Carter Brown’s The Wind-Up Doll

The Wind-Up Doll, published in 1964, is the sixth of Carter Brown’s Rick Holman mysteries.

Australian author Alan Geoffrey Yates (1923-1985) wrote more than two hundred novels and seventy-five novellas using the pseudonym Carter Brown. His books sold well over a hundred million copies. One of his many series characters is Hollywood troubleshooter/private eye Rick Holman. The studios, and the stars, employ Rick whenever they need a very very discreet private eye to get a star out of an awkward spot and avoid scandal.

Toni Astor is a rising movie star. She is twenty-one years old but really she’s twenty-one going on twelve. She was adopted by her aunt Naomi who steered her on the road to stardom. Toni is about to get married for the second time, to the latest pop singer sensation Larry Gold. Her manager has hired Rick to do some digging into the singer’s background. He just wants to make sure Toni doesn’t make a second disastrous marriage.

Rick gets to meet Toni’s cousin Lisa. The two cousins hate each other.

There have been some shady goings-on regarding the careers of both Toni Astor and Larry Gold. Both the film and music businesses are awash with crooked producers, managers, financiers and talent agencies and the careers of both Toni and Larry are complicated webs of dubious deals. And there are complicated webs of family jealousies and family hatreds.

And then the accident happens. A fatal accident. Seventy-foot falls into empty swimming pools usually are fatal.

The police are satisfied that it was an accident. Rick is not so easily satisfied. There are so many potential financial and personal motivations that might be temptations for murder. The problem is trying to make sense of those webs of personal and financial entanglements.

Toni is a nice enough girl but she’s immature and unstable and she knows how to make use of her considerable sexual allure. She certainly qualifies as a dangerous dame who should not be trusted too far. Her cousin Lisa and her mother Naomi seem just as dangerous and just as unpredictable.

Most of those involved in managing Toni’s career are either borderline gangsters or people who are accustomed to sailing very close to the wind when it comes to the law.

As you would expect in a Carter Brown novel there’s quite a bit of sleaze. There’s glamour as well and Brown knows that sleaze and glamour is always an irresistible cocktail.

The plot is nicely twisty.

And as you expect in a Carter Brown story the plot motors along at a brisk pace and there’s some fine hardboiled dialogue.

The Wind-Up Doll might not be great literature but it is great pulp crime fiction and it’s highly recommended. And the Signet paperback edition has a great Robert McGinnis cover.

I enjoy all of Carter Brown’s stuff but the Rick Holman books are rapidly becoming my favourites. Sex, scandal and murder in Hollywood always works for me. I’ve also reviewed one of the later books in this series, Where Did Charity Go?