Frankie Ray Returns
From Pulp Literature Issue 46, Mel Anastasiou presents the first instalment of the second book in the Monument Studios Mysteries series, The Extra Takes the Castle. In Part I, we find Frankie Ray and Connie Mooney settled soon after their previous entanglements with murder in Hollywood. Frankie is broke, and banned from Monument Studios, but there are adventures, obstacles, and deadly perils ahead for these two Vancouver hopefuls and all the extras at Paradise Gardens on Sunset Boulevard.
Enjoy the introduction to this story below, and be sure to read the rest of Part I in Issue 46, Spring 2025, on sale until May 31st!
The Extra Takes the Castle, Part 1:
Fire at the Castello
by Mel Anastasiou
The Castello Hotel stood six storeys tall on Sunset Boulevard. It catered to the great stars and greater has-beens and was staffed with Hollywood hopefuls. Frankie Ray intended to become part of it: today as a staffer and, in the fullness of time, as a star.
Frankie tipped back her head to take in the faux battlements ringing the Castello’s top floor. The movement dislodged her borrowed ten-dollar hat, and she snatched it out of the air before it could hit the gravel between the rumble seat of a Packard and the front grille of a Hispano-Suiza. The near disaster brought her back to reality, although reality on this warm afternoon in May was nearly as outlandish as the mediaeval-looking Castello in front of her. Because in early April Miss Francesca Ray had been a substitute teacher for the Vancouver school board, and by mid-April she’d become an extra in the movies.
Frankie had no way of knowing what percentage of the vehicles trundling by had spent the morning parked outside studio lots, or how many passing pedestrians yearned for long hours under hot klieg lights, but it was bound to be high. And she was one of them. Frankie and thousands like her made up the bottom rung of Hollywood’s complex production. Uncredited, disparaged, and only lightly paid, she and her fellow extras nevertheless appeared on film, just like movie stars.
Almost exactly like movie stars.
Gosh. Not at all like movie stars, actually, but it was a start. And today, two weeks after she’d been hired, she was fired and banned from the Monument Studios lot.
Frankie set her chums’ communal ten-dollar hat, with its velvet piping and upright feather, back on her head. Twenty girls had gone without butter or coffee for a week to buy it—fifty cents apiece—and it was a pointy, up-to-date miracle of style. Better still, over the last couple of weeks, this hat had maintained a one-in-three string of successful job interviews for the young female extras who lived in Paradise Gardens Villas. This residence was slightly seedy but conveniently located next to the Garden of Allah, where movie stars swam in a turquoise pool, and across Sunset Boulevard from the famed Castello.
Trust in the hat. Frankie looked up and down the street for her best friend since childhood, Connie Mooney, who was late as usual. Connie hadn’t gone shares on the hat, because her looks guaranteed employment if there was any to be had. Frankie felt in her pocket for her prop pince-nez, ready to pull out if the hotel needed secretarial help. She straightened her skirt and dived through the traffic towards her job interview.
Read the rest in Pulp Literature Issue 46, Spring 2025!
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 The Labours of Mrs Stella Ryman, available through online booksellers and at Pulp Literature Press.
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