My Virtue or My Plague

There is something cold and restless in the air of Elsinore tonight.

Will You?

And I will hook LeviathanAnd put his fang within your hand,And I will put out every starUntil I see you smile again. And I will steal the silver keyThat hides the secret of your heartAnd I shall touch the shuddering stringsWith my own dark and potent art. And I will bind you with a circleMade…

The Angel of Crime: Part Nine

Of my time in Vienna, there is little left to tell. I found Stewart sullenly nursing a cognac in the same dive bar where he’d introduced me to his murderous contact and I told him what I’d discovered – neglecting, of course, the stranger details. We had the film developed the next day: it was…

The Angel of Crime: Part Eight

I held my phone up, letting its light illuminate the granite staircase. The rain had begun again, more steadily now. The darkness seemed more inviting than frightening, somehow. It was, after all, a shelter from the rain at least. As I continued down, the echo of my footsteps seemed to change and I smelled an…

August 2021 Film Diary: Favorite First-Time Watches

It's been a while since I've written about movies here. Usually, I like to keep my enjoyment of first-time viewings to myself, though I'll occasionally share my enthusiasm for a really good movie on Twitter. However, I think I'd like to open up the scope of my blog a bit and share some of the…

The Angel of Crime: Part Seven

I came awake with a start. I was lying in the dirt before Moritz’s headstone. My hands were as cold as death and a light rain had been falling for some time, drenching me thoroughly. My heart seemed to beat at an unsteady pace, as though I suffered from some form of mild arrhythmia. A…

The Angel of Crime: Part Six

From the desert necropolis of Los Angeles to the ghost-haunted streets of Vienna, the film critic Gillis searches for clues to the mysterious riddle left by the sinister, dead film star Leo Moritz, born as Moritz Levenstein. His journey has put him in the perilous path of a shocking murder and rumors of a decades-old…

The Angel of Crime: Part Five

I arrived in Vienna utterly jetlagged, sleeping throughout the day and awakening towards twilight. This lopsided, nocturnal state of being did nothing to dispel the strange mood that settled over me. I had the oddest impression that everything that had happened to me twenty-four hours ago in Los Angeles had been a dream, a series…

The Angel of Crime: Part Four

The Levensteins made plans that night to fly to Vienna and I was invited to accompany them – or rather, Therese invited me and Franz and Gretchen coldly tolerated the idea. Gretchen in particular seemed against not only my presence but the very idea of solving Moritz’s mystery. I thought of the way she had…

The Angel of Crime: Part Three

Los Angeles, either in the heat of the day or in the fall of twilight and approach of night, appears like nothing so much as a beautiful necropolis. There is the Walk of Fame with the names of the legendary dead engraved in stars of terrazzo and brass, far overwhelming the minor constellations of the…