CAST THE FIRST STONE

Fiction

Like a vulture on carrion

CAST THE FIRST STONE

An Ellie Stone Mystery

By James W. Ziskin

290 pp. Seventh Street Books

Reviewed by Eric Petersen

Mystery writer James W. Ziskin is back with the fifth entry (the third book, Stone Cold Dead, is also reviewed on this site) in his popular mystery series set in an unusual time and place for a mystery – upstate New York in the early 1960s – and featuring an unusual heroine. Unusual for her time, that is.

At a time when career opportunities for most young women were limited by society to housewife, teacher, or secretary, Eleonora “Ellie” Stone works as an investigative reporter for the New Holland Republic, her hometown newspaper. But then, Ellie Stone isn’t like most young women.

In her mid-twenties, she’s a tough-talking, hard-drinking dame with brains, guts, and wit, all of which she uses to get her story – and solve bizarre and brutal murders while she’s at it. She takes no crap from men.

Artie Short, the owner and senior editor of the New Holland Republic, hates the idea of women in the workplace and prefers that Ellie stick to fluff pieces like coverage of the high-school basketball team. This time, however, he sends her on a business trip to Los Angeles.

There she’s supposed to interview a young actor named Tony Eberle who hails from Ellie’s New Holland hometown and just landed a plum role in a major motion picture that could be his first step on the road to stardom. It’s another “hometown boy makes good” story.

When she arrives at the studio, Ellie finds chaos on the set. One of the actors never bothered showing up for work and nobody knows where he is. His name? Tony Eberle. The furious director fires him and vows that Tony will never work for him again.

Something is very wrong. Tony would never torpedo his career like this. Ellie Stone decides to stick around and see what she can find out. She soon learns that Bertram Wallis, the producer of the film, personally chose to cast Tony. Wallis, an Englishman, is a well-known producer with a notorious reputation.

Ellie meets the curious cast of real-life characters who knew Tony Eberle, including studio fixer Dorothy Fetterman; eccentric, seemingly lesbian actress Evelyn Maynard; and Mickey Harper, Tony’s roommate and fellow actor.

She soon teams up with fellow journalist Gene Duerson (also an aspiring screenwriter) and photographer Andy Blaine to investigate Tony’s disappearance, which takes a sinister turn when Bertram Wallis is found dead.

Ellie learns that Wallis was thrown over the balcony of his hilltop mansion. A devastating clue was discovered in his pocket – a piece of paper with Tony Eberle’s phone number on it. Now Ellie’s hometown hero is the prime suspect in a murder.

As she digs deeper, Ellie Stone is drawn into a dark world she never knew existed. Tough as she is, her small town naivety shows when she learns that Wallis kept a casting couch where both beautiful young women and handsome young men sold their bodies to him for a shot at stardom.

Just about everyone in Hollywood knew that Wallis was a first-class pervert, amateur pornographer, and panderer who passed around young male and female starlets to his friends like candy and hosted orgies at his mansion where he photographed and filmed the goings-on.

Which is why studio fixer Dorothy Fetterman is desperate to recover a set of photographs that were stolen from Wallis – photographs that could expose the true sexuality of certain actors and ruin their careers.

Refusing to believe that Tony Eberle killed Bertram Wallis, Ellie determines to find Tony and solve the murder. But as she continues her investigation, she doesn’t know what to believe in a town that thrives on illusions and lies. And she’s about to have her own illusions shattered.

Mickey Harper, Tony’s roommate, is also his childhood friend from New Holland – and a tormented, closeted homosexual whose shield of lies has finally crumbled. For the first time, Ellie realizes what it’s like to be a gay man in America at a time when being gay was a crime punishable by imprisonment.

A time when gay people lived in fear of being outed, costing them their jobs, families, and friends. A time when gay men were savagely beaten for fun and blackmailed by sadistic homophobic cops who were no doubt repressed, self-loathing homosexuals themselves.

A time when young gay men, unable to simply be who they are, ended up in the clutches of sexual predators like Bertram Wallis, who abused, degraded, and exploited them for his own twisted pleasure.

As she presses on in her search for Tony Eberle, Ellie’s encounters with Hollywood’s gay underground lead her to develop a new understanding of gay people and gain some peace of mind. She always suspected that her late, beloved brother Elijah had been homosexual, something she could have never accepted – until now.

But can she solve the murder of Bertram Wallis before the virulently homophobic detective working the case descends on Tony like a vulture on carrion?

Cast The First Stone is the best Ellie Stone mystery yet – a haunting, harrowing, thought-provoking, unforgettable mystery that author James W. Ziskin dedicates to “all those who have suffered fear, humiliation, and violence for the crime of being themselves.” Highly recommended!

Eric Petersen is an administrator and blogmaster for the Internet Writing Workshop, an international, online writer’s group run out of Penn State University. You can reach him by e-mail at EricPetersen1970@hotmail.com