‘The Body on the Living Room Floor’ by Mel Anastasiou

The Top Floor

From Pulp Literature Issue 50, find the opening to Part 4 of Mel Anastasiou‘s The Extra Takes the Castle in ‘The Body on the Living Room Floor’. Uncover an excerpt below and be sure to read this section in full in Issue 50, Spring 2026, available for purchase now!

Here is where we last left our hero, Frankie Ray …

Frankie Ray, blackballed from Monument Studios, has taken employment as a chambermaid in a Hollywood hotel. Here, among the famous guests and hopeful fellow extras, she strives to return to work in the movies. However, her career problems are eclipsed when the great director GX Forrest is discovered dead on his living room floor. Frankie and Connie are first on the scene.

The Extra Takes the Castle, Part 4:
The Body on the Living Room Floor

by Mel Anastasiou

The last time Frankie Ray was confronted with the corpse of a Hollywood legend, she hadn’t immediately understood that she was in the presence of a murder victim. But this morning, deliberate violence was implicit in the knife in GX Forrest’s chest.

The elderly movie director lay spread out before them on his own living room floor, in his own blood, with his eyes wide open. Frankie leaned down to close his eyes, and Gillian Forrest, his wife — his widow — let out a noisy breath. Connie put her arm around the old woman’s shoulders, and afternoon light from the window drew halos above their heads: silver and copper, old and young.

“I’ll call the police,” Frankie said. “May I use your telephone?”

Gillian nodded, and the movement sent a tear down her cheek.

Connie said, “I saw it when we came in, down the hallway by the kitchen.”

Frankie found the phone and spoke to the operator. “I need to report a death. A murder, I mean. At the Castello Hotel, Suite 5A. Please tell the police.”

“Stay on the line, miss,” the operator told her. But the phone seemed to weigh about a hundred pounds, and Frankie replaced the handset.

She returned to the living room to wait on the sofa beside Gillian and Connie. The world turned, and the three women sat in silence, or what passed for it this close to Sunset Boulevard. Faintly, and then with increasing volume, sirens sounded above the usual rattle of traffic. Downstairs, a steady tolling could only be the hotel manager at work, raising the alarm with his hand bell. Seven rings for theft and ten for fire. There was no code for murder.

Sirens stopped, and car doors slammed. Frankie’s gaze returned to GX Forrest. She hadn’t known him well, but she was certain he would despise lying at anybody’s feet, let alone those of two hotel chambermaids. He would have railed against the police examining him as well. The men in blue would stand and stare, taking in the knife in his breast and the smooth surface of the pool of blood around him.

Once he’d fallen, he hadn’t moved about. But would such a man not have fought death? Or his killer? Forrest had been a fighter. On the other hand, he’d spent the last ten years hiding from the public eye and the power struggles of Hollywood. He’d gone ten years without a project or a studio, growing older with his wife here on the top floor of the Castello.

She wondered where the police would begin their investigation. They would certainly note the open window five stories above the ground. Frankie had taken a good look up at that window yesterday, and nobody but a human fly could climb up here and enter through the window. The police would figure it was an inside job. And since there was no sign of a struggle, and the window was too high for likely ingress, there was a single obvious suspect.

Read the rest of this story in Pulp Literature Issue 50, Spring 2026!

Mel Anastasiou writes the Fairmount Manor Mysteries, the Monument Studios Mysteries, and the Hertfordshire Pub Mysteries, available at pulpliterature.com. She won a Literary Titan Gold Book Award and was longlisted for the Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour for her novel Stella Ryman and the Fairmount Manor Mysteries. Look for Stella Ryman and the Search for Thelma Hu, available through online booksellers and at Pulp Literature Press.