Curtains of Blood
by Robert J. Randisi
Liesure 2002, pb, 351pp, $5.99
ISBN: 0 – 8439 – 5068 – 4
This is a historical mystery / horror romp featuring Bram Stoker involved with Jack the Ripper as research for what will become the novel Dracula. Historical bit parts and cameos include Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes; Oscar Wilde, wit and playwright; Henry Irving, grand actor of the Lyceum Theater, managed by Mr. Stoker; Inspector Swanson and Commissioner Anderson of Scotland Yard; Ellen Terry the actress; and others, including ex Prime Minister Gladstone.
It’s a quick, easy read of little depth, fun if you’ve got a bad head cold or flu and an impatience with television. It’s padded in Liesure’s typical fashion — big type & margins, blank pages between chapters, et cetera — but as a diversion goes it’s smooth and holds one’s attention well enough.
Good Lite beer, in short — de-alcoholized.
As a psychological thriller it fails to plumb any depths or offer any answers. Stoker supposedly wants insight into the dark side of man but when he gets several chances to ask the Ripper what makes him tick, he becomes passive and mute.
As a suspense thriller it fails to move much beyond the mildly atmospheric. We learn there was a Whitechapel street, in Whitechapel, and that the cobbles were washed only when it rained. Dickensian this ain’t. Shadows and fog, sure, but no sense of threat, no eerie danger at the edges is ever suggested.
As a realistic thriller its dialogue rings untrue. Hearing Irishman Stoker speak with Scotsman Doyle amidst Cockney Londoners in accents straight out of Chicago tough-guy movies is a bit disconcerting. Our tour of the Yorkshire accent at the end of the book is equally cursory.
Then again, Ah-nold made it in talkies, didn’t he?
As well-researched historical thriller it displays a tin ear for detail, too. At one point Stoker drinks his pint, we are told, even though it has warmed by then. Well, Mr. Randisi, who ever you are, (and that it’s a pen name is hinted by the writer’s picture, in which his face is hidden by a slouch hat and his body hidden by a thick leather coat), they drink ’em warm over there, and did back then too.
Having written such tongue-in-cheek nonsense myself by having a precocious, ice-cold ten year old Manfred von Richtofen, the Red Baron, as the Ripper, I can’t really throw stones. In my defense I will say I had the restraint to write a short story rather than a potboiler novel, but then, I wasn’t under contract, either.
Curtains of Blood isn’t quite a juvenile, nor entirely an adult diversion. It does the job of getting one through a flat afternoon, though, and that’s good enough. Kind of like a Vincent Price movie you never heard of before.
You might get a bigger kick out of a six pack of decent beer, though. It’s a mood thing.
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One can hardly expect to be wholly free of mental tension.
–H. P. Lovecraft
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