Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Books

A good man is hard to write
Hemingway-tough or Fitzgerald-sensitive? Today's novelists scramble for a masculinity that doesn't seem fake.
By Jonathan Miles
[12/02/99]

Reviews
"The Walking Tour" by Kathryn Davis
The pastoral collides with cyberspace in a pulse-quickening novel that's totally confusing, but worth the trip.
By Virginia Heffernan
[12/02/99]

Interview
Games people play
"Double Down" authors Frederick and Steven Barthelme talk about family, gambling and their run-in with the legal system.
By Jim Hanas
[12/01/99]

Reviews
"In Nevada" by David Thomson, "24/7" by Andrés Martinez and "Double Down" by Frederick and Steven Barthelme
The harsh beauty of Nevada, the glitzy pleasures of Vegas and the thrill ride of gambling.
By Jeff Stark
[12/01/99]

Ivory Tower
Painting insanity black
Why are there more black schizophrenics?
By Annie Murphy Paul
[12/01/99]

Complete archives for Books

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

R.D. Zimmerman's new mystery novel, "Innuendo," deals with the possible homosexuality of a very big, very married movie star. Even I, as sketchily informed as I am about such matters, had no trouble figuring out which Hollywood actor inspired the portrait. The murder of a gay runaway is thrown in to provide the narrative.

Innuendo By R.D. Zimmerman Delacorte Press Fiction 307 pages Buy this book at B&N.com The Quiet Game By Greg Iles Viking Penguin Fiction 433 pages Buy this book at B&N.com The Best American Mystery Stories 1999 Edited by Ed McBain and Otto Penzler Houghton Mifflin Fiction 352 pages Buy this book at B&N.com

The book's prologue, in which the victim, post coitus, stares "into the eyes of the stunning man who'd just taken him to the stars and back," is not overly promising. And too much of the beginning is devoted to showing how any of the male characters could be the killer -- the star, Mills' new cop boyfriend and a number of others. At first the plot threatens to remain a simple eeny-meeny-miny-mo. But it does eventually thicken, and the solution manages to be a neat twist on the very contemporary themes of outing and coverup.

Zimmerman walks a fine line here. He could have killed his story right off the bat by making Chase too obviously unsympathetic -- or too obviously anything. Zimmerman, however, is good at capturing the odd pocket of happiness in the Chase household. Despite the occasional preposterousness of the flirtation that may or may not be happening between Todd Mills and Tim Chase (names that belong in a porn movie), the star's troubling charm does come across.

When you read the book, it is hard not to picture the actual man Chase is loosely based on. In this way, Zimmerman is both outing him and expressing sympathy for his fear of outing, a kind of irony that ends up being not a whole lot more complicated than a story in People magazine. Like that magazine, the book would be far less interesting if it were less timely, but so what? Just don't wait 10 years to read it.

Next page | A real car bombing in Natchez, Miss.