Frederic Arnold Kummer (1873–1943)

This story reads like John Kendrick Bangs retold by Thorne Smith. A 19-teen-your old spoiled young thing is killed in a car accident and finds herself in a version of Hell very like New York City of the Jimmy Walker era. It even has prohibition, which the devil thought was a clever new torment., though as there are plenty of diabolic bootleggers it is not much of a torment. The young woman finds herself in the rundown district of East Gehenna with all her Irish immigrant ancestors but show more determines to work her way to a better part of Hell. She has a brief geometrical discussion with the Devil himself, who gives her a check and a recommendation to Ben Franklin. Franklin introduces her to his lightening rod and commissions her to interview some of Hell's better-known males for possible entries in a Who's Who in Hell. This gives her an excuse for cosy meetings with fellows from Noah on down. show less

This is a short detective novel. Originally published in 1917, at the dawn of the motion picture industry, it was apparently the first, or one of the first, novels to feature this theme. (And, contrary to what other reviewers may have written or implied, or even what the blurb may say, this is not a book about Hollywood. It takes place in New York City and surroundings on the New Jersey side where, at the time, a significant portion of the film industry was still located, before the general show more exodus to California a few years later.) It takes place in the silent era, and pre-dates the advent of talkies by around ten years. Amusingly for us a hundred years later, the slang word "fan" appears in quotes throughout the book.

The protagonist of the story, Ruth Morton, is a very young film star, darling of the audiences, who is earning some 50,000 dollars per year. Primarily known for her beauty (and that's your cue to roll your eyeballs), Ruth is a big earner. She lives with her mother, naturally, and is very wholesome. After receiving messages that seem to be threats of violence or death, mother hires a private detective, Duvall, to investigate the case.

The characters aren't terribly three-dimensional but they're alright. And Duvall isn't exactly a Sherlock Holmes, but he plods right along and investigates reasonably. If you want the truth, I liked Duvall's wife Grace best of all the characters. And she has a decent role. She's plucky and dives right in to assist, and despite an obvious bit of jealousy, doesn't come unravelled but pretty well keeps her head despite entering the danger zone. As I read along, I could almost see/hear this thing as a typical 1930s noir film possibly starring an actress like Lillian Gish all peroxided up, with maybe Claudet Colbert as Grace. (Although they're sort of different generations.)

One point of interest for me was the essential clarity and relative simplicty of the author's prose, especially for the era. A lot of books of the time tend toward the overly melodramatic and mildly purple, but this writing is pretty straight-forward. Young writers could definitely find worse models for genre prose than this. It still feels rather modern. The book does contain a handful of racial references utilizing "polite" vocabulary typical of the era as well.

The book is in the public domain, so don't get sucked into paying big money for any e-books of it. I read the free Feedbooks edition, apparently produced from the 1917 hard cover edition. I spotted only one or two typos in the whole thing, so if it was originally sucked in via OCR, someone did good proof-reading later. Try here: http://www.feedbooks.com/book/4258/the-film-of-fear ; probably made from http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29498 . show less

Probably far more risqué when it was new, this is still a lot of fun. The most notorious women who ever lived are presumed to be a social club in Hell, and they get together to tell the real stories behind their legends. Eve, Salome, Cleopatra, and more. The Art Deco line drawings are gorgeous.

Fantasy of history's most [in]famous wicked women, who get together in the infernal realms and swap gossip. Among those present are the usual suspects: Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, the queen of Sheba, Lucrezia Borgia, Delilah, Salome, Sappho, Thais, and others. Great quasi cheesecake front cover art of some of title characters in the style of Ray Johnson's art for Dell 414 (Cleopatra's Nights).
"Naughty, but still quite funny." -- from a Chicago Trubune review of the original edition.