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The Remake : As Time Goes By

Name: The Remake : As Time Goes By
Author: Stephen Humphrey Bogart
ISBN: 9780312856663

by Stephen Humphrey Bogart

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Overview

Tough-guy private detective R.J. Brooks is back in New York City after solving the hardest case of his career, the murder of screen legend Belle Fontaine - his mother. His famous parents left him little but a few memories and one of the best-loved movies of all time - As Time Goes By. They costarred in the classic film, an almost sacred tribute to their lives and love for each other. It is unthinkable to Brooks that anyone would ever attempt a remake. When he finds a camera and a reporter in his face, asking for a reaction to the news that Andromeda Studios is filming a remake of As Time Goes By, Brooks speaks first and thinks later - a move he will soon regret. Every TV station in the country runs the clip of him threatening to do anything to stop the making of the remake. And when Andromeda Studios employees start turning up dead in Los Angeles and New York, Brooks finds the police are taking his words literally. Now he's got to stay one jump ahead of the law on both coasts and overtake a madman before more innocent people die.

Another off-beat novel, starring private eye R.J. Brooks--son of a legendary leading man and his most glamorous co-star--written by Humphrey Bogart's son. When a major Hollywood studio begins a sequel to his famous parents' classic film, As Time Goes By, R.J. threatens to interfere. And when studio employees start turning up dead, the police take R.J.'s words literally. 288 pp. Print ads. Author publicity.

Synopsis

Tough-guy private detective R.J. Brooks is back in New York City after solving the hardest case of his career, the murder of screen legend Belle Fontaine - his mother. His famous parents left him little but a few memories and one of the best-loved movies of all time - As Time Goes By. They costarred in the classic film, an almost sacred tribute to their lives and love for each other. It is unthinkable to Brooks that anyone would ever attempt a sequel. When he finds a camera and a reporter in his face, asking for a reaction to the news that Andromeda Studios is filming a sequel to As Time Goes By, Brooks speaks first and thinks later - a move he will soon regret. Every TV station in the country runs the clip of him threatening to do anything to stop the making of the sequel. And when Andromeda Studios employees start turning up dead in Los Angeles and New York, Brooks finds the police are taking his words literally. Now he's got to stay one jump ahead of the law on both coasts and overtake a madman before more innocent people die.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Cahners\\Publishers_Weekly

In his second appearance after Play It Again, PI R.J. Brooks, son of a legendary film couple, is enraged when Andromeda Pictures plans a sequel to his parents'-and Tinseltown's-greatest movie, As Time Goes By. Because he has publicly wished the philistines responsible for this atrocity dead, he naturally becomes the main suspect when some of the yahoos are indeed eliminated. While the police try unsuccessfully to pin the crimes on him, TV producer Casey Wingate, his lover, accepts a job on the movie and heads for California. Then Mary Kelley, daughter of Janine Wright, the venomous head of Andromeda, asks him to locate her father; R.J. finds him on parole in Connecticut. When the killer starts threatening everyone working on the remake, R.J. heads to L.A. to protect Casey. As the killer strikes again, Mary's father disappears again, and R.J. begins a series of cross-country trips to work out two cases. Telling a tale full of set pieces from the movies, Bogart seems to be playing a bit of a con here. As the son of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, he's capitalizing on their life and collaborations, e.g., Key Largo and To Have and Have Not as surely as the fictional Andromeda is exploiting R.J.'s parents and their work. Still, readers willing to overlook this harmless hypocrisy will be rewarded with a creditable whodunit.

Kirkus Reviews

Private eye R.J. Brooks's movie-star parents are dead, but they still make his life hell, even when his resemblance to his father isn't blowing each surveillance. The latest complication: a threatened remake of their most famous film, As Time Goes By, by cheesy Andromeda Pictures—a project bound to tarnish Brooks's fondest childhood memories and ruin his current love life (since his sweetie Casey Wingate has signed on as its associate producer). Brooks isn't the only one who's unhappy about the project—somebody's sending threatening rhymes to ruthless Andromeda CEO Janine Wright, and spiking her lawyer's prosciutto with poison—and the NYPD thinks the somebody is Brooks. So partly to clear his name, partly to look after Casey, he hops a plane to L.A., just in time to find out that (1) Janine has just received a new note with an L.A. postmark; (2) the screenwriter has been killed; and (3) Janine's ex-husband William Kelley, the ex-con Brooks had located for her hostile daughter Mary Kelley, has jumped parole and run straight into a fatal accident. What else can go wrong? How about if the other suspect a too-anxious Brooks tries to feed an LAPD captain turns out, upon further investigation, to be quadriplegic?

The murder victims (more will follow) are almost comically forgettable. But Bogart has pruned back the lushly pulpish prose of Play It Again (1995) to produce a workmanlike, though never exactly surprising, sample of the imperiled-movie genre.