| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

The Crimson in the Purple

Page history last edited by PBworks 18 years ago

Roth, Holly - The Crimson in the Purple

 

Bill Farland is a would-be PI who prefers writing plays. Catherine Hadden is the shy, housekeeping half-sister to a theatrical family. She thinks someone is trying to kill her, but when the blow falls - after 92 pages, or about 40 too many - it is on the wicked but fascinating film-star Terratta Hadden. ("Archons of Athens, what a name!" as Dr Fell might have said.)

 

The hoary old room-swap theme is dragged out - was Terratta killed by mistake for Catherine? Bill Farland bumbles around for a while, but it is hopelessly out of his depth: he exists, in fact, merely to observe the family pre-murder, provide a love interest, and make a spectacular rescue in the last chapter. The real detection, such as it is, is done by NYPD Captain Rhine, whose main achievement is to spot that when one nasty person is murdered it is probably another nasty person who did it.

 

There is lots of Freudian psychology here, but done in a perfunctory way: Roth seems to have realised that Freud can be used to explain anything and is obviously uncomfortable with this degree of freedom. The discussions of morality are also curiously old-fashioned; the fact that a movie star was sleeping with someone he wasn't married to hardly seems important enough to generate all the angst that it does, while the pinnacle of Terratta's wickedness is that she is involved in a menage with two bisexual men. This allows Roth's homophobia to surface: this whole arrangement, we learn, is pervasively immoral, though why this should be so is unexplained. Perhaps this is why Terratta gets so little sympathy from the writer; much less so than the murderer, who is merely committing ordinary adultery - oh, and chopping people up with a specially sharpened knife.

 

Overly wordy and unconvincing, with an out-of-the-hat finale. Not a success.

 

Jon.

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.