“It is 1953 New York and Jack Beaumont is working as a financial planner to a rich woman named Libby. She has a thing for Jack and wants to marry him, but he doesn’t share her affection. Then there’s Susan Bright, who’s going out with the charming but shady Rodolfo. Susan stands to inherit a sizable amount of money and Jack is secretly in love with her.But when word arrives that someone is trying to poison Susan’s long-lost uncle, she and Jack (and Woolf!) head for Havana, the better to rescue Uncle James, apprehend the bad guys and—hey, why not?—hit a few casinos on the side.”
A mostly fun book, with a storyline that tends to be silly and a bit predictable in places and more than a bit over the top, but I found it entertaining. The romance angle works much better than the mystery. Apparently, McDowell was contracted to write 10 Jack and Susan books, one for each decade of the last century. But after doing three of them - first for 1953, then 1913 and 1933 - the author bowed out of his contract for whatever reason.
Stephen King once called Michael McDowell "the finest writer of paperback originals in America today". However, some know him for his best-known work, which was the screenplay for the Tim Burton film Beetlejuice. McDowell then went on to collaborate with Tom Holland on adapting the Richard Bachman (AKA Stephen King) novel Thinner. But those of a certain age – young teens of the 1980s, maybe- he is probably arguably best known for his novels of Southern Gothic horror, like The Amulet (1979) Cold Moon Over Babylon (1980), Gilded Needles (1980), The Elementals (1981), Katie (1982), The Blackwater saga (1983), and Toplin (1985). However, he also collaborated with his close friend Dennis Schuetz in writing four mysteries starring Daniel Valentine and Clarisse Lovelace: Vermillion (1980), Cobalt (1982), Slate (1984), and Canary (1986). Those four novels were published under the pseudonym Nathan Aldyne, though. Also during that same period, they released two psychological thrillers, Blood Rubies (1982) and Wicked Stepmother (1983) under the pseudonym Axel Young. Both books were over-the-top parodies of Sidney Sheldon-type suspense novels.
Sadly, McDowell was diagnosed with AIDS in 1994. After that, he went to teach screenwriting at Boston University and Tufts University while continuing to write commissioned screenplays. His final projects he was working at the time of his death in 1999 at the age of 49, was a sequel to Beetlejuice and what would be his final, unfinished novel, Candles Burning. That book would be eventually completed by novelist Tabitha King and released in 2006.
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