Maddie Ellis and the Malibu Movie Colony is an old-fashioned mystery serial set during the end of the silent movie era. In chapter 3, Writer Maddie Ellis, our protagonist, has just arrived at the Malibu Colony beach house that will be her home for the next three months. She barely has time to unpack before visitors begin showing up on her doorstep. Join us as we travel back in time to January 1928.
The man at the door was dressed in an open shirt and linen jacket, with grubby white canvas pants, the kind referred to as “ducks”. The hems of his trousers were rolled up and he was barefoot. He was also bare-headed, and his dark hair was threaded with gray.
“Allan!” Maddie exclaimed, delighted. He grinned and shook her proffered hand energetically.
“Maddie! I told Danny I’d keep an eye out for you,” the man replied. “The windows were open so I knew you must have arrived, and I thought I’d stop by. I won’t come in, but perhaps you would like to step out, if you have the time? I’ll show you the neighborhood.”
Maddie, feeling like Mr Mole in Kenneth Grahame’s book the Wind in the Willows, abandoned the house for the sunlight and fresh air with a glad heart and without her coat or hat. She only paused to pull off her Oxfords and put on a pair of newly-acquired beach shoes.
Belle told her that the Colony was full of Hollywood people, but somehow she had not thought that there would be anyone she knew. Allan Dwan was now a highly successful director, but a decade ago, when they were both starting out in Hollywood and the film industry was still in its infancy, they had worked together on several projects. Maddie had always liked the genial Canadian. He wasn’t one of those auteurs who ran a movie set like a martinet. He had a kind and encouraging word for almost everyone, including a young writer just learning the ropes.
“I hear you are planning to join us as a full-time resident,” Dwan said. “It’s a small club, but you will be welcome. In the beginning it was just Brenon and I.”
Maddie recognized the name of Belle’s “Irishman,” director Herbert Brenon.
“Oh, and Richard Dix, he’s been here from the start—that’s his house at the end of the row.” He pointed to a little cottage perched on pylons. “Betty Meehan is here most of the time, too, the writer, you know. That one is hers, but she doesn’t care much for company. She’s good friends with Raoul Walsh—that’s his, with the ping pong table. That one, over there, is Ronald Colman’s, but he isn’t here much, and when he is, he’s out in the water surfing.” He waved vaguely towards the east, where waves were rolling into the shore with a sound like distant thunder.
“Who owns this one?” Maddie asked, looking at the little cottage next door to her house. It reminded her of a child’s playhouse, with gingerbread fretwork on the veranda and a little arched window peeking out of the roof. Half of the little building was painted, the other half was raw wood, giving it an air of neglect.
“That’s Isabel Flores’ place, but I haven’t seen anyone there lately, not even the builders,” Allan told her. “And that extraordinary thing on the other side is Johnny Roberts’ ‘Castle in Spain’.” He indicated the structure that was covered in scaffolding. It was hard to miss. It was large and sat much closer to the water than its neighbors.
This was the house that blocked part of the view from Maddie’s bedroom window, and probably blocked everyone else’s view, too, she thought.
“Roberts got the roof on it just in time for the rainy season, not that we’ve had any rain to speak of this winter, but that’s as far as he’s gotten with it,” Allan said. “Heaven alone knows what it will look like when it’s done.”
Maddie laughed. “Belle Harrington told me it reminds her of a cracker box with columns tacked on, but it makes me think of a Victorian mausoleum, a model one made of pasteboard for a child’s project.”
“By Jove, you’re right!” Allan grinned. All it needs are some weeping angels and a cenotaph. Roberts is having some of the studio carpenters build it—they do most of the building around here—but he says he designed it himself.
“Now, this one belongs to Louise Fazenda and her husband,” Allan said, waving towards a more modest cottage, also made of unfinished wood. “She’s the one to appeal to if you run out of milk or eggs. She’s just about the only one in the whole place who isn’t on a perpetual diet, and she’s something of a housemother to everyone here, but she’s only out on weekends this time of year. Brenon and I both live down there.” Dwan waved an arm towards the end of the beach.
“He’s building what he calls a ‘Wendy House’ for himself, because he says Peter Pan paid for it, so he might as well—he directed that fantastic version of the story a few years ago, but he’s staying in that glorified garden shed while it’s being built. You might think Betty Bronson would be the one with a house like that, since she played Peter Pan in that film, but that one is hers and it’s perfectly ordinary. Charming, but ordinary. The green and yellow house is mine. Come by anytime. Everyone does, and don’t hesitate to holler if you need anything. We full-time residents have to look after each other.”
“I’m glad to have neighbors,” Maddie said. “It looked so strangely empty when I arrived it hardly seemed real.”
“It isn’t real. It’s a dream, not reality, but wait until the weekend. Everyone comes out then, and there was quite a crowd last summer.”
They walked to the end of the row of houses and back again. Allan left her at the gate to her own personal patch of sand. She watched him walk back down the beach headed home, his shadow stretching behind him, long and thin. Maddie began to think about dinner, or at least of a cup of tea—five years in Britain had left her accustomed to afternoon tea. She left the door open behind her and was filling the kettle in the kitchen when her next visitors arrived. This time at the front door.
This appeared to be an official delegation. There was a big man in a brown canvas coat and felt hat, and a gaunt, older man who was wearing a watchman’s jacket and cap.
“Miss Ellis?” The first man enquired. He was tall and broad shouldered, with blue eyes, and a weatherbeaten but not unhandsome face. He would make a good movie cowboy or an athlete—the kind who was just a little too old to play but was planning to show them with one more game, one final victory, Maddie thought, but all she said was, “Yes, I am Miss Ellis. Can I help you?”
“We saw the windows open,” the man said. “I’m Hank Crosby—the property manager. This is Joe,” he nodded at the other man. “Joe’s the watchman. One or the other of us is around most of the time. We have a couple of college boys on the weekends to help out, too, and an extra guard when we need one, but Joe handles most things. And if you need anything—firewood, a telegram sent, something from the store—ask at the gatehouse and someone will take care of it for you. You met Bert, didn’t you, when you drove in? Good. The general store is right across the road, and if they don’t have what you need they can get it for you most of the time.”
Maddie nodded politely at the men, but before she could say anything, Crosby launched into the real reason for the delegation.
“Mr Jones over at the property office didn’t tell me you were coming today or I would have been here to welcome you,” he said. “I don’t wish to alarm you, ma’am, but we’ve had a series of burglaries here. Clothes, jewelry, and furniture have all been taken. You should be aware, and make certain you lock up. Don’t leave the doors or windows open.”
“Furniture?” Maddie repeated. She tried to imagine anyone attempting to burgle the massive, permanent Victorian furniture her new home contained.
Crosby nodded. “Yes, so far, they’ve taken tables, chairs, lamps, a mirror, a sofa, oh, and a bed.”
“A bed?” Maddie was beginning to feel like an echo, repeating Crosby’s words back to him.
“Yes, with the mattress and the bedclothes and everything,” Crosby said.
When did this happen?” Maddie asked. “How did they do it?”
“It started last fall, with some small things missing, jewelry and whatnot,” Crosby said. “Then the bigger things started to be taken. It’s always at night, and mostly during the week when there aren’t many people here. The sheriff thinks it might be a gang and that they must have a boat.”
“A boat, not a van or a truck?” Maddie asked.
“No one has seen or heard a van or a truck,” Crosby replied with a shrug. “They’ve hit five houses so far, but not the Harringtons’—yours—not yet. We have the guards now, Mr. Jones hired them last month, and nothing’s happened since then, nothing that was reported—but you shouldn’t leave your windows open.”
Maddie had heard rumors that the Malibu coast had a history of sheltering smugglers and now rumrunners, but not that there were bandits on boats who burgled beds from beach bungalows. It was preposterous.
“Thank you for letting me know,” Maddie said, feeling somewhat bemused. “It’s so kind of you to come. Would you gentlemen care for a cup of tea?”
They declined. Maddie watched the little procession of two stride away, and closed the door, She pictured pirates lugging a bed like the canopied affair upstairs onto a boat and found herself singing:
“With cat-like tread upon our prey we steal!
In silence dread, our cautious way we feel!
No sound at all, we never speak a word,
A fly’s foot-fall would be distinctly heard!
So stealthily the pirate creeps,
While all the household soundly sleeps…!
Maddie carried her cup back into the living room, still singing, when a pleasant baritone voice joined in:
“Come friends who plough the sea,”
Truce to navigation, take another station.
Let’s vary piracy, with a little burglary!”
Maddie looked up in surprise and found a visitor standing at the open back door.
He was a tall, thin man in slacks with the hems rolled up and a wrinkled blazer that looked as if he’d slept in it. He had an old panama hat in one hand and was leaning on a cane with the other. His feet were bare.
He grinned.“I couldn’t resist. I like Gilbert and Sullivan. May I come in?”
Miles Devlin was the newly selected replacement director of the Sands of Afar. He and Maddie had been in meetings together all week at Mammoth Studios, but this was the first time Maddie had seen him as a real person, one who liked Gilbert and Sullivan and who appeared to have a sense of humor.
“Yes, of course, come in,” Maddie said. “Can I offer you a cup of tea? Or ‘a crowbar and a center bit’?” she added wickedly.
“I’m holding out for the ‘skeletonic keys’” he said. “Whatever they are: ‘Your silent matches, your dark lantern seize, Take your file and your skeletonic keys.’ But I’d love a cup of tea, or something stronger, if you’ve got it.”
“Just tea, I’m afraid, and not very good tea,” Maddie told him. “The water here seems to be somewhat brackish. There may be something stronger hidden somewhere in that extraordinary collection of furniture, but I haven’t found any yet, or looked for it, either, and I didn’t bring any with me. Perhaps I should have. I just had a delegation stop by to tell me about the burglaries that have been occurring in the neighborhood. Mr Crosby told me the sheriff thinks the burglars were pirates who took the furniture they stole away on a boat. The stolen items included a sofa and a bed.”
“And of course you thought at once of the Pirates of Penzance,” her visitor said. “Makes perfect sense to me. They might be doing you a favor if they stopped by here,” he added, gesturing at the abundant furnishings.
Maddie laughed. “I think it’s all leftovers from that big Sir Walter Scott film Mammoth Pictures produced,” she told him. “It’s going to be rather like living in a stage set.”
“A stage set for an English country house murder mystery. The only thing missing is a corpse on the hearthrug,” Devlin said.
“Don’t say it,” Maddie cautioned. “If you do, Belle and Daniel will hear you and bring one back with them from Madame Tussauds. Come into the kitchen,” she invited. “It’s less theatrical and a good deal more comfortable.”
“I’d like that.” He deposited his hat on the helmet of the suit of armor, and followed Maddie.
“I know I should let you get settled, but there’s so much I want to talk to you about, and so little time, and it’s impossible to get a word in at those meetings at the studio,” Devlin told her, resting his cane against the wall and taking a seat at the kitchen table.
He had sandy hair, an amiable face with mobile features and laugh lines at the corners of his eyes, which were hazel and full of lively intelligence. His voice had the slightest hint of an Irish accent. Instead of talking business, he told her about the terns he had watched fishing in the bay that afternoon and the great horned owls that nested in the canyon across the road. Maddie found him to be restful company.
“Are you one of the hardy souls who live here full time, Mr Devlin, or are you just out for the weekend?” she asked, once they were settled at the kitchen table with cups of tea and a tin of biscuits that Maddie had purchased in town.
“I wish I was a resident,” he said. “Perhaps if this project goes well I can afford to be one. I love it here. For now, I’m camping out at Herbert Brenon’s place. He’s in town working on a new project. He’s got a reputation as a curmudgeon, but he’s been awfully kind to me. He says we Irish have to stick together, but please call me Miles, or Milo, if you prefer.”
“My friends call me Maddie,” Maddie said. “I hope we will be friends. We have a lot of work to do together.”
“Oh lord, yes,” Milo said with a sigh. “Have you ever seen such a mess? What were the writers thinking? More importantly, what are you thinking, and can you see a way out of this mess for us? My friends have all told me I was mad to take the job,” he added gloomily. “But I couldn’t pass up the chance to try.”
“Me neither,” Maddie confessed.
