Peter Lorre Books

Peter lorre was one of the most unique and fascinating actors ever to come out of the studio system in Hollywood. Anyone who has every seen his soft, silken acting or heard that lyrically menacing voice ever forgot it. I know that I never did. I have been a fan since seeing him go toe to toe with Cary Grant in Arsnic and Old Lace when I was in my teens.

Peter Lorre fans have cause for celebration with this book, which is full of tremendous insight and depth. It covers all of Lorre's life and does so with compassion and appreciation. This work never becomes a fan's love letter, though, as the author does not shy away from the star's less admiriable qualities (which I will leave to the reader to discover). But everything is put in context, which often provides a certain understanding. And what a fascinating context it is - from the German stage of Bertolt Brecht to the Hollywood horror of Roger Corman. It's worth noting that this book is extremely well researched and includes a complete Lorre filmography as well as a complete listing of his tremendous radio work (was ever their a voice better suited for telling stories over the radio?).

As the Author tells Lorre's story, the reader is treated to plenty glimpses into several Hollywood immortals, such as Humphry Bogart, Walter Huston, Sidney Greenstreet, and Lauren Bacall (with whom Lorre had a close friendship). And the writing style is very readable and smooth.

All I can say is, for all of us Peter Lorre fans, Thank you, Mr. Youngkin.

And while we are on the subject of Hollywood greats that never have been given an aurhorative bio, what about Boris Karloff. Mr. Youngkin . . .?

-Mykal Banta

First of all I am profoundly grateful, that finally someone took up the task to write a biography on one of the greatest actors of the 20th century. Mr. Youngkin did very good work especially in researching the very early years of Peter Lorre in Vienna and Berlin, which I assume must have been a quite excrutiating task. Nobody who ever saw the film "M" will ever forget the wonderful performance Peter Lorre gave. Even later on, nearing the end of his live, when he was doing B-movies, he gave them that certain Lorre-touch. It is a wonderful read and Mr. Youngkins work cannot be praised enough. Sometimes this biography makes you cry and laugh at the same time. Finally somebody did credit to this wonderful, wonderful actor.

if you are unable to get ahold of author stephen youngkin's earlier biography of peter lorre, then by all means purchase this book. it's comprehensive and thorough, and a good read of a fascinating subject. if you were able to get ahold of the earlier book, then you can save your money on this one. the only new item that would make purchasing this edition worthwhile is the photo and information on peter's daughter catherine. she looks like him but pretty, and her connection to the hillside strangler is included.

i HAVE READ INNUMERABLE BIOGRAPHIES OF THE STARS.mANY TIMES THEY ARE SIMPLY HARDBOUND VERSIONS OF THE ''NATIONAL ENQUIRER''tHIS BIOGRAPHY OF PETER LORRE IS MORE THAN JUST ANNECDOTAL BUT TELLS A REAL LIFE AND HISTORY OF A REAL ARTISTWHO LIKE AN ACCOMPLISHED MINATURIST WHO PAINT BROADLEY ON A SMALL CANVAS.TO LEARN AND EXPERIENCE SOMETHING OF THE GERMAN CINEMA, THE CONTRACT PLAYERS OF THE 1940'S AND THE DECLINE OF THE REAL ''ARTISTIC CINEMA HAS BEEN A REAL JOY.AS A BOY I SAW THE ''BEAST WITH 5 FINGERS AND IT HAUNTED MY DREAMS.AS A OLDER MAN THE STORY OF THE ''LOST ONE'' WILL STAY IN MY HEART AND MEMORY.

"He's crazy about me...all the degenerates are." Peter Lorre, speaking of his chimpanzee co-star in "Five Weeks in a Balloon."


From the beginning of his career, Peter Lorre was typecast. The classic German Expressionist drama, "M", set the tone for his entire career. Lorre said that from that point on, in people's eyes he was "forever the murderer". This was allowed to overshadow his incredible talent and his great aptitude for comedy. (His throwaway lines, like the one I quoted above, are priceless!)

His career spanned from experimental theater in pre-Nazi Germany, to classic noir films with Humphrey Bogart, to eminently forgettable films from the Sixties. (How odd that one of his last appearances was in "Muscle Beach Party"!)

Stephen Youngkin does an admirable job of chronicling Lorre's professional life, including the myriad missed opportunities--(of note: Malcolm Lowry's rabid interest in seeing Lorre play "the consul" in "Under the Volcano", and Lorre's own desire to produce a film about Kasper Hauser. Both of those projects, never realized, would have added so much to Lorre's cachet.)

The book overflows with examples of Lorre's humanity, professionalism, and wit. Unfortunately, the actor's personal battles with the demons of drug abuse and poor health, his unluckiness at love, and his profligate nature create an undertow of tragedy which no reader can escape. In the end, this is a deeply saddening and troubling book. Long after you have finished reading it, you will find yourself reflecting on the life of this brilliant and tormented individual, who indeed has a special place in the hearts of all the "outsiders" in the world.

Once upon a time in America there lived an intelligent and unusual man, an émigré from his homeland in a Europe demolished by the unceasing, decades-long activity of psychopaths, a rather unremarkable-looking fellow in real life who possessed, however, the gift of great acting ability, of being able to effect a miraculous transformation, many times over and with any manner of variations, before the movie-cameras. Yet, as if Fate had had it in mind from the beginning to offset his good fortune, he was cursed with short stature, public ungainliness, and an unpredictable and often self-destructive nature, with homely yet expressive features and a voice that would eventually be made the butt of jokes.

But there were also those (Humphrey Bogart being one) who saw something entirely different in him: a streak of nobility and stubbornness, something that drove him to constantly strive for perfection of his craft, notwithstanding the incomprehension which seemed destined to envelop him wherever he turned - a quality, in fact, of genius.

I'm hoping that many other readers will soon discover this intriguing first novel by the American writer Anne Sharp: a constantly-shifting and kaleidoscopic hybrid of both Bildungsroman and a lifetime's patient accumulation of the minutiae of film trivia, every aspect of which gradually fuses together to form a glowing love-letter to an actor, long-dead, with whom the narrator has obviously, hopelessly, fallen in love.

We first meet this narrator, a girl of eleven (creative and independent, bright yet lonely), suffering the bullying and viciousness of other girls at junior-high during the early Seventies. She has an older sister with whom she gets along, but her parents are at each others' throats and on the verge of divorce. Her mother, eschewing first the Methodist and then the Episcopalian church, had

"married a Jew. Not a very intense Jew. He had never had a bar mitzvah, and wasn't observant. Both my parents were so alienated from their nominal religions, in fact, that when my sister Yvonne and I were born they took us to the First Unitarian-Universalist in downtown Detroit, where something perfunctory was done to us with water and a rose which did not impart any of the usual benefits associated with baptism, such as eternal life or membership in a human community. But for years I didn't know this."

Having finished her schoolwork, the narrator is allowed during the week to watch the TV show Night Gallery on the portable television in her room, and afterwards reads such fare as the stories of Poe and Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, often far into the night. Then, the summer after she starts junior-high, "my mother sat me down one morning and asked why I didn't have any friends anymore. Mom must have worried, since being an outcast was something she associated with my father."

The narrator's father, altogether an interesting yet shadowy figure, and perhaps spurred on by the half-Russian side of his lineage, commits an almost Dostoevskian act, going to his daughters' school counselor to "talk about" how his wife is supposedly turning both daughters against him. It is the father, however, who is soon afterwards turned out of the house.

At this point I'll call the narrator 'Anne', for the sake of simplicity - although the astute reader will refrain from jumping to conclusions about the autobiographical nature of all that's presented in the novel, this 'uncertainty as to provenance' being one of the book's many interesting nuances.

Anne is transferred to St. Ladislaus, a Catholic girl's school, for Grade 9: "In the whole time I attended Lads I was never kicked once. But it wasn't just me. Human beings in general improve tremendously between the ages of fourteen and seventeen." There is some fine, very humorous description of the pitfalls awaiting her as she enters her teens, but it is at this point that the bravura of the movie-theme starts - and this, the most delightful and subtle thread of the novel, is what holds everything together, and accounts for much of the book's beauty.

Anne's mother, having sent her husband packing, begins to regularly watch a Public Television program, featuring foreign films, every Friday night. Her daughter joins her to watch such films as Grand Illusion, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Seven Samurai, Ivan the Terrible, The Blue Angel, and Knife in the Water. Thus is an ardent and intractable cinephile created.

"Not in a million years would my dad have let me watch movies like this. I had been an extremely phobic little girl. There was a talking clown doll, a Christmas present from an uncle, that made me run away and cry whenever I saw its face or heard its strangled, artificial voice. Yvonne was fascinated by the uniform reaction she got from me just by taking it out of its box. Eventually the box was stored in the basement, whereupon I refused to go downstairs."

The rather eccentric but strong-willed mother allows her daughters to stay up and watch a midnight double feature of Frankenstein and Dracula. Anne is immediately smitten with Karloff and Lugosi, and realizes herself that she's fallen in love with the movies, especially those filmed in black-and-white, in which "the clothes and the settings and the men were much more beautiful."

It is at this pivotal point that she watches the film M, and is devastated by the performance of Peter Lorre as a deranged yet pathetic killer of children:

"You must remember this. There's a city made of grey stone where it's always night. All the people are afraid of a little man who slips around in shadows, emerging whenever he sees a stray child. First he flirts her into the bushes, offering candy, fruit and toys. Then he sticks her with the switchblade he uses to cut up oranges, and leaves her for her mother to cry over."

There now enters into the young girl's life a confusing, addictive, and increasingly obsessive love affair (there is no other word for it) with that Hungarian actor who died not long after she was born. She is fascinated by his voice, by the "purling arabesques of his English pronunciation". She cannot rid herself of that "face of a Buddha in repose, his iridescent purr, his beckoning, exophthalmic gaze." Her coevals make fun of Lorre's voice: "I heard their mocking, cruel, ignorant mimicry and blushed and raged to myself." She watches every movie with Lorre in it that appears on television, even in the early morning, and drifts about the entire school-week "in a semi-hallucinatory state of sleep deprivation." While watching TV late at night, and to avoid waking the mother and sister, the narrator (reminding one of the secretive reading & television-watching habits of ourselves when young) uses an earphone hook-up to her television, so that she can listen to the movie without revealing herself, "spared that shame, at least." Having told others who her favorite actor is,

"People would make a face and say, "Well, what you mean is you like his acting. You're not in LOVE with him."

I would nod and turn away. I saw mental hospitals in my future.

He was so beautiful."

What could other people know, says the narrator, of "a fourteen-year-old girl trembling under this merciless thing that had crept over her when she was little, that she had hoped she would eventually grow out of, that she wasn't growing out of?"

Woven throughout the ongoing tale of her obsession are some wonderful digressions, following the Bildungsroman theme: outings with her father and sister; cigarettes and smoking in the movies; a look at the differences between how men and women become physically aroused; the movie-going experience in the 70's and a paean to the suburbs of Detroit; episodes from her girlhood and her friendships with the depraved Natalie, semi-depraved Valerie, and two irrepressibly aspiring film-makers named Neil and Dave; there is also the profound effect upon her of The Rocky Horror Picture Show; a very cutting and amusing demolition of the deplorable human being but excellent poet Brecht (with whom Lorre, unfortunately for his peace of mind, was often involved); and her first glimpse of her idol on the big screen, as Dr. Gogol in Mad Love. The narrator's father has remarried, and she briefly goes to see a psychiatrist - but is left no less confused and unimpressed by 'real life'.

This wealth of detail is interspersed with the frequent, always bracingly mordant and often melancholy interjections of someone agonizing over a vanished, once-desperately unhappy but tremendously gifted character actor: "For he had been a great artist, and terribly misunderstood."

"They say he was fascinated by the word "creep," often used to describe the characters he played. Rightly so, as it was the single most evocative word you could use to summon up that ur-creature at the pith of those parts he so famously played, small, close to the ground, eugenically suspect. With that perverse whimsy of his, he devised means of turning that hurtful pejorative back at the people who used it on him. He would claim that he had studied the etymological derivation of the word (originally spelled kreep, he insisted), and discovered it had originally meant something akin to "fellow," "regular guy," "mensch," in other words, the opposite of its current connotation. However, it had been corrupted through ill-usage by careless native English speakers [...] He'd go around calling people creeps, then declare that they shouldn't get mad at him; it was really a compliment."

Having arrived in America in 1934, Lorre's time in Hollywood is portrayed with great verve and humor, its elements of absurdity and the uncomfortable feeling of displacement the actor must have felt being perceptively-rendered. It was certainly a strange time in Hollywood, with a steady stream of European émigrés taking on character roles and often forced by their penury to become extras in a vast number of films. Austrian and German refugees, many of them Jewish, were typically being cast as Nazi spies or leaders; Russians and Poles were asked to play the very men who had tortured them, stolen their property, threatened their lives, or otherwise driven them from the Continent.

Hollywood had never seen the likes of such names: Conrad Veidt and Hans von Twardowski, Fritz Kortner and Vladimir Sokoloff, Erich von Stroheim and Martin Kosleck, Emil Jannings and Akim Tamiroff... Olga Baclanova, once a well-known singer and actress in Russia, was reduced to playing the hen-woman in Freaks; Leonid Kinsky may, sadly, be finally remembered only as Sasha the bartender in Casablanca. And then, of course, there was Peter Lorre:

"It was certainly extraordinary for anyone who looked like him, especially as ethnic as he did, to be allowed to work in that pantheon of Aryan beauties. There were obvious problems he might have corrected, like his weight and those terrible teeth (very naughty of him, in that land of grapefruit and cosmetic dentistry), that might have made them more inclined to take him seriously as a leading man. Though it was nearly impossible to make the baroque planes of that incredible face look conventionally handsome, even normal on film. Even the master von Sternberg failed at it. There are some portions of Crime and Punishment in which he shimmers like Dietrich, and in others he just looks like a shoat."

A bittersweet cadence intrudes near the end of this fascinating book, during which the narrator meets the first (perhaps that should be the second) serious love of her life, Brent, who is a DJ at a radio station and introduces her to punk music. She enters university, comes to terms with a grandmother's death, and briefly experiments with drugs. After having driven down to L.A. with her boyfriend, in search of a new beginning to their lives, there occurs a visit to Peter Lorre's tomb in the Hollywood Memorial Cemetery, where

"We found him right away, at the end of a long corridor lined with Armenians. There was nothing to mark him as anyone famous. There was a little brass plaque with his name and dates and those of his last wife, the one he'd had a child with, and who'd been about to divorce him when he died."

This novel, which provokes what nineteenth-century Russians often aptly referred to as "laughter through tears", is a wholly original and excellent piece of work. I will never look at that pitiable yet supremely talented actor, whose very soul somehow mirrored his body and produced an impression of something vaguely misshapen, in quite the same way again.

"During the seventies his estate sued a breakfast cereal company that promoted one of its products with a little blue cartoon ghost that looked and sounded fetchingly like him. The estate argued that he wouldn't have wanted to have been remembered that way.

But his life was spent making sure he'd be remembered as nothing else."

This is an extremely honest portrayal of a teenager who yearns for something other than what she has. The writing is literate, lyrical, and insightful. The content of the book contains much more insight into a young girl's psyche than just the obsession she has with the dead actor. The book is much less about Peter Lorre than about the author, and her coming of age in a society and culture that she feels left out of.

Or maybe not. Maybe the best way to describe it is a reverse "Lolita" where the little girl is chasing after the dirty old man of her dreams...whatever, it's brilliant.

Reading Anne Sharp's _The Peter Lorre Companion_ makes me think of all the girlhood loves I never outgrew and still relish to this day. I saw my first Peter Lorre film at age 27 (and fell hopelessly in love with the man) but like the author says, the book is mainly about her childhood and adolescence. Sharp writes about love, old movies, divorce, friendships, sex, families, Catholic schools and various obsessions with a great deal of humor, wisdom and sensitivity. Whether or not you're a Peter Lorre fan isn't the point -- if you have ever longed for a lover who is always there for you, who is real and yet mysterious and uniquely attractive, you will relate to these stories. I found I couldn't put the book down. Highly recommended! (and now, for those uninitiated into Lorre-love, go and rent "Mad Love" or the 1934 version of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much" and find out what all the fuss is about...)

This book is a must-read for everyone interested in actor Peter Lorre. Unfortunately it is out of print but if you can get a hold of a used copy, it's well worth the price.

Radio's most outstanding theatre of thrills was most certainly "Suspense." Whether it was a man spending the night in a haunted castle, a lonely woman stealing a baby, or a murderer among a bus of people trapped in a blizzard, listeners knew they could always rely on "Suspense" for excitement and entertainment.

The eight shows on this volume (9) include: "The Devil's Saint" -- (Peter Lorre) "The Morrison Affair" -- (Madeleine Carroll) -- "In Fear and Trembling" -- (Mary Astor) -- "The Clock and the Rope" -- (Jackie Cooper) -- "Return Trip" -- (Elliot Reid) -- "The Twist" -- (Michael O'Shea) -- "Fugue in C-Minor" -- (Vincent Price and Ida Lupino) "Knight Comes Riding" (Virginia Bruce and Howard Duff)

So there will be no confusion, the eight shows in volume 10, which for some reason is linked with 9, are as follows: The Pit and the Pendulum -- Jose Ferrer, Sell Me Your Life -- Lee Bowman, Chicken Feed -- Ray Milland, A Friend to Alexander -- Robert Young and Geraldine Fitzgerald, Marry for Murder -- Lillian Gish, Tree of Life -- Marc Stevens, Till Death Do Us Part -- Peter Lorre, I Won't Take a Minute -- Lee Bowman

"Her Knight Comes Riding" is especially good, with a twist ending you don't see coming. And silent film fans will enjoy Lillian Gish's turn starring in one of the finest shows ever to find its way into homes week after thrilling week.

Listening to this greatest of old radio shows will help you appreciate why it ruled the airwaves for so many years. These were quality productions with great stars and terrific writing. Our imaginations could run wild for a time and picture all that was happening, even the shocking parts.

Wait for those familiar and ominous bells with the lights out, as Autolite or Roma Wines takes you into a world of the imagination, and Suspense!

Those ominous chimes! Each week listeners of old time radio awaited them eagerly for what they knew would be another solid tale of mystery and suspense. "Suspense" was certainly one of the finest radio shows ever broadcast into homes. Roma Wines and Autolite became houshold names because they sponsored radio's best written show of its kind.

Famous stars of the day were always delighted to appear on "Suspense." It was not only great exposure between film releases, but offered a chance to stretch their acting skills. Those stars are in evidence here in this collection. Even stars associated with silent film, such as Lillian Gish, thrilled audiences in dark tales of crime and sometimes the supernatural.

The eight shows in volume 10 are as follows: The Pit and the Pendulum -- (Jose Ferrer), Sell Me Your Life -- (Lee Bowman), Chicken Feed -- (Ray Milland), A Friend to Alexander -- (Robert Young and Geraldine Fitzgerald), Marry for Murder -- (Lillian Gish), Tree of Life -- (Marc Stevens), Till Death Do Us Part -- (Peter Lorre), I Won't Take a Minute -- (Lee Bowman)

Star power and tense and involving stories combined to make "Suspense" one of the most enduring shows ever to rule the airwaves. A fantastic starter kit for those new to the medium or a nice addition to the radio buff's collection.

Peter Lorre was blessed, and cursed, with the most distinctive screen persona of all time, including an absolutely unique voice that was quite easy to mimic--- I could do a great Lorre when I was 12. This volume surveys many of the important films in his long career. Though each film is discussed by a different author, there is surprisingly little repetition. In some other volumes in the Midnight Marquee series, film reviews have in fact been nothing more than semi-literate, or painfully illiterate, plot summaries. I am happy to report that this is not a problem with the current book. Although the discussions vary in quality, they are all very well researched and actually function as effective critical reviews of the films in question. Recommended highly.

This is a great book, an entertaining read. Certainly not a reference book although I am familiar of other books being written about Lorre presently. The chapter about the Moto films are nice coverage, though just a recap of the plots. Only gripe is the chapter about Lorre's radio work. As an old-time radio fan, I do ask readers not to take everything to heart. There are many mistakes in the radio chapter, [...] even John Dunning's Ultimate book that every old-time radio fan has is far more correct. I do wish a Lorre book comes out soon that is a reference. This is an entertaining read for any Lorre fan.

This is a very good source on both Peter Lorre and his films. Each film is reviewed by a different author so the emphasis, length and tone varies by author. By having this combination of authors all of the heights and shortcomings of Lorre's films are brought out. If you are a Lorre fan you will find this a valuable resource, especially if you want to seach out Lorre films to view - this will guide you to the better ones. Until a definitive biography is written, this will give you some of the facts about Lorre's life in a nutshell.

Putting the stain of shame on his forbears (Julius & Phil Epstein, authors of such classic screenplays as Casablanca, The Male Animal, Arsenic & Old Lace, etc.), Leslie Epstein's Pandaemonium purports to be the story of the disaster-filled movie of that name, which in turn is actually Sophocles' Antigone done as a Western!, in the desert town of the same name, "as told by" (sometimes) one Lazlo Lowenstein, better known to most of us as Peter Lorre. This allows Epstein to continue perpetrating the lie of Lorre's alleged cocaine addiction, with Lorre always reaching into his pockets for his "magic dust". However, Stephen Youngkin's biography of Lorre, The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre, exhaustively researched for over 25 years, proves such claims are lies - Lorre was actually addicted to morphine & Youngkin's book has the proof as provided from FOI docs involving Harry J. Anslinger & the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (precursor to today's DEA). But there are many more inaccuracies in this book than space to mention them all. The plot: Film pioneer gone mad wants to make a film in the middle of the desert, and the cast and crew seem to go crazy from the heat and thirst & there seems to be a murder or two but the film gets made, after a fashion. Hitler-era Germany & Austria figure in the book and the decimation of Jews during the 1930's and 1940's is offensively symbolized within the movie in the form of cowboys (Nazis) versus Injuns (Jews). On board a plane flying out to the desert location a Japanese coroner from L A tells Lorre of the plot to bomb Pearl Harbor, claiming a Mr Moto movie has inspired Emperor Hirohito! Then some other stuff happens. Can the reader care about it? No. The End. Celia Lovsky, Lorre's wife at the time, is missing here so that faux-Lorre can get boringly fondled by Rochelle Hudson. Plenty of other real-life film stars of the era are maligned as characters besides Lorre. The 1934 film Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch is supposedly going into production in 1942 in this book. And so on. If you're going to involve historical events and people who actually walked the earth not too long ago, Mr. Epstein, do a little research! But alas, the writing is the main problem here. Epstein is so pedestrian, uninteresting, dull, plodding, filled with page after page of excessive descriptions that make Dostoyevsky seem like an author of blank verse. Nearly 400 pages of stultifying snooze-fuel. Less than one star.

Boy, I really wanted to like it much more than I did. Novels about Hollywood which feature actual personalities are rarely successful, no matter how much insider knowledge is involved. I found that I couldn't finish it, even though I had less than 50 pages left to go. Life is too short.

A really human portrait of mixing the personal and the political in the name of artistic endeavors, I found this book to be a wonderful read about Hollywood in its heyday. In the same way the author was unafraid to take on the Holocaust and protray it in the language of human survival for King of the Jews, Epstein is also unafraid to be both funny and frightening in this novel.

The idea of Peter Lorre as narrator of this book promises to be a funny one. But I think those of a certain age, who have the hysterical voice of Rocky Rococo indelibly ringing in our ears, will be disappointed. I was. The author doesn't really capture that Peter Lorre. His coyness about his drug abuse and sexual hi-jinks lacked an expected leering quality. His cringings were ordinary rather than epic. I won't say the portrayal is a failure as he has a certain presence. But for someone so colorful in our memory he is rather flat on the page. Most of the alleged humor in the book is similarly drab.

This is a pretty good book nonetheless. The events leading to those set in the dessert provide many a memorable occasion for compulsive reading. The intricate episode when, as he is being interrogated by Goebbels the imperious Von Beckmann, flashes back to his travels into the Jewish villages of Europe revealing his true origins to us, is masterfully done.

But the culmination of the book, the grim antics on location in Death Valley are outlandish and unbelievable. The cult atmosphere as described is jarringly anachronistic; more reminiscent of Charlie Manson than Hitler. Yet we are explicitly directed by the author to take these as analogous to the Nazi madness of the era.

I wrote this to try and understand what to make of this book. My expectations for it were disappointed at every turn. Yet it held my interest right up to the final chapters. But these desert episodes seem totally misguided; And worse, predictable. Yet I admired much of the writing. I guess those who read of my still unresolved dilemma regarding this book may take it as a warning.

Casting Peter Lorre as the cynical voice of Hollywood was a brilliant stroke in Epstein's part. Unfortunately, the execution fails, as his depiction of Lorre, and for that matter ALL THE CHARACTERS, leave much to be desired.
I agree with a few reviews already written about this book: Epstein tries WAY TO HARD to get his message across, and in the process falls flat. For me this book was heavy and dull, up until they get to the cult-like town of Pandaemonium, where it does pick up the pace and becomes quite the page turner. And I did feel much sympathy for poor Peter Lorre, when he turns from being a Japanesse sleuth to a Cassandra, preaching of destructions to come.
The POV switch was as much an annoyance as (I'm sorry to say this) the Epstein twins. And the "it smells like almonds" jokes were not funny to begin with. The fact that this joke pops up quite frequently throughout the whole book is enough to make you cringe.
One last rant: every single character in this book is selfish and despicable. I hated each and every one of them. Now there's nothing wrong with hating characters. The Maltese Falcon is a prime example of characters you LOVE to hate.
But no, these characters you just simply hate.
Epstein did good when he penned King of the Jews. What happened here is a mystery.