Ripped from the headlines

New mysteries are lifting their plots out of the newspapers. And that's not a bad thing.

By Jacqueline Carey

Dec 3, 1999 | Fictional works based on real-life causes cilhbres are nothing new, but fiction-nonfiction cross-pollination is particularly abundant these days. The much admired television show "Law and Order" has created years' worth of plots "ripped from the headlines" -- some are so transparent I wonder how the producers can use the fictional disclaimer at the end with a straight face. At first I found the show's swerving in and out of real-life elements disconcerting, and I was annoyed at what I took to be the writers' laziness in not thinking up their own stories. But soon, I too felt the tug that the anchor of reality provides. Now I plan my Wednesday evenings around the show. (Not that there still aren't some bafflers. Remember the one based on Hugh Grant's being caught with his pants down, only he's given a wife who then kills the prostitute? As if there weren't any other prostitutes in the world?)

R.D. Zimmerman's new mystery novel, "Innuendo," deals with the possible homosexuality of a very big, very married movie star. Even I, as sketchily informed as I am about such matters, had no trouble figuring out which Hollywood actor inspired the portrait. The murder of a gay runaway is thrown in to provide the narrative.

"Innuendo" is the latest installment in Zimmerman's Todd Mills series. Mills is a formerly closeted, now proudly gay investigative reporter for a TV station in Minneapolis. The movie star, Tim Chase, is in town to film a movie about AIDS after suing a tabloid over allegations that he had abandoned a longstanding gay lover and winning $8.5 million, thus "vindicating" his sexuality, according to a spokesperson.

The book's prologue, in which the victim, post coitus, stares "into the eyes of the stunning man who'd just taken him to the stars and back," is not overly promising. And too much of the beginning is devoted to showing how any of the male characters could be the killer -- the star, Mills' new cop boyfriend and a number of others. At first the plot threatens to remain a simple eeny-meeny-miny-mo. But it does eventually thicken, and the solution manages to be a neat twist on the very contemporary themes of outing and coverup.

Zimmerman walks a fine line here. He could have killed his story right off the bat by making Chase too obviously unsympathetic -- or too obviously anything. Zimmerman, however, is good at capturing the odd pocket of happiness in the Chase household. Despite the occasional preposterousness of the flirtation that may or may not be happening between Todd Mills and Tim Chase (names that belong in a porn movie), the star's troubling charm does come across.

When you read the book, it is hard not to picture the actual man Chase is loosely based on. In this way, Zimmerman is both outing him and expressing sympathy for his fear of outing, a kind of irony that ends up being not a whole lot more complicated than a story in People magazine. Like that magazine, the book would be far less interesting if it were less timely, but so what? Just don't wait 10 years to read it.

Next Page: A real car bombing in Natchez, Miss.

• View blog reactions