or, On How Pleasure Is Derived From Fear
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… Continue reading The Angel of Crime: Part Eight
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… Continue reading The Angel of Crime: Part Seven
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… Continue reading The Angel of Crime: Part Six
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… Continue reading The Angel of Crime: Part Five
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… Continue reading The Angel of Crime: Part Four
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… Continue reading The Angel of Crime: Part Three
As I waited in the dark, high-ceilinged parlor of a Los Angeles mansion, I mulled over another odd legend about Leo Moritz that I remembered hearing of years ago. I think it started in the 1920’s, when he was still called Moritz Levenstein and was already making a name for himself as an actor on… Continue reading The Angel of Crime: Part Two
This is a tale of ghosts, magic, and terror, set in Los Angeles and Vienna in a year very close to our present time. It was written as an homage to the classic Hollywood films of the 1940s that I grew up loving and still love and as an homage to the artists who made… Continue reading The Angel of Crime: Part One
Sublime Terror 