Get Hold Of Movie (Stanley Hastings #10) Imagined By Parnell Hall Presented As Booklet

Stanley Hastings finally has his chance to hit The Big Time as a screenwriter, Sidney Garfellow, a documentary director people have actually heard of, has hired him to write the screenplay for his first 'regular' movie.
Stanley dreams of leaving his lessthanrewarding career as an investigator for a personal injury lawyer for the Silver Screen.
What stands in the way of this Well, Sidney Garfellow, who keeps changing his mind about what he wants, forcing Stanley to rewrite and rewrite again.
Then there's the film's star, who ignores Stanley's golden prose in favor of more 'natural' lines he's written himself.
Oh, and there's people getting killed on the set, Just a little problem there, . .

Hall draws heavily on his own experiences when writing Stanley Hastings: he has worked on the stage, in films, and, at one time, as a detective himself.
He writes hilarious songs, often about the foibles of being an author, It is no surprise that he has some experience with screenwriting himself: he wrote the screenplay for C.
H. U. D. At least Stanley gets to write a movie with "four hot babes" in it,

I've read several of the Hastings novels, and I always enjoy the verbal humor in them.
This novel is no exception, Stanley gives us his unvarnished and aggrieved opinions of the director, the actor, and Murty the sound man.
He exchanges marvelous barbs with his boss, who visits the set, and Sergeant McAuliff, a series regular who is hired as a consultant.
After the deaths begin, Detective Clark is brought in to investigate, Stanley doesn't like Clark: in a previous novel, Stanley was his prime suspect, The cops are smart, especially Clark, who is far from the closedminded nabob mystery authors so often employ.
The plot is good, and there's enough twists to keep the reader guessing,

The drawback: in some scenes, Stanley and the police detectives spend a lot of time talking about who was where at what times.
I tend to speedbump over those sections, but you might want to take the time to read it: the solution just might be hiding in there.
You had to know if Stanley wrote a movie, someone would turn up murdered on the set, didn't you I greatly enjoyed this book, not the least because it reminded me of Parnell Hall's discussion of his

own experience with writing a film, which was very similar to what Stanley dealt with only without the dead bodies.
It was nice to see Sergeant Clark again he might not be Stanley's favorite police officer but I like him, and I like reading about his interactions with both Stanley and Sergeant MacAulluiff.
toread A very pedestrian PI novel with all the clichés associated with this genre, Stanley Hastings is an investigator for a lawyer about to hit the bigtime when hired to write a screenplay but various murders on set intervene and it meanders to a mundane conclusion largely through a continuing dialogue between Hastings and a stereotypical dogmatic cop who thoroughly dislikes him.
I really dont know why I persevered with this, Stanley Hastings, private detective, is living a dream, He is finally going to see his screenplay made into a movie, His name will be on the screen when the credits roll, He has made it! Or has he

Starting with finding a dead body in the building the crew will use to shoot in, is just one of the downward steps this dream takes.
Accidents, or are they accidents, more deaths and a steady stream of script rewrites he is constantly given are just more roadblocks to getting the movie in the can.
It's enough trying to shoot around Manhattan without all these other distractions,

I've enjoyed Hall's Puzzle Lady mysteries and this doesn't let me down, I will keep an eye out for more of Stanley Hastings' doings When Manhattan private eye and parttime actor Stanley Hastings gets an offer to have his screenplay produced, he thinks he's finally hit it big.
But when corpses keep turning up, he sees he will have to rewrite the ending, to catch the killer.
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