Henry Clement - The Clairvoyant

[vaughan]

The Clairvoyant is a screenplay (written by D. Jonathan Ringhamp) that has been reworked as a novelization. You can find details of the movie here:

www.imdb.com/title/tt0087555/

AKA: The Killing Hour (US).

There are novelizations that are merely briefly annotated screenplays, and then there are some where the author has gone the extra mile, and tried to exploit the different form. In this case we get the former, with entire chapters coming and going in less than three paragraphs. You can almost hear the director screaming "cut!"

Still, the film seems to be a tad "lost', in that no-one has seen fit to release in on DVD format, so in lieu of the film itself, this will have to do.

The plot is intriguing - an art student is getting visions from various murder scenes, which she sketches through automatic drawing. The murderer is known as the "handcuff killer", and he/she seems to be picking victims at random...... Once the girl tells the police what she can do she is catapulted into the limelight, and eventually finds her way on television. But won't this put her in danger from the killer himself? Couldn't she become the next victim? And is there a connection between the killings and a spooky childhood experience?

To say the writing here is "cursory" is to play it a huge complement. One suspects it was written over a weekend. As such it's a VERY quick read (215 pages in all, but don't forget, entire chapters might well consist of a couple paragraphs). I sat in the garden with four bottles of Old Speckled Hen this afternoon and easily polished it off. Without the beer I'd have been quicker.

But you know, sometimes these bright and breezy "devil may care" titles are quite a bit of fun. The rush at quick a speed, never spending a moment on anything other than dialog (unless they're forced to describe some action sequence).

The cop in this is a "comedian", a very very BAD comedian - he was annoying int he book what with all his (out of date) impersonations, goodness knows how he comes across in the movie itself, but I wouldn't imagine too well!

Still, worth a read on a sunny afternoon that's for sure.

[andydecker]

Henry Celement - The Clairvoyant (Pinnacle Books, 1984, 215 pages)

Cover found on the net. Thanks to the original scanner.

Henry Clement wrote mostly novelizations of tv-movies. Like this one (which I never saw, even if the actors are kind of scary) or She Waits from 1975, which I also never saw (even if it was starring David McCallum), but which according to the novelization I read is a boring, dreadful affair. One of those 'is she posessed by the ghost of the former wife of his husband or not?' stories. Curtains billow, music boxes play in the night, and nobody believes her.