The Prince of Beverly Hills

I finished this Stuart Woods novel tonight, and after not liking the last few books of his that I'd read, it was a pleasant surprise, an enjoyable story set for the most part in Hollywood in 1939. Woods captures that era fairly well without going overboard on period details and without any blatant anachronisms. The plot is a little thin -- movie studio troubleshooter has a series of run-ins with a mobster who works for Bugsy Siegel -- but the characters are likable (except for the villains, who are appropriately despicable), and the pace seldom slows down. Without giving away any plot details, it's pretty obvious this book is intended to be a one-shot, which is kind of a shame because the hero would make a good series character for Woods . . . as if he needed another series character, since he already has three on-going ones.

I wrote 22 pages today, which surprised me a little because I spent part of the day running errands. Sometimes it goes like that, though. In my running around, I stopped at Half Price Books, and one of the things I picked up was a DVD of a Steve Reeves movie I'd never heard of, THE WHITE WARRIOR. This is some sort of Cossack movie from 1959, based on a novel by Leo Tolstoy. I'm not expecting much from it, but it was only a buck. I liked the Hercules movies starring Reeves when I was a kid and also liked MORGAN THE PIRATE, which starred Reeves as Henry Morgan. I haven't watched any of them in forty years, so I don't know how well they would hold up if I saw them now. Speaking of MORGAN THE PIRATE, I own the novelization of that movie, published by Dell and written by the old pulp author Robert Carse. I've never read it, but I might have to dig it out and do so.