The Adventures of Gideon Cairn
by
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I expected that any friend of Bernie would be another Bernie, if two such existed in the same hemisphere. I didn't expect Michael. He was small and bespectacled and younger than I. The age-factor troubled me. Would my co-writers get younger and younger? Was I over the hill at 26? Would I become one of those bossy hags that bully new employees and sip gin out of office paper cups in the afternoon? I was the senior writer now, and that scared me. I took those fears out on Michael, but he didn't seem to mind. He was, he is, a very nice person. He is also very bright -- in a bizarre, macabre, outré, grand-guignol way—a child of Mary Shelley out of Fu Manchu. He has read every pulp magazine, seen every horror movie, heard every mystery program on radio, stored his mind with enough historical evils to justify an exorcism. Brain surgery on Michael would reveal a steamy fen full of smiling and malignant toads. All these horrors co-existed with the hopeful innocence of Oliver Twist before Fagin. Within a week I was feeling protective. I wasn't sure what Michael felt toward me, but I knew that I could keep things platonic. Michael wasn't a threat. I was between men and I wanted to stay there. We had long lunches and dinners at Horn & Hardart's, where I sucked his mind like a brain-dead succuba drinking fresh inspiration. He thought that we should introduce a serial format, two or three shows with one story—what appeared to be a supernatural murder that Cairn could solve in rational terms. All that summer we lived in Michael's world, somewhere east of Transylvania, bordered by the dark bazaars of Istanbul and Gideon Cairn's library on Beekman Place. Milton said that we were better off in Michael's world. He was worried about what was going on in the real Europe. The Germans were threatening Czechoslovakia. He thought there would be war in Europe by the end of the summer.
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About the Book
The Mutual Broadcasting System is struggling to save a failing mystery show, Adventures of Gideon Cairn. A dashing, obscure Canadian actor is hired to play Gideon Cairn, and a troubling element of the occult is introduced in the scripts. Then, at the end of one Sunday-night broadcast, the actor makes an unscripted announcement: on the next weekly broadcast Gideon Cairn will provide information that will lead to the solution of a recent real-life assassination in Rockefeller Plaza.
This story of the week between the two broadcasts is told from
three points of view -that of Michael, a young scriptwriter whose mind is infected
by the fantasies of pulp fiction - that of Milton, a middle-aged radio producer
with ties to the American Communist Party - and that of Marion, the senior writer
on the show, whose experience has led her to distrust dashing actors, political
ideologies, and the attractions of the kind of mystery fiction that she has
been writing. Enter the NYPD, FBI, Communists, Fellow Travelers, Nazis, The
Lone Ranger, Charlie McCarthy and Orson Welles. Read on...