WEIRDLAND

Monday, November 19, 2012

Dashiell Hammett's legacy, Dark Crimes

Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man invented a new kind of crime fiction. It was hard-boiled, but also light-hearted; funny, with a hint of homicide. Now, for the first time, the stories of After the Thin Man and Another Thin Man have been published as novellas.

In 1934, The Thin Man was made into a popular motion picture, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy — and a wire-haired terrier — which spawned five sequels, including After the Thin Man and Another Thin Man. And although the screenwriting couple of Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich usually completed the screenplays, MGM Studio needed the stories and characters that only Hammett could write.

Now, for the first time, the stories of After the Thin Man and Another Thin Man have been published as novellas — The Return of the Thin Man. They have been edited by Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett.

On Hammett's heavy drinking, a quality which he invested in Nick Charles: "You know, there was a famous photo session of all of the former writers for Black Mask magazine. Raymond Chandler was also a Black Mask writer. And this photo — which was made in, what, 1935, 1936, one of the only known photos of Chandler and Hammett together — afterwards Chandler wrote to someone saying that Hammett had had at least 12 drinks during the time that they were together, and didn't show the least effect from them. Nick Charles is in many respects like Hammett, just as Nora is in many respects like Hammett's girlfriend, Lillian Hellman, to whom The Thin Man, the published book, is dedicated."

On Hammett's attitude toward the characters he'd created: "I think he was fed up with Nick and Nora Charles — not fed up. He was tired of them pretty early on, and he was fed up with the studios for the exploitation of the characters that he saw. Just before he finished the last draft for Another Thin Man, MGM bought all rights to the characters Nick and Nora Charles and asked so that they could develop the series without him. They paid $40,000 for those character rights. And Hammett wrote to Lillian Hellman just after that, 'There may be better writers than I am, but nobody ever created a more insufferably smug set of characters than the Charles, and they can't take that away from me, even for $40,000.'" Source: www.northcountrypublicradio.org

"Good writing is more than clever plotting sprinkled with witty dialogue, and there’s a difference between drafting a tale for other hands to finish and honing your own work as close to perfection as you can get it. “Red Harvest,” “The Maltese Falcon,” a handful of Hammett’s Black Mask tales — those works aim for that perfection. These screen stories, meanwhile, were penned not for posterity, but for a studio paycheck. “The Return of the Thin Man” is a fine curiosity, but hardly a fresh capstone to Hammett’s distinguished career." Source: www.washingtonpost.com

Humphrey Bogart, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Mary Astor in 'The Maltese Falcon' (1941) directed by John Huston, based on Dashiell Hammett's novel.

"Early classical noir was limited largely to shooting on studio sets rather than using real locations, as can be seen in such films as 'Scarlet Street', 'The Maltese Falcon', 'The Big Clock', 'The Big Sleep', or -one of the very best examples- 'The Blue Dahlia'. These films dramatized what in essence was a closed world, characterized visually by the tight framing of a trapped, claustrophobic milieu often viewed through high-angle shots." -Encyclopedia of Film Noir (2007) by Geoff Mayer & Brian McDonnell

Turner Classic Movies and Universal Studios Home Entertainment present a 3-disc collection including The Glass Key (1942), Phantom Lady (1944) and The Blue Dahlia (1946).

"A ruthless political boss and his personal advisor become entangled in a web of organized crime and murder which involves the alluring daughter of a rising gubernatorial candidate in The Glass Key, a stylish remake of the 1935 film based on Dashiell Hammett's popular pulp fiction. A man arrested for murdering his wife can't produce his only alibi - a mysterious woman he met in a bar - so his loyal secretary goes undercover to locate her in Phantom Lady, based on the crime novel by Cornell Woolrich. A WWII veteran is accused of killing his unfaithful wife and races against time to find the real murderer with the help of a sympathetic stranger in The Blue Dahlia, adapted for the screen by hard-boiled detective writer Raymond Chandler who received an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay." Source: shop.tcm.com

Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd in a promotional photo of "The Blue Dahlia" (1946) directed by George Marshall

The Blue Dahlia has become inextricably linked to the infamous 1947 Los Angeles murder case known commonly as The Black Dahlia. Victim Elizabeth Short was found dead, her torso severed in half, in January 1947. It has remained an unsolved crime to this day. Elizabeth Short was known as The Black Dahlia before she died because of the dark color of her hair and her penchant for wearing black. The nickname was a play on words of The Blue Dahlia, one of the popular films of the day. On April 21, 1949 Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake reprised their roles from The Blue Dahlia for a half-hour radio broadcast version of the story for The Screen Guild Theater. Source: www.tcm.com

Mia Kirshner as Elizabeth Short in "The Black Dahlia" (2006) directed by Brian De Palma, based on James Ellroy's novel

"Chandler wrote the kind of guy that he wanted to be, Hammett wrote the kind of guy that he was afraid he was. Chandler’s books are incoherent. Hammett’s are coherent. Chandler is all about the wisecracks, the similes, the constant satire, the construction of the knight. Hammett writes about the all-male world of mendacity and greed. Hammett was tremendously important 
to me." -James Ellroy

-What about The Black Dahlia?

-James Ellroy: The LAPD will not let civilians see the file on the Dahlia case, which is six thousand pages long. When I started working on the novel, I was still caddying. I was living in Westchester County and realized that I could get, by interlibrary loan, the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Herald-Express on microfilm. All I needed was four hundred dollars in quarters to feed the microfilm machine. Man, four hundred bucks in quarters—that’s a lot of coins. I used a quadruple-reinforced pillowcase to carry them down from Westchester, on the Metro-North train. It took me four printed pages to reproduce a single newspaper page. In the end the process cost me six hundred dollars. Then I made notes from the articles. Then I extrapolated a fictional story. The greatest source, however, was autobiography. Who’s Bucky Bleichert? He’s a tall, pale, and thin guy, with beady brown eyes and fucked-up teeth from his boxing days, tweaked by women, with an absent mother, who gets obsessed with a woman’s death. It wasn’t much of a stretch. Source: www.theparisreview.org

Josh Hartnett as Dwight 'Bucky' Bleichert, a former boxer and a Homicide-Warrants Division detective in "The Black Dahlia" (2006)


"Sam Spade as an Ideal and Dream Man: "Spade was given Hammett's own first name of Sam. The last name was said to have been connected to a boxer of Hammett's period, John Spade. In a swift summation of the detective he invested with fame in book form and Humphrey Bogart christened with his own unique stamp of no-nonsense machismo, Hammett stated: "Sam Spade is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the detectives I worked with would like to have been and what quite a few of them, in their cockier moments, thought they approached... a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of everybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent bystander or client." -"Pulp Fiction to Film Noir: The Great Depression and the Development of a Genre" (2012) by William Hare

Sunday, November 18, 2012

"Gangster Squad" and "Sin City 2": Upcoming Neo-Noir Releases:

"For Mickey Cohen, the desire to indulge—and bend the rules—meant more business. The first and most important part of it was gambling. Bookies were typically forced to pay $250 a week for the wire that provided racing results and a measure of protection. That added up. By one estimate, Bugsy Siegel’s bookie take during this period amounted to roughly $500,000 a year.(He also reputedly had a multimillion-dollar salvage business that trafficked in rationed goods as well as a rumored heroin supply route.) Mickey got only a sliver of this cash. However, other Siegel-Cohen enterprises were more than enough to make Mickey a wealthy man. Cohen would later boast that the two men’s loan-sharking operations “reached the proportions of a bank.” They also exercised considerable sway over the city’s cafes and nightclubs, lining up performers, arranging financing, and providing “dispute resolution services.” Mickey had his own operations as well, independent of Siegel. By far the most significant was the betting commission office he operated out of the back of a paint store on Beverly Boulevard. There Cohen handled big bets—$20,000, $30,000, even $40,000—from horse owners, agents, trainers, and jockeys who didn’t want to diminish their payouts by betting at the racetracks. Cohen also routinely “laid off” large bets to five or six commission offices around the country. On a busy day, this amounted to anywhere from $30,000 to $150,000, of which Mickey took a 2V2 to 5 percent commission. He also routinely used his insider knowledge to place bets himself.

He also opened a private club in a mansion in the posh Coldwater Canyon neighborhood, which stretches north from Beverly Hills to Mulholland Drive. There his guests—mainly denizens of the movie colony—could enjoy a good steak, listen to an attractive chanteuse (“who, when the occasion called for it, could also sing a song with a few naughty verses”), and enjoy games of chance at all hours of the night. -"L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City" (2010) by John Buntin

New Character Posters for Gangster Squad (2013) directed by Ruben Fleischer

Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling on the set of "Ganster Squad", September 20, 2011

“Los Angeles, 1949. Ruthless, Brooklyn-born mob king Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) runs the show in this town, reaping the ill-gotten gains from the drugs, the guns, the prostitutes and—if he has his way—every wire bet placed west of Chicago. And he does it all with the protection of not only his own paid goons, but also the police and the politicians who are under his control. It’s enough to intimidate even the bravest, street-hardened cop… except, perhaps, for the small, secret crew of LAPD outsiders led by Sgt. John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) and Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling), who come together to try to tear Cohen’s world apart.” Gangster Squad is set for release on 11th January, 2013, in the UK and US Source: heyguys.co.uk

Poster of "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For" (2013)

Jaime King and Jamie Chung have boarded Sin City 2, which began shooting on Monday in Austin. Robert Rodriguez is directing the movie with Frank Miller, the comic book icon who created the Sin City comics that were published by Dark Horse in the 1990s. Rodriguez and Miller teamed up for the stylish 2005 hit adaptation. Many of the original castmembers are returning for the sequel, including Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba and Rosario Dawson. (Rourke’s character Marv was killed by electrocution in the first movie but the Dame’s story takes place before and after that film’s events.)

King played the golden-haired prostitute Goldie in the first movie and returns to play her twin sister, Wendy. Chung is stepping into the heels worn in the first movie by Devon Aoki, the katana-wielding, roller-skating assassin Miho. The character plays a key role in helping Dwight locate the double-dealing Ava. Ava’s part, originally written for Angelina Jolie, is still unfilled.

And the part of Dwight remains a question mark. The character was played by Clive Owen in the first movie and sources say Owen is understood to be returning. But the character undergoes facial surgery and appears as a new man, thus the need for a new top-flight actor to play the reconstructed character. Also still uncast is a newly created character named Johnny, a smooth gambler. Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Kristen Stewart pays homage to Veronica Lake

Happy Anniversary, Veronica Lake!

Kristen Stewart attending "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2" World Premiere, on November 12, 2012

Kristen Stewart’s semi-sheer nude-colored Zuhair Murad gown at the “Twilight: Breaking Dawn – Part 2” premiere in Los Angeles. Gorgeous! Her glam waves perfectly complimented the sexy dress and here is how you can recreate the look yourself.

WHO: Fekkai stylist Adir Abergel

THE LOOK: A Veronica Lake-inspired style with a modern, deconstructed twist.

HOW TO: Begin by applying Fekkai COIFF Bouffant Lifting & Texturizing Spray Gel from roots to ends to create texture and memory.

Next, hand-dry the hair until it is completely dry to enhance your natural texture and create volume before making a deep side part. Source: www.accesshollywood.com

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

"Breaking Dawn" part 2 - Premiere videos

Kristen Stewart chats with Access’ Shaun Robinson about attending her final premiere for “The Twilight Saga.” How is this premiere different from the others? Plus, what was the best thing a fan said to her as she walked the red carpet? Access Hollywood interviewed the cast of Twilight’s “Breaking Dawn: Part 2” at the premiere last night and here you can find all of the interviews – including Robert, Kristen and Taylor and more – on a single player! Source: www.accesshollywood.com

Sunday, November 11, 2012

Happy 103rd Anniversary, Robert Ryan!

Happy 103rd Anniversary, Robert Ryan!


A video dedicated to the talented and handsome actor Robert Ryan, noir icon, family man and civil activist.

Soundtrack: "You don't need to be more than yourself" by Elliott Murphy

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Jake Gyllenhaal Holding Hands with Mystery Brunette in New York City

Jake Gyllenhaal holds hands with a mystery gal while taking a stroll on Friday (November 9) in New York City. UPDATE: Her name is Mahsa Jafarian, an Iranian graduate student enrolled in a master's degree programme at a college in New York, who met Jake on a train and they have been hanging out ever since. A source says, "He asked for her number and gave her a call a few days later to ask how she did on an exam she'd told him about... Mahsa thinks Jake is intelligent, well-rounded and a perfect gentleman - and she's completely smitten with him."

"Gyllenhaal has gone back to the theater. Since Sept. 20, he has been appearing in Nick Payne's off-Broadway play If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet, giving eight performances a week at the Laura Pels Theatre at 111 West 46th Street. Gyllenhaal plays -- with a flawless English accent -- the well-intentioned but immature uncle of an overweight teenage girl whose parents are too busy to realize the extent of her emotional troubles. The play begs the question of whether his arrival on the scene as sort of a truth-teller makes the situation better or worse. Tickets cost $100, but the show, which runs through Nov. 25, has played to packed crowds every night, something that has not escaped Gyllenhaa's notice. "I can't tell you what a privilege it is to be up on stage every night," he says, "to know that 450 people filled the seats of a theater every night to come see four people work on a stage." The old saying goes, "Once you've seen Paris it's hard to go back to the farm." For Gyllenhaal, End of Watch and If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet seem to be something like Paris. It's not like he was previously making a living as a hack, but his work on these two projects has been so challenging -- and ultimately gratifying -- that he doesn't want to waste precious time on others that are not. As he puts it, "I have no intention of doing work, here-on-out, that doesn't take that same type of devotion and that same type of care." Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

Thursday, November 08, 2012

Jake Gyllenhaal talks on Election Day


Jake Gyllenhaal takes time on Election Day to talk liberally with Stephanie Miller. Gyllenhaal and Stephanie discuss the latest trend of actors speaking out politically. He says that he thinks "it's a strange time when actors act like politicians" and vice versa. Gyllenhaal speaks about the importance of taking the time to say how you feel as an American. He adds that he believes, "deeply in democracy."

Scan of Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña in Total Film UK, November 2012

Jake Gyllenhaal in Esquire (Singapore) magazine, November 2012

Poster of "An Enemy" (2013) directed by Denis Villeneuve


Emmy winner Jake Hamilton travels to the Toronto International Film Festival to talk with Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena about their new film, END OF WATCH


Jake Gyllenhaal talks about End of Watch and Brokeback Mountain

Scan of Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña in "End of Watch", Total Film UK, December 2012

Though the film was shot in just 22 days, Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena, who plays the other cop, elected to first spend five months training, learning, and riding around with real LAPD cops in order to get a real sense of what their lives, work, and relationships are like. (This came with some real drama: on their first ride-along they witnessed a murder, and Gyllenhaal says it wasn't the only one.) Gyllenhaal says that they didn't receive special treatment because they work in the movies; in fact, he jokes, "the cops that we worked with didn't give a shit about us [being famous]." He also chuckles that "there was a lot of joking about movies I've made [a reference to Brokeback] -- endless humor in a cop car." The main thing that attracted Gyllenhaal to End of Watch, he says, was "the dialogue between these guys in the car." For the film to work, Gyllenhaal and Pena's interpretations of those words -- and occasion improvisations -- had to be completely believable, and they are. "I haven't really ever talked about this," Gyllenhaal says, before revealing that their "massive fight" took place after a miscommunication during a tactical training exercise that involved live ammunition nearly caused an accident. Gyllenhaal confronted Pena, who insisted that, because he was wearing ear protection, he hadn't heard Gyllenhaal say to him that he was moving positions. Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com
"The real driving forces of End of Watch are the characters. Taylor and Zavala are fully fleshed out creations, with Gyllenhaal and Peña inhabiting them with an almost uncanny naturalism that makes you feel almost as though the viewer is cruising with them in the patrol car, each back-and-forth between them feeling organic and genuinely funny. The charm of the film is that the two actors take characters that in the wrong hands could have been reduced to two-dimensional Bad Boys clones, and make us truly believe that these two are firm friends, whether that entails larking about in the precinct, getting ranted at by an angry superior or dashing into a burning building to play the hero. There is a possible criticism here, in that the repeated action heroics of the first two thirds feel a touch unwelcome compared to the sequences that just let the two actors go into full flow with their characters. These are not mere one-liner dispensers either, with a number of smaller, more soulful moments proving as touching as the macho banter is amusing – there is ample support here from their partners, played by Natalie Martinez and Anna Kendrick, who despite being given little screen time, both put in very engaging turns, providing a little context to the men’s day jobs. The two leads really do shine here, working off each other so perfectly that it is no exaggeration to say that we see not one, but two awards-worthy performances in End of Watch." Source: www.screengeek.co.uk

Wednesday, November 07, 2012

"Sunset Boulevard" in Blu-Ray, "The Song Is You" Book Review

Gloria Swanson And William Holden In 'Sunset Boulevard' (1950)

On November 9th, 2012, Paramount will be releasing a film on Blu-ray that showcases the studio in a variety of ways that no other film really did. While Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) is widely recognized to be one of the most cynical looks at Hollywood ever committed to celluloid, it also managed to document the studio and film personalities in a way that no one had ever done before and no one has really done since.

Sunset Boulevard tells the story of Joe Gillis (William Holden), a down-and-out screenwriter in Hollywood who, through a series of mishaps, lands in the domicile of a famous silent film starlet, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), who has since faded into obscurity. Monetary temptations being too strong for the young Gillis, he is convinced to assist Desmond in rewriting the screenplay that will help her return to the silver screen and to the fans that she “deserted” all those years ago… to disastrous results for all parties involved. Wilder’s study of Hollywood in the ‘50s, acting and the industry all come together to show a powerful and complex story of how technology and personality intermix and sometimes end up like oil and water.

Gloria Swanson and director Billy Wilder between scenes of "Sunset Blvd." (1950)

The extras that are on the disc are as follows: Commentary by Ed Sikov, author of On Sunset Blvd: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder, Sunset Boulevard: The Beginning, Sunset Boulevard: A Look Back, The Noir Side of Sunset Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard Becomes a Classic,Two Sides of Ms. Swanson, Stories of Sunset Boulevard,Mad About the Boy: A Portrait of William Holden, Recording Sunset Boulevard, The City of Sunset Boulevard, Franz Waxman and the Music of Sunset Boulevard, Morgue Prologue Script Pages, Deleted Scene—“The Paramount-Don’t-Want-Me Blues” (HD) Hollywood Location Map, Behind the Gates: The Lot, Edith Head: The Paramount Years, Paramount in the ‘50s Galleries: Production, The Movie, Publicity, Theatrical Trailer (HD). Out of all of these features, the stand out pieces are the Edith Head documentary, the Sunset Boulevard Becomes a Classic, the Galleries, and the Morgue Prologue Script pages. Source: www.craveonline.com

-Theresa Schwegel: You wrote a male lead in "The Song Is You" and he isn't so likeable. I mean, most women would probably like him, but not for long. Would you ever sit down with a guy like that over a few gimlets? What do you find compelling about Gil Hopkins?

-Megan Abbott: Thinking about Gil Hopkins, I had two pictures in my head: William Holden in "Sunset Boulevard" and Tony Curtis in "Sweet Smell of Success". I kept photos of both of them by the computer. These charming, smooth-talking pretty boys hustling every angle and hating themselves for it. Men doing bad things who are too smart not to have self-contempt but not smart enough to figure out a way to rise above it. I just find it fascinating and I wanted to write a character like that. And you can bet I would sit down for gimlets with him, but I'd definitely stop at one. Source: www.mysteryreaders.org

"And he went to premieres with the glimmering girls of the moment, lunch at the Derby, to the track with John Huston and his rough-living crowd. When someone needed to pick up the big-shot buccaneer at the drunk tank and slip some green to the blue, he sent Mike or Freddy or reliable old Bix. They kicked needles down sewer grates, slipped suicide notes into pockets, gave screen tests to hustlers quid pro quo. Hop had it taken care of. He had it fixed. Mr. Blue Sky. All from his chrome and mahogany office, cool and magisterial and pumped full of his own surging blood." -"The Song Is You" (2007) by Megan Abbott

Edgar-winner Megan Abbott became a sort of soul mate in the neo-noir literature. Her tortuous and vibrant novels equal in ambience to James Ellroy's gritty and eerie "L.A. Confidential" and "The Black Dahlia" stories. Emulating the hardboiled lingo to a T, Abbott recounts in her second mystery novel the strange circumstances surrounding the former "Florentine Gardens" dancer, model, actress and B-girl Jean Spangler, who disappeared from Los Angeles in 1949 after having completed a bit part in the film "Young Man with a Horn" with Kirk Douglas. In the alternate scenario created by Abbott, Gil "Hop" Hopkins (the publicist who helps to obscure the details of the investigation, favoring the movie studios' pretense) has seen Jean and her best friend Iolene the last night in the Red Lily club in the company of creepy song-and-dance duo Marv Sutton and Gene Merrel, who have a terrible reputation around dames.

Contrasting to the more classicist approach of the 'Czar of Noir' Eddie Muller (author of "The Distance", one of my favorite crime novels, where his indefatigable San Francisco's sportswriter Billy Nichols tries to protect the Heavyweight boxer Hack Escalante), Abbott's style, although nailing the atmosphere and a feeling of true chronicle, is more on the emotional (not sentimental) side. She has written two more crime novels set in the past: "Queenpin" (the central character, gambling queen Gloria Denton is loosely inspired by Bugsy Siegel's lover Virginia Hill) and "Bury Me Deep" (set in 1930's, inspired by the true story of Winnie Ruth Judd, known as The Trunk Murderess). Both Muller and Abbott's have a potent poetic flair in their narratives, which frames the plot and historical addendums.

Frannie Adair (whose restrained attitude reminded me of Lora King in "Die A Little"), an Examiner's reporter who is interested in the Jean Spangler case, maintains a tense relationship with Hop based on professional rivalry that culminates in a romantic attraction, despite of her character seeming almost undersexed compared to the other women in Hop's life - as Midge, his ex-wife who had a platonic crush on Jean. Hopkings is a very accomplished finagler, turned into a successful PR in the lucrative Hollywood machine of 1950's. Whereas the detectives and dupes in the vintage noir films projected a stern aura of morality and machismo de rigueur, in "The Song Is You" and "Die A Little" (Abbott's previous novel), we find a sharp trastocation of the genre conventions, mainly throwing away the apparently solid male façades and showing us their filthy edges. Abbott's detailed representation of complex femme-fatales and their self-destructive pulsions, doesn't betray a subjacent analysis of the whole feminine idiosyncrasia and multiple weaknesses associated to the sex-symbols and starlets in that particular era. More than a confrontation between sexes, Abbott proves both fall prey of a feverish machinery prepared to dislocate their dreams and bury deep their souls.

While "Die A Little" constitutes a more orthodox effort to recreate the golden suburbia in the middle of the 20th century, "The Song Is You" is a more wide-ranging experience, outlining the glamour of old Hollywood and revealing the subterrestrial world of the drifters, hopefuls, wannabes and losers: the industry's underclass that threatens to get the lid off the Dream Factory's lieges. Combining echoes of Chandler's Little Sister, Abbott entwines real-life personalities such as the bombshell Barbara Payton (and her failed romances with Franchot Tone and Tom Neal), and aspiring actress Elizabeth Short (turned into the sad celebrity 'The Black Dahlia' due to her macabre murder): "Jean grinned broadly at her, a grin that split her face in two, eerie like a ventriloquist’s dummy, dark on a stage. She grinned broadly and in that grin she told Iolene, All the stories in the world and I wouldn’t pass this up — I’ve seen bad things enough to shake the word “bad” loose from its roots. I can go to the far end of nothing with the best of them. I can pull the pin and roll."

Hop embarks on a dark journey in the demimonde of Tinseltown, reluctantly fighting off his last vestiges of dignity when the demons being to pile up precipitately inside his dormant conscience. There are melancholic winks to Raymond Chandler, especially in the last chapters "Reno, 1946" and "Merry Lake" (which contains the most disturbing twist in the novel).

In the manner of epilogue, in "Four Years Later" Hopkins has established himself as one of the big shots in the film industry: "He spoke to the contract stars and the beauties who floated over from the other studios for a picture or two. They all came to him. Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, too, even Humphrey Bogart. And the women, Jeanne Crain, Doris Day, Jennifer Jones, Jane Wyman, Anne Baxter. They all came. And finer, less flinty fare in the up-and-comers: Janice Rule, Dorothy Malone, Jan Sterling, Carroll Baker. Every day. And, of course, the columnists — the rumor monkeys he worked like a carnival organ grinder. Walter still kicking around, Hedda, Louella, Sheilah, and all their lesser models — all dancing for him."

Chandler's femme fatale glowered at her destiny, she was more romantically evil and her sexuality more abstract; his hero Philip Marlowe was naïvely incorruptible and distant toward women. Abbott's femme fatales (if we can call them so) are imperfect, suffer deep fears and painful resentments. And there are not smooth knights or tough guys who can heal their despair, just abusive bosses, sometimes subspecies of a man, or grifters who stroll through desolate spots, only to find their own scams in the end looking them back in the mirror.

"There was something lost. He could look in the mirror a thousand times and he would never see it again. He’d snuffed it out. Had he known he’d never get it back… Had he known it would be gone forever… He opened the drawer to his bedside table and dug under the handkerchiefs, phone book, cigarettes, matchbooks. He pulled it out. It was thin as a cobweb now, this postcard. It had become delicate with time. Postcards, after all, aren’t meant to last. They’re less than a letter. They’re a fleeting thing. A whisper in the ear reminding you, “Merry Lake’s Waiting for You.”

Article first published as Book Review: The Song is You by Megan Abbott on Blogcritics.