An Art Deco Mystery

Book Review

If you like the 1930's (an as a serial Georges Simenon fan, I do), then you might want to savor Amanda Quick's (alias Jayne Ann Krentz) latest venture into Historical Romance: “Close Up,” which just went out for publication on May 5, 2020.

Yet, if you pick up a copy, you will notice that this is not just a contemporary novel adorned simply with old cars and fashion statements. The author has other ideas.

“It's not just the 1930s era that draws me,” Krentz told me. “It's the California version of that time frame. I want to make it clear that I'm doing the mythical 1930s California-a land where people could reinvent themselves and, in the process, invent the future. A land of golden sunlight, sparkling beaches and dramatic shadows.”

For, Krentz is one of those serial writers producing many different venues in the literary vein, having works set in the past, present and even future. In this-another book under the pseudonym Amanda Quick-she offers a fare of independent women, strong-willed men, mysticism, and, of course, murder.

The setting is in Southern California, where Vivian Brazier, a photographer who works grisly crime scenes as a free lancer, dreams of becoming recognized as an artist with her photo skills when she is not on her day job.

Leaving wealth to embark upon a hard-scrabble life?

Seemed kind of far-fetched to me?

Not so to the author.

“I write characters who are at turning points in their lives, characters who are in the process of reinventing themselves. Vivian is a great example of my kind of heroine. She is bold, determined and smart.”

Yet, suddenly Vivian becomes involved in one crime scene too many and is identified by the killer of a woman at the scene as a potential target as well. He attacks her at her home.

Then a second attack comes…only this time, from a different source, as her first assailant has been captured!

So the tale begins with a mystery.

When a man shows up at Vivian's door and offers to help protect her from her attackers, a new complexion is cast on the case. This one, who introduces himself as Nick Sundridge, is a private detective. And after checking him out with her police sources, Vivian puts herself in his hand for protection.

Nick and her become closer, and a mutual attraction develops.

But love cannot blossom until a significant amount of baggage on both sides is dropped first.

For Nick is a complex man, haunted by dreams of precognition of the future-his future and that of the people he is hired as a private detective to interact with.

Yet, Krentz writes him that way. I wondered why and she supplied the answer: “I have always loved working with the psychic vibe because it gives depth to the characters and it allows for some really cool plot twists.”

Add to that the psychic 'vibe' the fact that Sundridge's last marriage didn't end well and he still suffers from the crash and burn that it was, you have even more complexity.

A cursory look at Wikipedia's entry for the author, Jayne Ann Krentz, exemplifies the calling she feels when her novels evolve.

Her outlook is, accordingly in her own words: “Popular fiction encapsulates and reinforces many of our most fundamental cultural values. Romance is among the most enduring because it addresses the values of family and human emotional bonds.'

In other words, she favors multiple story lines…not a bad way to entice readership and a notable reason why she is a New York Times favorite romance writer.

As Amanda Quick, Krentz includes historical settings that are both interesting and a mix of characters. She intentionally decided that she would not write of Los Angeles. That is because as it is a town, as she says it is, “bought and paid for by Hollywood and gangsters.”

Instead, she moves her historical novels to the fictional setting of Burning Cove in this book as well as other stories in her Amanda Quick umbrella of tales. Here, the rich and notorious mix, along with regular townies, making an interesting blend of characters and motivations, so that you may find yourself in conversation with a movie star at one moment, and then with an underworld figure in the next breath.

This stirred my interest, so I asked her about it.

She responded, “What I love about working with various settings-I write three of them: historicals, contemporaries and futuristics-is that each fictional landscape allows for lots of variations in the plots. As an author I find it refreshing to move from one world to the other.

The 1930s is particularly exciting because there is so much fascinating plot material: Great cloths! Robots!

Enigma machines! Asylums! Gangsters! The whole noir vibe!”

It is fascinating that Quick even finds the time in “Close Up” to contrast and compare the art of pictorialism and modernism in photography at the time in question, lending even more reality to the underlying theme of the protagonist's struggle to find meaning to her life, as well as to save it from being snuffed out.

Indeed, what Vivian finds with her artistic eye in one photograph is what begins the onslaught of events and the attempts on her life. It is an irony that is not lost on the reader.

In her interview on The Poison Pen Workshop recently, Krentz (ala. Quick) speaks of her research and that it serves several uses: Namely, that it adds levels of interest to the story and her characters, so that she does not have to spend time on dry and dusty, or even intricate police procedures that are off-putting to readers and does not lead to outcomes.

It is the same type of thread that Simenon followed in his books. He admitted in one semi-biographical book that if the crimes he wrote of were accurate-instead of the one hundred to one-fifty pages that he usually put out for his popular Maigret series were realistic, it would take months…maybe even years for those stories to be told and would be impossible to pen.

Having said that, Quick does do her historical homework.

There is a tendency, however, for her descriptions of people to be rather flat, and indeed, repetitive. Word choice is lacking as well and there should be only so many scenes in which a character tosses her head just so, and the male love interest gives downcast glances, or that villains engage in one-dimensional hate rants.

However, as devil's advocate, it should be said that one does not write in the huge volume that Krentz does without suffering somewhat from such things.

But this has been said of the greatest authors as well. It is, as they say, the price of fame.

She leaves our interview with this final thought: “I always assume that if people enjoy my stories and my characters it is probably because we share a lot of core values and a sense of humor.”

It seems that they do.