Blog Posts by David

"MM--Personal"
by Lois Banner
photographs by Mark Anderson
Abrams, 336 pp., $35 (oversize)
Reviewed by David Marshall James

Imagine rifling through someone's drawers-- what the contents would bespeak of the person to whom they belonged.

Imagine two file cabinets that belonged to Marilyn Monroe, which have acquired a Byzantine history since they were removed from her Brentwood home during the days following her death on August 4, 1962.

BTW: Expect to read, see, and hear more of MM as the 50th anniversary of that date approaches in 2012.

Marilyn was a keeper.

She kept receipts for clothing, beauty products, drugstore items and prescriptions, and for many other goods and services that she could legitimately deduct from her income taxes.

She also kept correspondence.

MM saved carbon copies of letters that she sent. She selected fan letters (of the 20,000 she received per week at the height of her fame) that were special to her (particularly some from servicemen she met and

"Pumped for Murder" by Elaine Viets
Obsidian, 292 pp., $23.95
Reviewed by David Marshall James

This tenth "Dead-End Job Mystery" proves that the series is ripening nicely with age, most unlike the boxed wine that the protagonist's landlady, Margery, imbibes during her "sunset salutes" at the Coronado Apartments in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Part of the reason for the series' ongoing likability is that author Elaine Viets allows progress in her protagonist's, Helen Hawthorne's, life.

Helen has overcome being an embittered divorcee on the lam from her ex-scuzzband in St. Louis. He wound up with a ridiculous judgment for half of all Helen's future earnings, even though he was the one who was blatantly unfaithful.

Determined to deprive him of cent-one, Helen went AWOL on her life and high-paying position in St. Louis, driving off into the sunset, and ultimately landing at the "sunset salutes" at the Coronado.

As the series has progressed, Helen has dabbled in an array of dead-end

"Slugfest" by Rosemary Harris
Minotaur, 275 pp., $24.99
Reviewed by David Marshall James

You can take the girl out of the city, butcha can't take the city out of the girl.

Expatriate (from Brooklyn to the Connecticut burbs, that is) professional gardener Paula Holliday returns to NYC (where she used to work in video production) in order to push a Connecticut-burb neighbor's outdoor sculptures at the Big Apple Flower Show, in this fourth "Dirty Business" mystery by Rosemary Harris.

The timing couldn't be better for Paula, as her BBC (Best Bud in the City), Lucy Cavanaugh, is spa-ing things up SOB (South of the Border) in hopes of shedding seven pesky pounds, so Paula can encamp in Lucy's walk-up studio apartment.

In addition to manning (womaning?) the sculpture booth along with dozens of other exhibitors at the show, Paula aspires to a pleasant interlude in the city-- a little shopping at the Korean grocer's here, a slice of pizza at the

"Designs on Film: A Century of Hollywood Art Direction"
by Cathy Whitlock
HarperCollins (!t), 384 pp., $75
Reviewed by David Marshall James


This is the sort of book in which I used to immerse myself during study halls and library periods in junior-high and high school.

To be sure, it would make a nice addition to your coffee table, or home library. Guests can lose themselves in these pages, and children can obtain a fine visual overview of the history of American cinema.

Indeed, the accent is placed on the visual in the design of this volume, as well it should be, taking the reader from a time when full-scale sets for such lavish silent-era productions as "Robin Hood," "The Thief of Baghdad," and the original "Ben-Hur" were constructed over multiple city blocks, to today's computer-generated images, filling in the "green screen" backgrounds against which actors are filmed.

The photographs are well chosen from a cross-section of movie genres, and author Cathy Whitlock clearly

"The Cat, the Lady, and the Liar"
by Leann Sweeney
Obsidian, 257 pp., $6.99 (paperback original)
Reviewed by David Marshall James


Jillian Hart and her three kitty cohorts have become as comfy-cozy as one of the "cat quilts" that Jillian designs and creates to order.

Her purposefully de-stressed life as a 43-year-old widow transplanted from Houston to a lakeside home in (fictitious) Mercy, South Carolina, does attract the distressed, however, or those simply in quest of calm in a harried world.

Even her once-obstreperous stepdaughter, Kara, has removed herself to Mercy after staff downsizing at the metro paper where she worked as a reporter.

Kara-- who has been assisting Jillian's honey, Tom Stewart, with his security-system-installation business-- is poised to take over the town newspaper, and the revivification of her reportage is woven into the plot, along with a sudden romance.

Jillian is just doing a favor for a local, independent, animal-rescue operation at which she has

"Dead by Midnight" by Carolyn Hart
William Morrow, 282 pp., $24.99
Reviewed by David Marshall James

Annie Darling-- proprietor of Death on Demand mystery bookstore on the boardwalk at Broward's Rock, South Carolina (an island coastal resort)-- does a good bit of business off "hammock reading."

This twenty-first entry in Carolyn Hart's "Death on Demand" mystery series makes for good hammock reading.

That is, of course, after you've finished the new biography of Millard Fillmore (for real).

The action here centers on a three-partner law firm that's been suffering mightily since the senior partner (a widower with three young-adult children) succumbed to the wiles of his flashy, arriviste, new female partner, making her a partner in every sense of the word.

It's "wicked stepmother" time not just for the kids, but for the third partner as well as the firm's receptionist, both of whom have fallen out of favor with the newly crowned queen.

You just

"A Gentleman of Fortune" by Anna Dean
Minotaur/Thomas Dunne, 335 pp., $24.99
Reviewed by David Marshall James

If Jane Austen had turned her hand to sleuthing instead of writing, then she might have become rather similar to Miss Dido Kent.

Dido, aged thirty-five in 1806 England, is definitely a woman of her own mind. Unwilling to dissemble or to act under what she considers "false pretence" in order to situate herself securely in a marriage, she finds herself at the precipitous edge of security that Austen knew all too well-- as did other gentrified women of her era-- and that she attempted to escape via a career as a successful novelist.

The peripatetic Dido moves from one household to another, living off the grace and favor of relations and friends.

To be sure, she is seldom idle, either serving as companion, caretaker, or even nurse to someone in need.

However, the exeedingly warm and exultantly flowering summertime of this second Dido Kent mystery by English novelist Anna

"Antiques Knock-Off" by Barbara Allan
Kensington, 228 pp., $22
Reviewed by David Marshall James

Brandy Borne is infanticipating, as Walter Winchell used to phrase it, although the baby isn't hers.

Rather, she's in full surrogate mode for best friends Tina and Kevin, which, in the Best Friends Department, ranks somewhere between giving bone marrow and donating a kidney.

Unconventional pregnancies figure into Brandy's personal history, as well as into the plot of this fifth, bountifully amusing Trash 'n' Treasures mystery.

You would think that a city named Serenity (fictitious, on the Mississippi River)-- filled with tourist-attracting Victorian edifices, antiques shoppes (as opposed to plain old "shops"), and bistros-- would be, well, filled with some serenity as well.

Not with Brandy's mother, Vivian, knocking about. And Brandy, too, for that matter.

They're slightly nuts, and on the meds to prove it. However, Vivian's basket of pecans (or peanuts, or walnuts, or Brazil nuts,