THE REMAKE

Private eye R.J. Brooks's movie-star parents are dead, but they still make his life hell, even when his resemblance to his father isn't blowing each surveillance. The latest complication: a threatened remake of their most famous film, As Time Goes By, by cheesy Andromeda Pictures—a project bound to tarnish Brooks's fondest childhood memories and ruin his current love life (since his sweetie Casey Wingate has signed on as its associate producer). Brooks isn't the only one who's unhappy about the project—somebody's sending threatening rhymes to ruthless Andromeda CEO Janine Wright, and spiking her lawyer's prosciutto with poison—and the NYPD thinks the somebody is Brooks. So partly to clear his name, partly to look after Casey, he hops a plane to L.A., just in time to find out that (1) Janine has just received a new note with an L.A. postmark; (2) the screenwriter has been killed; and (3) Janine's ex-husband William Kelley, the ex-con Brooks had located for her hostile daughter Mary Kelley, has jumped parole and run straight into a fatal accident. What else can go wrong? How about if the other suspect a too-anxious Brooks tries to feed an LAPD captain turns out, upon further investigation, to be quadriplegic? The murder victims (more will follow) are almost comically forgettable. But Bogart has pruned back the lushly pulpish prose of Play It Again (1995) to produce a workmanlike, though never exactly surprising, sample of the imperiled-movie genre. (Author tour)