SPIDERWEB is the other half of the recent Robert Bloch double from Hard Case Crime. (Yes, I’m reading a lot of HCC books these days, for some reason – like they’re good.) I enjoyed SHOOTING STAR, but SPIDERWEB is a darker, better book, I think.
The narrator is Eddie Haines, a radio announcer from the Midwest who heads to Hollywood in the early Fifties with the intention of being a success as a TV show producer, or an announcer if he can’t sell his pitch for a TV series. Of course, neither of those goals works out, and he’s on the verge of killing himself in despair when he meets Professor Otto Hermann, a “psychological consultant” to the movie community who’s actually a swindler and conman. Hermann recruits Eddie to join his group of henchmen and gives him a new identity as the author of a successful self-help book. Eddie realizes that the professor is a crook and that he’s turning into a crook himself, but everything still goes along fine until the professor decides to target a state senator for blackmail and use the senator’s niece as part of the plot. It just so happens that Eddie has fallen in love with the niece . . .
In noirish fashion, things get worse from there, as Eddie tries to do the right thing but it won’t quite seem to work out. Bloch keeps the story perking right along, but under the smooth prose and snappy patter is a pretty bleak look at Southern California and gullible humanity itself. SPIDERWEB is a fine novel, and Hard Case Crime has done a good thing by bringing it back into print.
3 comments:
Good post. I enjoyed reading SPIDERWEB more than the other title in the double-book from HHC. I see on the Ace Original cover that Bloch is billed as "Author of THE SCARF". I'm guessing he hadn't hit it big yet with PSYCHO.
Ed Lynskey
These look like they're down my alley. I like Bloch, although I've never quite forgiven him for some negative comments he once made about Howard and Conan.
SPIDERWEB predates PSYCHO, that's why it's not mentioned on the cover.
Post a Comment