Extra, Extra!
In The Extra: A Monument Studios Mystery by Mel Anastasiou, Vancouver schoolmarm Frankie Ray runs away to Silver Screen Hollywood to test her conviction that an actress who lacks glamour but has talent and an enterprising attitude can make it in the movies. But when a womanizing matinee idol turns up dead on her sofa, Frankie’s career hopes shatter. She’ll need all her acting chops to sleuth out the murderer and clear her name.
Frankie made her debut in Issue 22, Spring 2019 (on sale now until July 31st), and we are delighted to share with you the opening act!
The Extra: A Monument Studios Mystery
by Mel Anastasiou
May 7, 1934
Paradise Gardens Villas, Sunset Boulevard
Hollywood
Sunlight through the window highlighted the needle-thin black lines criss-crossing the dead man’s knuckles. There were so many tiny creases in a person’s skin where soil could collect.
The young woman dampened a tea cloth at the sink and carried it to the sofa to clean her lover’s lifeless hands and face. She took up one grimy hand and then the other, and scrubbed them with her damp cloth. When she was satisfied, she set his left hand across his lap and his right palm down at his side.
His hand looked empty. Forlorn.
She fumbled in her pocket and brought out an orange she’d plucked from the tree in her back garden. There were oranges everywhere in Hollywood in springtime. This one was a beauty. She touched the fruit to her nose and smelled the bittersweet peel before bending his cool fingers around it.
Where the lapel of his jacket had slipped back, she could see the bullet hole. She made a little clicking sound and pulled the jacket straight. She would not cry. In fact, she must not cry. But she couldn’t just leave him.
She bent down beside him and kissed his mouth.
“Goodbye.” It was still not enough. “Good night, sweet prince.”
A show business farewell. He would have liked that.
Nine days earlier
Vancouver, Canada
A thousand miles north of Hollywood
Francesca Ray smacked the chalk dust off the backside of her school skirt. She unhooked her stockings and rolled them down around her ankles. She felt far too restless in her skin to tackle the peeling of parsnips and potatoes for supper, so, with no further thought for daughterly chores, Frankie bypassed the kitchen and her father’s bedroom. A moment later she slipped out the front door onto the stoop.
She saw the afternoon paperboy’s toss in time to snatch the newspaper out of the air.
Grinning, Pat leaned on his handlebars and shook his head. “You shoulda been a fellow, Frankie,” he said. “You’re ready for anything.”
“It’s Miss Ray to you, Pats.” She threw the newspaper back, loose and low, the way her fiancé had shown her. “And keep the paper — Dad stopped it.”
“He started it again.” The paper flew back at her. “Say, Frankie, you oughta take a look at the classifieds. There’s an ad in there, and if it means what I think it means, you’ve got trouble in your teapot.”
“Cheeky,” she called after him, but he’d already pedalled halfway down the block, slinging his papers in clever arcs against the neighbours’ doors. Pats had never been what you’d call respectful, but he had a bean or two in his head, so Frankie opened the newspaper to the back. She looked around for somewhere ladylike to perch, but in the end plunked herself down on the top porch step to study the small-print classifieds in the light of the blinkered April sun.
Find out what happens next, in Issue 22, Spring 2019, ON SALE now until July 31!
Want more Frankie Ray? The Extra: A Monument Studios Mystery, a new novel by Mel Anastasiou, is available now!
Mel Anastasiou writes the Fairmount Manor Mysteries, the Hertfordshire Pub Mysteries, and the Monument Studios Mysteries. Winner of a Literary Titan Gold award and longlisted for the Leacock Medal, Mel is also the author of two illustrated thirty-day workbooks on story structure: the steampunk-themed The Writer’s Boon Companion and The Writer’s Friend and Confidante. For news on published and upcoming new works, visit her website, melanastasiou.wordpress.com, or visit her on Twitter.
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