Who Killed Sal Mineo?

Rating:
Summary: Get Over It!
Review: I believe that Sal Mineo was a good actor. But all the homosexuality drivel is over the top. Why does his sexuality concern so many people. They should be outraged he played at a being a man, that was probably his best role. Women should be outraged by all these so called men that have absolutely no interest in women at all. They fall over themselves as fans living to get a glimpse of someone that has no interest in them at all. Sad man, sad life.

Rating:
Summary: Thank you, Susan...Susan?
Review: I had the pleasure of reading this novel shortly after it appeared in paperback. Little did I know it would be the last thing in print about Mr. Mineo for many years.
It may have been the times--the early years of the chilling reports about a "gay plague"--but I remember think what a refreshing drink of water this book would be in the desert of information surrounding Sal's death. I will say up front that I did not get what I was hoping for. I believe I was hoping for a book which would give the low-down on Sal Mineo's life and death ala Jackie Suzanne. Instead, I was drawn into the story of a reporter and her unexpected love affair as a result of her assignment to write a small on-location piece concerning the famous actor's murder.
I found myself wondering at times where the mystery which was unfolding around the principals would lead, and especially how it would illuminate the star's demise, but in the end the bittersweet tale left me strangely satisfied, but also angry and in tears--just as did the real-life event.
I real life, the death of Sal Mineo seemed so pointless and shrouded. In her fiction, Ms. Bundy lifted the shroud and showed how without purpose it surely was. Still, I kept hoping Susan had another equally imaginative and moving story to tell. Still waiting, Susan...Susan?

Rating:
Summary: Thank you, Susan...Susan?
Review: I had the pleasure of reading this novel shortly after it appeared in paperback. Little did I know it would be the last thing in print about Mr. Mineo for many years.
It may have been the times--the early years of the chilling reports about a "gay plague"--but I remember think what a refreshing drink of water this book would be in the desert of information surrounding Sal's death. I will say up front that I did not get what I was hoping for. I believe I was hoping for a book which would give the low-down on Sal Mineo's life and death ala Jackie Suzanne. Instead, I was drawn into the story of a reporter and her unexpected love affair as a result of her assignment to write a small on-location piece concerning the famous actor's murder.
I found myself wondering at times where the mystery which was unfolding around the principals would lead, and especially how it would illuminate the star's demise, but in the end the bittersweet tale left me strangely satisfied, but also angry and in tears--just as did the real-life event.
I real life, the death of Sal Mineo seemed so pointless and shrouded. In her fiction, Ms. Bundy lifted the shroud and showed how without purpose it surely was. Still, I kept hoping Susan had another equally imaginative and moving story to tell. Still waiting, Susan...Susan?

Rating:
Summary: Gay Bashing Does Not A Review Make
Review: I hesitate to suggest that anyone's parents, even Marmoset's, restrict their child's access to a bookselling site. But a barely coherent rant against gays in general and Sal Mineo in particular(see below)hardly qualifies as an informed critique. While master Marmoset may be as literate as others in his seventh grade English class, he displays a gross misunderstanding of the use of the topic sentence, the building blocks of a readable paragraph, Mineo's career or the novel inspired by his brutal death.

What is sad is not Mineo's life--he was a millionare twice over by the age of 18 and was twice nominated for the Oscar and once for the Emmy by the age of 21--but that both master Marmoset and author Susan Braudy chose to discard the facts in favor of their own, far less interesting inventions.

Plodding and unclever,the book holds no surprises and works neither as a mystery nor as a romance. Strangely Braudy, a journalist who wrote about the murder herself, has discounted some of the fascinating details that still surround the Mineo tragedy in order to focus on more mundane ones of her own invention.

She has, for instance, given him pedophillic tendancies. At a party crowded with twenty-somethings, she shows him preoccupied with the beautiful "puppy bodies" surrounding him. (In fact, Mineo's most famous partner was Rock Hudson, a couple of decades his senior.) And while the real Mineo was, among other things, a bodybuilder and artists' model, Braudy has two of her characters looking askance of photos of him in the nude while one pronounces him "no bathing beauty." But far worse from a mystery reader's standpoint is that Braudy's reporter-heroine shows no great insight or resourcefulness when it comes to solving the crime, instead choosing to spend her time being romanced by one of Mineo's bisexual friends.

Although I can't recommend Braudy's work, those who are knowledgeable about Mineo's life and death may get a chuckle from the sequence in which director Nick Ray laments how James Dean "turned" Mineo gay while the two were making "Rebel Without A Cause." This in spite of Gore Vidal's observation that it was Ray himself--the real Ray, not Braudy's version--who was "openly having an affair" with the adolescent Sal.

Berkeley Hunt