I had to give up on this novel after 200 pages. While I'm familiar with 1930's pop culture, I'm not obsessed with it, as apparently the author is. Could have been a half-decent novel with the concept of Boris Karloff and Raymond Chandler solving a supernatural case, but Newman isn't up to the task. There was one interlude, which was supposed to resemble a Black Mask short story, but it felt like filler to me; and the part where Chandler and Karloff visit an asylum then get stuck inside struck me as absurd. Never mind that why didn't their wives and families wonder why they were missing for a week? And the mad movie mogul finances those Frankenstein-like experiments but the law turns a blind eye . . . really?
The book did remind me of the 1990's movie Gods and Monsters, about the last days of Frankenstein director James Whale. I was reading Whale's Wikipedia page and it mentioned the "Karloff cult", which Newman is certainly a member of.
On the plus side, Something More Than Night got me thinking of Chandler's The Big Sleep and Robert B. Parker's Poodle Springs (Chandler's last book that the Spenser author finished). Think I'll reread those two mystery novels.
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