THE STRANGE BIRTH, SHORT LIFE AND SUDDEN DEATH OF JUSTICE GIRL is, on first glance, a history of the birth of live television in the mid-50s. Beneath this veneer, it is also the history of America dealing with World War II, Communism and the true meaning of justice in this new society. Despite these substantial topics, this is a humorous story of an accidental hit television show where the main characters’ beliefs and life styles evolve with the times while they discover the power of a new technology.
Johnny Dirby is a disgruntled writer doing sketch comedy for a low rated show on the Regal Television Network in New York. After being fired by the show’s producer, he writes a satirical scene and slips it into the script, thus bringing about the birth of Justice Girl. The scene is a hit and a new show is created around Justice Girl with Johnny as the producer. Felicity Kensington, the actress who portrays Justice Girl becomes a star overnight despite her true objective of ferreting out “hidden” Communists in the show’s cast and writing staff. The interaction between Johnny’s working class background and Felicity’s society upbringing in this new milieu of live TV drives the story through some interesting plot twists resulting in a climactic ending. Author Julian David Stone uses flashback effectively to give the back-story of the main characters as well as the cultural upheavals going on at the time. Stone’s ability to master detail is spot on, as with his description of how early televisions sets hummed when turned on to the disappearance of the image into a small disappearing white dot when it is turned off. It is this level of detail, along with effective dialog, that creates an amazing realism for the story.
For those born into the digital age, THE STRANGE BIRTH, SHORT LIFE AND SUDDEN DEATH OF JUSTICE GIRL recounts the chaos and seat-of-the-pants productions that preceded broadband downloads. For those who were born in the black and white era of early TV, this is a wonderful remembrance of the earliest days of the Information Age.
Reviewed by Ed Bennett for IndieReader.