When a dead body turns up on a Warner Brothers soundstage during filming of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” Jack L. Warner is unhappy. It’s not because someone is dead but because it halts production. This is the opening premise in the latest book in Elizabeth Crowens’s classic cinema-centered mystery series, “Round Up the Unusual Suspects: A Babs Norman Golden Age of Hollywood Mystery.”

Warner calls the police but also hires Babs Norman and Guy Brandt to investigate. The pair of private investigators cracked the Blackbird Killer Case (in the previous book of the series), saving the production of “The Maltese Falcon.”

Once the police arrive, the body is identified as Gerhard Sauer, a stagehand. Sauer was more than just a stagehand, however. He was a spy for lawyer Leon Lewis, hunting for Nazi sympathizers pre-war. Warner, ardently anti-Nazi, provides jobs for European emigres who fled the Nazis, so he supported Lewis.

It’s been three months since Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Warner wants to ensure there are no Nazis working undercover for him; he doesn’t want anyone to sabotage the making of his ardently patriotic movies.

Sauer’s body had a swastika carved on its neck, so Warner and Lewis believe Sauer found a saboteur the hard way. Warner forces Babs and Guy to add German expatriate Rudy Schmitz, another Lewis agent, to their investigation.

The killer is assumed to be an expatriate with hidden Nazi sympathies. Warner tells the detectives to watch movie sets employing expatriates. No movie currently being made has more expats than “Casablanca.”

Its director is the same one who just-wrapped “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Warner wonders if this director was the murderer’s intended victim. Babs, Guy, and Rudy are sent to the “Casablanca” set to get their man.

Actor PIs

Babs and Guy are ex-actors, since being a PI pays better than being an unemployed actor. Investigating involves a lot of standing around and just watching.

Warner being Warner, he can’t stand having someone on his payroll just standing around. Warner forces the three sleuths to do double-duty as “Casablanca” extras. This slows their investigation. You can’t break character during a scene to follow a clue.

Life is also getting in the way of the investigation. Things happen and keep happening. The United States has just entered World War II. Babs has an elderly Japanese tenant desperate to avoid internment, so she’s concealing him. Guy’s been called for his draft physical. Babs has two blue parrots who keep attacking her neighbor’s dog and breaking things, but she’s too softhearted to dump them.

When Warner gets annoyed at the slow progress, Babs and Guy enlist cast members, including the stars, to help the search. Since Babs and Guy were both actors before they were PIs, the cast view them as part of their tribe.

In addition, the Casablanca cast members who were in “The Maltese Falcon” are happy the pair found the killer stalking them during the filming of that movie.

Everyone joins the hunt for the killer. Everyone, that is, except for one person who wasn’t in “The Maltese Falcon“ cast. When asked to help, he steals Rick Blaine’s line, ”I stick my neck out for no one,” from Humphrey Bogart.

The book is filled with MacGuffins, including the murder kicking off the investigation. It fits, since a MacGuffin is key to “Casablanca,” on the set of which much of the book’s action occurs. A MacGuffin is a plot device, often an object or event introduced early in a story, which is necessary for the story’s progress but is otherwise insignificant. In “Casablanca,” it’s the letters of transit. In this book, is it something other than Sauer’s death? That would be telling too much.

The killing, even including its ultimate solution, offers an excuse to romp through the Hollywood of early 1942 as the book takes readers behind the scenes of the making of “Casablanca,” one of the great movies of all time.

Hollywood’s Other Side

Readers visit the Hollywood of the 1940s, when the studio system ruled and the Hays Code hid many of Hollywood’s darker secrets. The book is crowded with the mobsters, the show business wannabees and successes, the crooked cops, and the hustling politicians who circulated in 1940s Hollywood.

Every celebrity Crowens could cram in makes an appearance. For instance, Dashiell Hammett, Bugsy Siegel, Virginia Hill, and Salka Viertel are among the characters. The plot reveals the desperation and fear of the expatriate community.

The author faithfully relates the chaos during the making of “Casablanca.” The script was incomplete when filming started, and it wasn’t finished until the last scene was shot. Many of the stars in it were reluctant participants, desiring roles in different movies or more prominent roles in “Casablanca.”

Wartime limitations forced the recycling of sets from other films. Many people who were involved thought the movie would flop. No one expected the magic that resulted.

“Round Up the Unusual Suspects” seems less like a traditional mystery book and more like the script of a screwball comedy movie from the period. The story is filled with Easter eggs about Hollywood and “Casablanca,” and those familiar with the movie will find hunting them amusing.

There are also dark threads in this book, appropriate to the times. They serve to accentuate the bright highlights the author provides.

‘Round Up the Unusual Suspects: A Babs Norman Golden Age of Hollywood Mystery’
By Elizabeth Crowens
Level Best-Historia: Jan. 20, 2026 ‎
Paperback, 306 pages

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