was beginning to suspect that I could melt into the floor and not a soul would miss me, that perhaps such a thing would be the best for all parties—as if they could sense that I was broken, weak, desperate—Pacific Pictures called.
“This is Irma Feinstein, secretary to Mr. Devlin Murray, president of Pacific Pictures,” said the woman on the phone. “I saw your play in New York a few months ago. How would you like to move to Hollywood and write for us?”
