William Desmond Taylor: A Dossier

Metuchen NJ/London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc.. Near Fine. 1991. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket, as issued) [nice copy, virtuallly as-new, blemished only by some faint foxing to the edges of the text block]. (Filmmakers, No. 28) Series (B&W photo frontispiece) A compilation of contemporary newspaper and magazine items on the activities of silent film director William Desmond Taylor -- whose greatest and most enduring fame, of course, flows from the mysterious circumstances of his homicidal demise in 1922. The focus of this book, per its author, is on "Taylor's years as a Hollywood filmmaker" (1913-1922), but he also allows as how his "unsolved murder will also be briefly examined, including commentary on recently-published 'solutions'" -- rather a disingenuous claim, given that fully 40% of the book is devoted to that "brief" examination. (And let's face it: although Taylor was an important enough director in his day, nobody would much remember him if he hadn't been bumped off as he was, and if that event hadn't become the stuff of Hollywood legend, dark-side variety.) The author was the founder of a low-circulation periodical called "Taylorology," which devoted itself completely to exhaustive documentation of the Taylor murder (and its chief suspected perpetrators, actresses Mary Miles Minter and Mabel Normand) -- and which migrated to the Internet almost as soon as it came along, and can still be found online, if you're looking for a rabbit-hole to dive into. .