Review: "Make with the Brains, Pierre" by Dana Wilson

 

Make with the Brains, Pierre by Dana Wilson Black Gat, 2025   The only bad thing about this 1946 psychological thriller from Dana Wilson—it is her only mystery novel—is the clunker of a title: Make with the Brains, Pierre. A title more apt for a Hollywood farce than a bleak ride into tinsel town’s darker side. In fact, Bill Pronzini, in 1001 Midnights, compared Make with the Brains, Pierre with the work of Cornell Woolrich and the New York Times wrote, “[it] presents a convincing picture of a troubled mind struggling with problems beyond its power.” Pierre Bernet is a French film editor, or what they call a cutter, lured to Hollywood in the years before France was defeated by Nazi Germany. But now he is 34, unemployed, living in a tiny apartment, and in love with a woman far too young for him: Eleanor Marr. Eleanor works as an onscreen extra and while she is fond of Pierre, she loves the very married owner of a film company, Joe Sherman. As a kindness to Pierre, Eleanor convinces Joe to hire Pierre. The job is less than a week’s work, but it pays eight times what M-G-M, when Pierre last had gainful employment, paid. While working, Pierre meets Joe’s dreadful wife, who refuses to grant a divorce to her husband, and the guy bankrolling the job. A shifty and well-connected lawyer named Frank Marshall. Of course, the film cutting job is for an audio splice that is used in a fraud and no matter how Pierre tries to play things, it always ends up with him hanging from the branch. Make with the Brains, Pierre, is a solid thriller—it opens with Pierre self-destructing in his tiny apartment, water dripping on something awful in his bathtub, while he awaits to be killed by the two men outside his building. Then the narrative goes into flashback to answer, How did Pierre get here? and What the hell is in the bathtub? It is told with sly humor and a sharp commentary of both Hollywood and post-WW2 America. The suspense is ratcheted slowly from chapter to chapter until, in the last pages, there is no doubt where it is going and the full horror of Pierre’s situation is starkly written into nightmare. Make with the Brains, Pierre—bad title and all—is a damn good book. *             *             * This new Black Gat edition includes an excellent introduction by Randal S. Brandt, “The Original Bond Girl,” detailing Dana Wilson’s life. She was an actress whose second husband was Albert R. Broccoli, the producer of the James Bond film franchise, and so much more.

Check out Make with the Brains, Pierre at Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback. Or at the Stark House website here.