Benefit Performance

by Richard B. Sale

An all but impossible MURDER highlighting a premiere outside Hollywood's famous Chinese Theater...A BODY which is not the body...BLACK SHROUDS draped over the gates of Neptune Studios respecting the death of a popular movie actor who is not dead-and hopes to stay that way...An EMPTY GUN HOLSTER in the wrong apartment...A MAKE-UP JOB which proves to be too balefully perfect...A FRECKLE on an ear lobe which suddenly turns to a smile...A SCRIPTLESS PART which, by the minute becomes more unhealthy to play...A child's AUDITORY MEMORY which is a phenomenon of Neptune Studios...A MURDER planned with the wrong man, with intriguing results...A second baffling DEATH...A MORTAL JOURNEY winding up in a paralyzing climax.

Wouldn't You Like to Know-

*What to do about a murderous mistress who thinks you're her lover?
*How, to avoid being murdered again, a movie star becomes his own double?
*Why Kerry refuses to murder his director?
*What happens to Casey while Kerry broods in his barred bistro?
*Why the killer doesn't stop killing?

YOU will learn the answers in this clever story in which everything happens fast-and plenty happens.

Genres: Mystery

192 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1946

About the author

Richard B. Sale (1911-1993) an American screenwriter, film director, and pulp fiction writer.

Reviews

[Derek]

While somewhat annoyingly written, as a raw piece of work it has huge potential. It's a nonstandard mystery, where a big movie star hires a lookalike stand-in for a publicity appearance, and that stand-in gets shot and killed. Now the actor impersonates the impersonator in order to track down why anyone would want him dead, and he soon learns that the stand-in lives a seedy, dirty life.

It's a concept that brims with neat ideas. While he's incognito, he sees the "other side" of the Hollywood types around him, who begin backstabbing his memory even before the coffin (containing stand-in) is in the ground. He learns that acting-wise, he's not all he's cracked up to be. And of course, once he gets into trouble, he can't convince people of who he really is.