A Murder in Hollywood by Michael Crichton writing as John Lange
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’m a big Crichton fan and it was no surprise to me that I loved this book. The primary appeal was actually not the mystery, although that was good, but all the inside detail about the movie business and the shooting on location in particular. The title is an odd choice since all the action takes place near Tucson, Arizona where a western is being filmed. The writer is found dead. He was a nasty fellow and quite a few people have motive to kill him, but was it murder or an accident? The local authorities have tentatively ruled it an accident.
The studio head brings in Perkins, the top insurance investigator to serve as private eye. He finds a lot of things to be suspicious. The detective work is superb (Sherlock Holmes-like). The biggest flaw in the book for me is that it is too short and too fast a read.The author originally wrote this under the name of John Lange, a name he used before using his real name and publishing The Andromeda Strain. This confused me at first because this book supposedly was never published in those early days, only in 2026. But Wikipedia tells me this was written in 1973, four years after The Andromeda Strain and two years after that was filmed, so I presume he got his scoop from being involved in that filming. I don’t know why he was still writing under the name Lange by that point.