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The mood in hell was light. All smiles and hugs, Sammy Davis Jr. was in high spirits as he arrived at Paramount Studios in the fall of 1972 to film Poor Devil, a new NBC comedy set in the netherworld.

The 46-year-old entertainer surveyed the Hollywood soundstage, where Hades had been reimagined as a corporate office with a side of sitcom camp. Gold double doors opened to Mr. Lucifer’s office, where a stately desk sat beneath a friendly pentagram — cute horns, a dangling inverted cross for a chin. Then there...

Last night I dusted off an old DVD of mine called Death Scenes. This documentary explored the photo scrapbook (“a catalog of horrid indiscretions”) of a police officer who pounded the beat of Depression-era Los Angeles. The grisly slideshow of crime scenes unfolds under the baleful narration of one Anton Szandor Lavey (1930-1997), head of the Church of Satan and, as it happened, close pal of Forry Ackerman.

Lavey was one of the subjects Forry and I discussed when we first met in Pennsylvania. The two men, more alike than it would at first seem, fostered a relationship of mutual respect. As Forry himself put it in his dictation to me:

“Although Anton Szandor Lavey by his own declaration was something like a Son of Satan and was known to hold Black Masses, when my wife and I knew him we didn’t find a mean bone in his body.