Close Up by Amanda Quick ****

Like the other books in this series, Close Up by Amanda Quick is set in Burning Cove on the central coast of California during the 1930s. The protagonist of this novel is Vivian Brazier, a struggling photographer. She aspires to be a fine art photographer but pays the rent with news photography—crime scenes, fires, and car accidents. This paying job leads her to help solve the mystery of the Dagger Killer, but then she becomes the target of a paid assassin.

The book includes the continuing characters and locations of Burning Cove, including, Luther Pell, owner of the Paradise night club with connections to government espionage and the mob, and Oliver Ward who owns the exclusive Burning Cove Hotel married to Irene Ward, star crime reporter at the Burning Cove Herald.

Vivian is protected from the assassin by Nick Sundridge, a person afflicted with the family curse of visions of the future. The topic of debilitating family curses is one theme of this book. The other is the evolution of art photography with realism versus impressionistic, and the tension between art nudes and pornography.

On a personal note, Vivian observes: “The big camera was the badge of the news photographer. Cops rarely questioned a freelancer who carried one.” The camera in the book was the Graflex Speed Graphic, the standard from World War I to the 1960s. This was a large camera that took sheet film. The film carrier had to be exchanged for each picture, so in addition to this bulky camera, the photographer also carried a supply of loaded film carriers (4” x 5” x 0.5” each). I can attest that the observation was true because along with a friend of mine we carried that camera into places we’d never been allowed otherwise.

A pleasant mystery of glamour and romance in the 1930s.

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