With Halloween upon us, you might want to indulge in some macabre fun.
Joe Barone’s first mystery novel, The Body in the Record Room, takes place in a state mental hospital in 1954, when a patient who calls himself Roy Rogers finds a dead body in the hospital records room.
“Roy” – along with his friend Harry and Harry’s dog Bullet – investigates and finds out that the present murder may be linked to a gruesome crime that occurred twenty years earlier, when a mutilated corpse was found lying on the altar of a Catholic Church. As he perseveres, he finds within himself the courage and moral strength of his hero, the real Roy Rogers.
The author was raised on the grounds of a Missouri mental hospital, where his father, a medical doctor, was the long-time superintendent. Barone has served as an ordained minister for 25 years. An unusual credential for a mystery author!
Peggy Webb’s Elvis and the Dearly Departed, features mortuary hairdresser Callie Valentine Jones – who “fixes up the hairdos of the dead.”
When the corpse of a prominent physician goes missing, Peggy takes off in hot pursuit of the recently embalmed, last sighted in Vegas. She is assisted in her investigation by “Elvis,” a basset hound who believes he is the reincarnation of the King of Rock 'n' Roll – and who really knows how to sniff out a killer.
Ain't nothin' but a hound dog …
Both of these books put me in mind of Bubba Ho-tep, a novella by mystery writer Joe R. Lansdale, which was adapted as a 2002 horror/black comedy film starring Bruce Campbell as a decrepit Elvis Presley – or a man who thinks he is Elvis Presley! – now a resident in a nursing home.
The film also stars Ossie Davis as Jack, who claims to be John F. Kennedy – he says he was patched up after the assassination in Dallas, dyed black, and abandoned by Lyndon Johnson.
Eventually, Elvis and Jack face off against a re-animated ancient Egyptian mummy stolen during a museum tour and then lost when the bus being driven by the thieves veered off the road and into a river near the nursing home.
The mummy takes on the garb of a cowboy and is dubbed Bubba Ho-tep by Elvis who is given a telepathic flashback of the mummy's life and death when he looks into its eyes following the murder of an elderly woman resident of the home.
Très bizarre – trick or treat!
