Book & A Movie: Murder Trains!

Book cover: Dread Journey, by Dorothy B. Hughes (Pocket Book edition)

Book cover: Dread Journey, by Dorothy B. Hughes (Otto Penzler Presents American Mystery Classics edition)

I recently engaged with two—very very different—stories about MURDERS ON TRAINS by complete accident???

First up, we’ve got Dread Journey, by Dorothy B. Hughes, which is another book in the American Mystery Classics series that I was talking about earlier this week. Originally published in 1945, this edition came out in 2019 after a couple of decades out of print.

It takes place, as you’ve probably guessed, on a train.

Viv Spender, Hollywood producer, is ready to cut his current leading lady, Kitten Agnew, loose in order to take a new ingenue under his wing. Kitten is a whole lot more savvy than his previous conquests have been—she’s well aware that none of her predecessors have had sparkling careers OR lives in general after being dropped by Viv—so she’s determined to EITHER hold him to her (impressively solid) contract OR make him marry her.

Viv, though, is rich and powerful and very, very used to getting what he wants.

And, you know, he’s already gotten away with murder at least once.

Dread Journey follows them, the new ingenue, and whole bunch of others—some of whom have their own connections to Spender—as the train heads east from Los Angeles.

It’s dark, it’s surprisingly quiet, it’s honest about power and corruption, and it’s actually really… sad at times:

Murder must be avenged. Between them, what they knew, each one his little knowledge, Viv Spender would face justice. Maybe it wouldn’t hold up in court. It didn’t need to. Spender might not pay with his eye and his tooth for hers; but he’d pay with living death, he’d pay in revulsion of human hearts, and after revulsion, oblivion. This case would be tried in the newspapers; Hank could attend to that.

Maybe it just feels sad to me because I know that this book is going on 80 years old, and that no matter how things are SUPPOSED to work, there’s still different sets of rules for different sets of people? Wow, I *am* a wicked downer today, yikes. Apologies.

Anyway, some of all that might be more My Stuff than the book?

Related, this line has been me for months, if not years:

She tried to read but the print wandered from her eyes.

ALSO. I literally just now noticed that the tunnel on the Penzler edition cover is a skull!?

Movie poster: Terror Train (1980)

Second up is something COMPLETELY different…

I give you… TERROR TRAIN, from 1980.

It’s a slasher from the ‘80s starring Jamie Lee Curtis.

So far, sounds pretty straightforward, right?

Yeah, no.

It follows a group of soon-to-be college grads as they get together for their last New Year’s bash…

…which is set, for some reason, on a moving train?

Anyway, in Classic ‘80s Slasher Form, Jamie Lee & Company were all involved in a Prank Gone Wrong a few years back, so when they all start getting picked off, the few survivors do the math pretty quickly. (Well, I mean, not quick enough for the first two or three victims, but you know what I mean.) And they team up with the train conductor—who is both an amateur magician(?) and apparently also an amateur detective(??)—to track down the killer and also get to the next station without any more deaths.

Uh… also, DAVID COPPERFIELD IS IN IT??

Like, THE MAGICIAN??

And he does a whole magic show with, like, some seriously ‘70s Adult Movie Music and Flashing Lights and lots of Dramatic Spins and Smoldering Looks and he is wearing a ruffly shirt and a giant collar and he is, like, a PARODY OF HIMSELF, and all of these drunk college students are, like, RAPT.

I feel like his act is everything Gob Bluth aspires to be?

Narrator: …that was not a compliment.

The idea of this fraternity party being held on this train is absurd on its own, but the idea that these dudes would also hire a MAGICIAN is just inconceivable to me??

I love watching movies like this, because if I HADN’T watched it, I’d have had NO IDEA that this was such a dealbreaker for my suspension of disbelief.

It is possibly the most embarrassing thing—in part because I genuinely got the impression that they were trying to make a Good Movie—I’ve ever seen and I kind of can’t wait to watch it again???

Screenshot from Terror Train: David Copperfield levitates a rose Very Seriously while wearing a collar so gigantic that it is ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE to take him seriously; Jamie Lee Curtis looks on, absolutely (and inexplicably) enthralled.