A previous career in the film industry became the inspiration for Tony Piazza’s latest detective novel, set in 1930s Hollywood.
“When writing my stories, I draw on many experiences from my life,” said the Santa Maria-based novelist, who used to work as a stand-in and stunt double for actors in the 1970s, including Michael Douglas. “I am very familiar with being around movie crews and what makes up their daily routine. … I worked with motion picture and television companies that came into the [San Francisco] Bay Area for about 10 years.”
Piazza’s new novel, A Murder, Well-Scripted, starts with a missing actress, who was kidnapped during a film shoot. The film’s producer hires Piazza’s protagonist investigator, Tom Logan, to take the case.
“The suspects are plentiful, and the twists are daunting as he [Logan] weaves his way through a mystery teeming with deceit, jealousy, and greed,” Piazza said about the book, which marks the eighth installment in his ongoing series that follows Logan’s various investigations.
Piazza said that each book in the franchise is designed to be read as a stand-alone story, but readers who follow each book in order will witness a progression in Logan’s personal life, “with the primary characters’ relationships with him evolving throughout the series.”
“But, as far as the mystery story within each book, they are self-contained and can be read in any order,” Piazza said.
An avid bookworm since youth, Piazza grew up loving stories by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie. Piazza’s early interest in mystery novels preceded his eventual appreciation of screenplays for detective dramas.
“Over those years working in the entertainment business, I’ve read many detective scripts and become knowledgeable about structure, plotting, and story hooks,” said Piazza, whose last novel before A Murder, Well-Scripted was Murder in the Cards, released in 2019.
Piazza took a break from writing during the pandemic, which resulted in the three-year gap between books, the author explained.
“It was difficult not writing for such a long period of time. The story was evolving in my head, and I was anxious to get it down on paper, but life kept interfering with the process,” Piazza said. “I wrote the first two chapters before COVID hit and then went on hiatus for the entire interval of the lockdown. You would think that having so much time would have been ideal for a writer, but I knew I couldn’t give 100 percent to my story when so much was transpiring in real life.
“Once life started returning to some semblance of normal and routines were beginning again, I was able to pick up where I had left off a year and a half earlier,” Piazza added. “It felt great immersing myself back into the fictitious world of my private investigator—once more guiding my protagonist, Tom Logan, through the nostalgic era of the 1930s. … Looking back, perhaps it would’ve made more sense for me to return to that world sooner instead of being glued those months to the news of the day.”
Piazza’s latest piece of Logan literature will be highlighted at the Book Loft in Solvang during a book signing with the author on Saturday, Nov. 12. There’s also a radio play-style audiobook in the works for the new novel, Piazza revealed.
“James Romick is a … Broadway actor who not only reads my book, but performs the various characters as he goes along,” said Piazza, who described Romick’s upcoming audiobook adaptation as “similar to the radio dramas of yesteryear and the next best thing to seeing my work on the big or small screen.”
Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood is a big fan of the big screen. Send thriller recommendations to cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 20-27, 2022.