Customer Reviews

The Devil's Wind: A Novel

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I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of "The Devil's Wind" by Richard Rayner.
The world of architecture brings in an environment that is different from most other novels and gives us a look at the lives of some interesting people. Throw in a dash of 1950's Las Vegas history and a story full of twists and turns and you have the basis for a good film-noir mystery.
I can't wait to see the movie!

In 1956 California, highly regarded Los Angeles architect Maurice Valentine feels he rid himself of his past culminated when he changed identity from Maurizio Viglioni after coming home from World War II battle fatigued. Instead, he Anglicized his name, married a wealthy senator's daughter, and has connection is politics and with the mob. Maurice is going places perhaps in DC.

At a party, the womanizing Maurice meets self-claimed heiress Mallory Walker, who seduces him; for the first time in years he wants more. However, he is stunned when, Mallory fires a shot at him. Not long afterward, she is found dead in what appears to be a car accident. However, Maurice knows how sly and deadly his connections are; he wonders if Mallory was murdered and begins making inquiries though he knows that is a mistake. He has to know why she wanted him dead. Soon he will find a strange twist involving an obsessed actress and soon to be someone else's wife Beth Dyer, who sends him seeking Vegas mobster Paul Mantinelli at a gala celebrating the latest atomic bomb test.

The story line is action-packed, very graphic (the scene with the bomb exploding nearby is brilliant), and contains strong characters. The twists and turns will initially shock the audience, but quickly make sense as no one is quite like they seem; just ask Viglioni in his Valentine persona. Richard Rayner provides a wonderful historical (makes me feel ancient to say the 1950s in a historical context) Noir that pays homage to the Barbara Stanwick femme fatale movies.

Harriet Klausner

The Devil's wind had plenty of noir atmosphere, and the period detail and lingo down pat. There was sly humour and some good sex scenes, however the characters were only sometimes interesting, complelling...our main guy, Maurice was not much likable, or fully formed...his sketchy past was not really that sketchy...as written, it was hard to beleive he would embark on his journey for answers...didn't fit his character to care that much...i just didn't buy that he was motivated enough...Beth Dyer was a great character...as was Jackie. The climax got a little messy...i loved the tone and mood, just wanted more character development maybe...and please, since when do architects talk like gangsters? and are so savvy and world weary wise...i know a few, and they are not jimmy cagny cum brad pit..:)

In Raymond Chandler's "Red Wind," we learn that during a Santa Ana wind "anything can happen." Richard Rayner has taken Chandler at his word and given us The Devil's Wind, a fast paced explosion of noir set in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and the desert in between during a couple of weeks in 1956. The narrator of the story is architect Maurice Valentine. Mallory Walker, the requisite mystery woman, enters the story during the first sentence. Walker sweeps Valentine into an affair which takes them to Las Vegas where we encounter mobsters-in-love, corrupt politicians, jazz musicians, and the first of two atomic tests. Before the second atomic test, identities proliferate, relationships are revealed, deals are made, people die, souls are searched, and, despite the blowing sand and dust, things become progressively clearer. I enjoyed the story immensely and only had issues with one historical inaccuracy [I-15 and I-10 didn't exist yet] and one geographical inaccuracy [Amboy Crater is a volcano, not a meteor crater]. The Devil's Wind is ripe for screen treatment [although I don't want to see it done unless it's done well]. Once you pick up The Devil's Wind, you won't want to put it down!

This is one of those books in which no one is who he or she pretends to be, or is called. It takes place in the Fifties when Las Vegas is just starting to transform the desert into a gambling oasis. It is full of corruption with the gangsters and their molls and social corruption by those who want to be somebody but aren't. In 1956, the Hoover Dam has been built and Las Vegas is starting to sprout. Palm Springs, a favorite of Frank Sinatra, had sprung up in the Thirties with the speed of a movie set. "The wide main street was glittering and clean, with plenty of parking and branches of the ritziest New York and L. A. stores on either side. The houses are painted bright blue in a 'too perfect neighbornood.'

Forty-five miles across the Nevada desert, a bomb is detonated to vaporize by atomic testing a whole block of houses built just for that purpose. There are a series of periodic nuclear blasts; all of this happened in a blink. It is said that Oppenheimer had remarked at Los Alamos, "I am become death, the shatterer of worlds." He began the research at the University of Chicago where the atom blaster was perfected.

After the big bang at Bikini Atoll where the bomb named 'Gilda' with a full size picture of Rita Hayworth painted on it like the cover of this book, (Dolly Parton had her picture painted on a naval ship just this past year.) the government decided that the Nevada desert would be the perfect testing environment where no one would get hurt. The Senate Atomic Energy Sub-Committee decided who got the contracts to build the houses and hospital needed for the experiments.

This was the time Senator Joe Kefauver of Tennessee and his committee were investigating organized crime in America. Of course, Las Vegas had sprung up, but as yet the reputation had not reached Washington. The women in their jaded worldliness and the men with apocalytic hollowness drove some pretty wild cars, Porche, lavender Cadillac with gold trim, an old Bentley, and the 'faux' architect a Studebaker. I had a brother-in-law who collected old Studebakers until the parts could no longer be found to keep them running.

The girl who grows up to be immoral could quote Poe, though she had no idea who he was, the one about "Annabel Lee." That's about the only redeeming factor this book has, the literary references and the history and rumors of the Anti-Communist Reign of Joe McCarthy. Hoffa was even in this one. That's before he vanished off the face of the earth. Maybe one of those bomb experiments out in the desert misfired and took him up in a red mushroom coffin to the sky.