Make believe

Make Believe is a mystery novel by Edward Ifkovic. Poisoned Pen Press published it in 2012, and its Open Library record lists 238 pages. It is fiction, not a life of Ava Gardner. Gardner appears as a character in a murder story built around Edna Ferber. Google Books lists a large-print edition from ReadHowYouWant, dated November 2012. That edition runs 390 pages, credits the author as Ed Ifkovic and is subtitled An Edna Ferber Mystery.

The Open Library description sets the story in 1951. Ferber goes to Hollywood to stand by a friend who has been blacklisted during the Communist witch-hunt, and the premiere of Show Boat is the backdrop. She falls in with Gardner, Frank Sinatra and the people around them. When her friend is killed, she sets out to find the murderer. The record files the book under women sleuths, criminal investigation and Hollywood fiction.

For fans

The publisher’s description

The longer description in the Google Books record moves the story to June 1951, when the McCarthy hearings had shaken Hollywood with charges of Communist sympathies. The friend is Max Jeffries. Ferber first knew him from his work on the 1927 Broadway production of Show Boat, and he had also worked on the new MGM version starring Gardner. In the novel’s plot it was Max who pressed for Gardner to be cast as Julie. He has been put off the Metro lot and left uncredited on the film because of his politics. The same description presents Gardner as a woman scandalizing the town, and irritating Hedda Hopper, through her affair with Sinatra, who has left his wife for her. Ferber comes to see her as vulnerable and insecure, and to like her. Max is killed just after a public fight with Sinatra, and Gardner fears her lover will be arrested.

The Kirkus review

Kirkus Reviews covered the book on 6 Nov 2012. In its account Max is a music arranger whose letter in support of the Hollywood Ten got him blacklisted and his credit taken off MGM’s 1951 Technicolor Show Boat. Ferber hurries to him with the galleys of Giant, and five days later he is found shot dead in his bungalow. Ferber narrates, and the reviewer called her “dyspeptic.” Her suspects include Max’s two closest friends, aging actor Sol Remnick and Egyptian Theater manager Larry Calhoun. Also among them are the brothers Ethan and Tony Pannis, who blame Max’s wife, Alice, for the fatal balcony fall of their mobster brother Lenny, her former husband. The reviewer wrote that the suspects are overshadowed by a “blistering double portrait” of Gardner and Sinatra. In the review’s account Ferber has no use for Sinatra, who is angling for a part in From Here to Eternity to save his career. Kirkus called Gardner a “radiant, insecure siren” and wrote that the book brings her back to life the way the previous entry had done for Harry Houdini.

Next to the other Gardner books

Nearly every other book about Gardner in the catalog is a biography, and one is her own memoir, Ava (1990). Make Believe is one of only two novels on the list. The other is Alton Rivers’s Love, Ava, published by St. Martin’s Press in 2007, five years earlier. Ifkovic’s book came out six years after Lee Server’s 2006 biography and a year before Peter Evans’s Ava Gardner (2013). It suits a reader who wants a crime puzzle set in Gardner’s Hollywood. The biographies are where her life is told as fact. The excerpts do not record what sources Ifkovic drew on.