Based on one of Vincent Starrett's Jimmie Lavender story "Recipe for Murder" (Redbook Magazine, November 1934), The Grand Hotel Murder dropped the Lavender character' who knows why? (Lavender, a Chicago gentleman detective, was the popular character in forty-nine stories by Starrett. Surely he could have carried a film as himself.) The film also made a number other changes to the basic plot.
Roger Blackwood (no longer Jimmie Lavender) is a young crime novelist (not a critic) in California (nope, not Chicago), specifically, San Francisco's Hotel Mardena. A body is found in room 940, a man who died by poisoning. Blackwood (Edmund Lowe) joins forces (sort of) with hotel detective Andy McCabe (Victor McLaughlin) to solve the murder while each tries to upstage the other. McCabe is also aided by his assistant, Feets (John Wray). Since this is a hotel, there are a lot of suspects; since this is a B mystery programmer, there's a bit if snappy dialogue. Things come to a smashing and very abrupt end during a New Year's Eve party.
There's some decent plotting stuck here amongst a whole lot of vagueness. The film is a pretty good time waster for those who like that sort of thing. They really should have stuck closer to Starrett's original story.
Directed by Eugene Forde, with a script by Arthur Kober. Also featuring Rosemary Ames, Mary Carlisle, Henry O'Neill, C. Henry Gordon, William Janney, and Charles C. Wilson. Look closely and you'll see Lynn Bari, perhaps best known the WWII pin-up model dubbed the "Woo-Woo Girl," in an uncredited role as a receptionist.
Enjoy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78lrDazqgNM
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