Edna Ferber, detective? In the recently released Lone Star by Ed Ifkovic, Ferber investigates the murder of a young woman who was an “extra” in the film Giant, based on her blockbuster novel, which is in its final days of production in 1955. As the Kirkus review points out, “Nobody knows better than the author of Show Boat, Cimarronm So Big and Dinner at Eight that everyone has a skeleton in his closet.”
James Dean is the prime suspect. There are rumors that he fathered the murdered woman’s child and that she was blackmailing him about this and other indiscretions, and he was seen leaving her apartment just before her body was found.
With actress Mercedes McCambridge playing Watson to her Holmes, the 70-year-old Ferber takes a walk on the wild side when she delves into the troubled lives of the teenage heartthrob Dean and his disparate friends.
Actually, the Publishers Weekly review thought of her as a Christie-style detective, calling her “an equally shrewd but tarter version of Miss Marple.”
James Dean fans – and any readers looking for something slightly offbeat – should also try Robert Eversz's fast-moving 2005 mystery novel Digging James Dean .
Ex-con Mary Alice Baker (now calling herself Nina Zero) is a Hollywood tabloid photographer for the Scandal Times. She is sent to Fairmount, Indiana, where thieves have broken into James Dean's grave and stolen some of his bones. She comes to find out that this is not an isolated incident and that there is a grave-robbing cult selling relics from old movie stars to naïve youths who aspire to stardom.
With her beloved toothless Rottweiler in tow, the prominently pierced Nina makes for an intrepid and compassionate punk protagonist and Publishers Weekly called her “a character well worth meeting again.”
James Dean, James Dean,
You were too fast to live, too young to die, bye-bye!
