Someone to Watch Over Me

Employed by Titanic Pictures, Jake Shannon is a babysitter for the stars of 1947 Hollywood. At six feet two inches tall and built like a heavyweight, his job is to make sure that movie royalty stays out of trouble. His current assignment is a poetry-reading, blond bombshell – a Marilyn Monroe with a soul – named Savannah Stevens, an accomplished but temperamental actress who claims she is being stalked. Jake, a war veteran, who apparently saw action on D-Day, at the Battle of the Bulge, and at Dachau, is tormented by his own demons and torn between his desire to save Savannah and his responsibilities to the money-grasping, finish-the-film-at-all-costs producers who employ him. The staccato writing style – frequent use of three-word sentences and one-line paragraphs – creates a noir atmosphere and proves an effective vehicle for the hard-boiled detective humor. The plot takes Jake Shannon through murders, disappearing movie stars, several beatings, and, above all, Tinseltown’s behind-the-scenes cover-ups of whatever needs to be covered up. The ending to Someone to Watch over Me, even with some final twists and turns, comes as a slight letdown given the build-up in the preceding pages, but fans of the Sam Spade school of detectives will still enjoy this story from start to finish.