Blues in the Dark

August 26, 2019
At the start of this tepid thriller from Benson (In the Hush of the Night), independent movie producer Karissa Glover, who is mixed-race, rents a house in L.A.’s West Adams Heights (a neighborhood favored by black celebrities such as Hattie McDaniel decades ago) that once belonged to white actress Blair Kendrick, who was killed in a supposedly mob-related hit in 1949. The place inspires Karissa to make a film about Blair’s life, focusing on her romance with black jazz musician Hank Marley and the unwanted attention paid to her by the head of Ultimate Pictures. Karissa’s film depicts the studio’s heavies trying to break up Blair and Hank’s relationship. Mean-while, modern execs use similar tactics to try to stop Karissa from making her film. Benson deserves credit for portraying the painful consequences of racism both then and now, but he does so by repeatedly using information dumps that feel intrusive rather than organic. Predictable twists and stereotypical villains, including Italian mobsters and a Jewish movie exec, don’t help. The whole comes across like a B movie.

Starred review from August 1, 2019
Indie-movie producer Karissa Glover is looking for an idea for her next project, and she finds it in an old house she has just rented in the West Adams Heights section of L.A., where Black stars of the forties?including Hattie McDaniel?once lived. It turns out that the house was formerly owned by film-noir femme fatale Blair Kendrick. Curiously, no one has lived in the house since Kendrick disappeared in the late forties, presumed murdered after apparently witnessing the Mob killing of Eldon Hirsch, head of Ultimate Pictures. Why not make a modern noir based on Kendrick's life and death? Lots of reasons, Karissa discovers: the actress' clandestine and taboo affair with a Black jazz pianist has been hidden for decades, along with other aspects of Blair's life, and the current owners of the studio, descendants of Hirsch, don't want the bad press that would come with opening their own Pandora's box. Benson, author of several James Bond pastiches authorized by Ian Fleming's estate, cleverly juxtaposes the present-day action, as Karissa digs for the story, against the finished film script, gradually revealing the multiple surprises in the story of Blair Kendrick. A couple of those surprises are telegraphed, but no matter: Benson has some doozies up his sleeve for the finale. This lovingly and sharply evoked homage to the glory days of film noir works on every level: as a gripping thriller, as an insightful look at racism in Hollywood, and as a perfect entr�e into the ever-fascinating world of moviemaking.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)