Customer Reviews

Earthquake Weather

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Set in the tension-filled days following the deadly L.A. temblor of 1994, Terrill Lee Lankford's Earthquake Weather is a biting satire of Hollywood cast in the form of a murder mystery.

As a longtime filmmaker, Lankford knows the business from the inside out, and he uses that knowledge to flay Tinseltown's overinflated egos and pretensions with razor-sharp wit.

His main character, Mark Hayes, is a development executive stuck in a dead-end job working for a tyrannical movie producer. When the producer is found dead floating his pool, the list of suspects seems to include just about everyone in Hollywood, including Hayes.

Hayes sets out to find the killer himself, along the way encountering a rogue's gallery of showbiz malcontents that will have readers shaking their heads in disbelief, all the while laughing out loud.

Earthquake Weather is the best Hollywood novel since Michael Tolkin's The Player -- and a fine crime story besides.

Reviewed by David Montgomery, Chicago Sun-Times

What better way to grab a reader's attention that to start a book with a major, building destroying earthquake. EARTHQUAKE WEATHER starts with the 1994 Los Angeles quake to get things jumping. We ride it out through the eyes of Mark Hayes who, along with his room-mate handles the terrifying event like a veteran. Apart from providing a rip-roaring start to the book, the earthquake is used as the catalyst for the events that follow over the next few months in Hayes' life.

While L.A. is recovering from the earthquake, Hayes' life gets rocked for a second time when he discovers Dexter Morton floating face down in his swimming pool. Dexter Morton is a movie producer and is Mark's boss, but he is also a detestable man who was sure to have had many enemies any of whom would have had reason to kill him.

Partly because he feels that he may be the number one suspect and partly because he thinks he may know who the killer actually is, Mark throws himself into a spot of amateur sleuthing. The fact that he is suddenly unemployed thanks to his boss's untimely demise has something to do with his interest in the case too.

So what we are treated to is a murder investigation of sorts delving into the more seamy bars and nightclubs around Hollywood. Interestingly, although the main storyline revolves around a murder, it's not the murder itself that gives this book its direction it's the effect that the murder has on the lives of those who were close to the victim.

Through the characters, the grimy second-tier of Hollywood is uncovered as a world of dissatisfied, bitter or downright beaten people who have tried to make it in the industry, only to be eaten up and spat out. Mark Hayes, the narrating voice of the story, works as a lowly creative executive (script reader), working for the tyrannical Dexter Morton. He has aspirations to become a producer himself one day, although as the story progresses that possibility looks more and more remote.

Representing the most common category of failed aspirants is Charity Brown. She is the small-town beauty who came to Hollywood to be an actress and got herself a couple of small movie roles thanks to her stunning looks. Then the roles dried up and she became the trophy girlfriend of Dexter Morton and hopelessly addicted to drugs. The inevitable downward spiral of her life is as common as it is tragic.

Then there is Clyde McCoy, Mark's neighbour and an ex-screenwriter who has turned his back on the business after being burnt on a movie deal years before. He puts forward the plight of the screenwriter as sitting on the lowest rung of the Hollywood ladder. He's a bitter disillusioned man, but he is also the source of many of the insightful stories about the life that he shunned. McCoy is given a fully developed background by Lankford breathing life into his character, yet he remains the great enigma of the story.

I found this to be a hugely entertaining book, with the story smacking of the feeling that, yes, this is what life is actually like for the writers, the aspiring actresses, the hopeful film-makers. Mark's investigation doesn't necessarily roll along at a fast pace, but it opens up the world around him and introduces us to more troubling issues such as the role of drugs and sex in this surreal side of life.

Given that Terrill Lee Lankford has produced, directed and written feature films, his take on the darker side of Hollywood can be considered as coming from the voice of experience. He takes a great poke at a huge and powerful industry while providing a story that is darkly humorous and richly entertaining.

I would categorise EARTHQUAKE WEATHER as Hollywood noir, providing a realistic, but very entertaining insider view of the less glamorous side of the Hollywood film industry.

One line typifies the author's cynical vision of Hollywood: after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the narrator notes that the destruction has caused people to re-evaluate their lives and buy new glassware.

I read that, stopped, read it again. And laughed. Lankford's humor sneaks up on you like that in a finely wrought story of frustrated ambition that seems quintessentially American.

The PW et al. reviews tell enough of the story, but they don't truly communicate how authentic this feels, how deeply revelatory it is of the machinations film people not only take for granted, but assume are life itself.

BTW, there is absolutely nothing about this book that makes it remotely like Jackie Collins as another reviewer believes, because Lankford knows how to write.

Terrill Lankford fulfills and exceeds all genre expectations in his compelling noir, EARTHQUAKE WEATHER ... it is believable in its details about the world and workings of Hollywood, darkly funny in its take on that world, complex and wise in its handling of its varied cast of characters. It has a cynical surface, as any Hollywood novel should have, but under that surface lies a core of compassion as deep as the San Andreas fault. The movie references are organic and relevant to the mystery, and are fun as well. Mark Hayes is a complex narrator, a post-millennium hero, who leads the reader through the maze of this murder mystery with wit and style, and in the creation of Charity James, Lankford pulls off an authentically erotic female character who is not a cliche. EARTHQUAKE WEATHER is the true heir to SUNSET BOULEVARD, and a worthy one.

Billed as a Hollywood crime novel depicting the dark heart of the movie business, Earthquake Weather falls far short. Mike Hayes, the protoganist, is a creative executive in Hollywood who can be moral, heroic, cynical, ambitious, driven, lazy, weak, confused, single-miinded, humorous and a variety of other contradictory things depending on which of the almost 60 short chapters one is reading in this book. As a character this may make Mike human, unfortunately as a narrator it only confuses the reader.

The book's secondary cast is a set of boiler-plate characters - a movie mogul tyrant, Mike's hedonistic room-mate, a beautiful starlet turned crack-whore, street rappin' gang members, a pair of Joe Friday type homocide detectives and world weary yet enigmatic screen writers - who inexplicably show up and disappear. To spice things up there is some contrived tension with a maniacal rattlesnake, the return from the dead of a saloon owner and a couple of stand-offs with our hero and LA gang members. If this is all sounding a little like something Raymond Chandler might have written - well he's in here too, although why is unclear.

The "mystery" involves the death of the movie mogul, (Mike's boss), who is murdered about a third of the way into the book and is solved by Mike, when "everything clicks", about ten pages from the ending. No clues, no pursuit of suspects - just the murder and then the identification of the murderer. The book contains dozens of vignettes, some humorous and some well written but at least in my mind it doesn't hold together as a story, a mystery or a novel.

T.L.L. has got to be one of my favorite writers. I've read his other two books and enjoyed them both immensely. This one didn't disappoint either. His books are never the "feel good novel of the year", but I still find myself laughing despite others' misfortune. There is good characterization and prose. The content is both interesting and makes for a good storyline. The story is written such that you know the main character is flawed, yet you feel empathy for him anyway. In a round-about way, Earthquake Weather takes the few ingredients of Grisham novels that I like and makes it work throughout the whole story.

If possible, I would have given this book 4.5 stars, but since it was a choice between 4 and 5, I'll give it 5. The only problem I had was with the ending. It seemed a little abrupt.

** Somewhat of a Spoiler **

The revalation of the murderer was kind of out of the blue. The main character suddenly has a revelation and figures it out saying "it was obvious". 7/8 of the book goes to examining the main characters ordeals and experiences, then suddenly with 10 pages left, he thinks to himself and says "suddenly I had an epiphany". There was really nothing that contributed to that throughout the story. I won't give too much that could spoil things, but suffice to say, I found it abrupt, and mildly unsatisfying.

However, I understand T.L.L. is working on a sequel and I am eagerly awaiting my chance to get that satisfaction of a proper ending.

Ok, maybe this book isn't comedic by nature, but some of it is laugh out loud funny. I don't mean that that is laughably bad, I mean that some of Lankford's dialogue is just that good. The may not be strikingly original but I will say that the story flys by and really hits the film industry in the solar plexus. The characters are solid and Clyde McCoy has some superior lines. His analysis of the fall of Hollywood (actually of his own career) is not only on the mark, but more geniunely heartbreaking than any of the deaths in the book. The character of Charity is meant to represent a type and it does that, but she isn't someone you naturally want to cheer for. I guess Hollywood does that you. And, the end was just great. Very much like an old movie. You can't beat it.

In recent years Los Angeles has been the epicenter of disasters with an earthquake to add to the list but thirty-five years old Mark Hayes would live no where else. That is work no where else as he actually lives in Sherman Oaks. Mark would like to have had some success with his career at Warner Brothers, but though a creative executive, he has no film credit to his name. Instead he critiques cerebral dumbing scripts.

Much of Hollywood detests Mark's boss producer Dexter Morton, who enjoys their hatred and flaunts it by inviting those who find him an abomination to parties he host because they always come. The morning after Dexter's latest bashing bash, Mark finds his boss dead in the swimming pool. The police feel Mark is the leading suspect though Charity James, the former girlfriend of Mark's studio peer is also high on the casting list. Mark and Charity begin seeking the truth from a clichéd Hollywood B movie with too many subplots to make it on the screen, but this is real life and a happy ending is not necessarily in the script.

Using the 1994 earthquake to set the stage, Terrill Lee Lankford provides an insider amateur sleuth novel with a pinch of a police procedural tale. The story line uses real events in the background; yet the prime thread is low key as Dexter's struggles with his boss (dead and alive) and his lack of success. This is similar to Jackie Collins' delightful Hollywood novels, but with an emphasis on the likeable with no empathy antihero's feeling sorry for himself woes as he faces middle age with nothing but police trouble on his filmography.

Harriet Klausner

The author writes from an insider's view of Hollywood. We've all heard the stories about the"sharks" of movie land. They are all here: the evil producer that's walked over everybody on his way to the top. He throws a party, inviting all his enemies to gloat, and is found murdered the next day.
The writing in this one is smooth and flowing. Once I started, I was hooked until I finished. Enjoyed it so well, I immediately ordered the sequel, Blonde Lightning.
If you like a good mystery written with a deft touch, one can't go wrong with this one.

Mark Hayes has no desire to be in the movies; he just wants to make them...HIS way! He has a dream; he has talent and experience, but after fifteen years of trying to cut himself a slice of cinematic production pie, he not only can't seem to catch a break, but what little luck he has had has been all bad. When this unforgettable noir chiller opens, he's on shaky ground in more ways than one. LA (including his vintage apartment in the San Fernando Valley) has just been rocked by a major earthquake, and all hell is breaking loose on the Warner Bros lot where he and his neurotic co-worker, Alex Richards, are somewhat tenuously employed as creative executives aka D-(for development)-boys by (...) slimy, utterly ruthless but currently hot producer, Dexter Morton. His immediate situation does have one upside. While it costs him his womanizing roommate, the earthquake has given him a chance to finally meet his neighbors who will soon become his friends and allies: former premier-script-writer, Clyde McCoy; mysterious, ganja-smoking T. Zimmerman ('Zim"); and attractive, reclusive Becky Osterhage. Unfortunately, the quake also gave Morton time to take a good look at the script for his next production, and now he's on the rampage. Mark had figured if he could just manage to cope with Morton's abusive behaviors, he might be able to ride his coat-tails long enough to parlay a dead end job and a loser's image into a ticket to ride on his own. However, his plans to keep his cool at all costs start to unravel when Dexter fires its original author and coerces Mark into mavening a ghost-writing deal with a local hack to revise the script with some very illegal money involved. He gets further enmeshed in his boss's unsavory lifestyle at Morton's 50th birthday bash after he plays reluctant Good Samaritan and rescues Charity James...Morton's mistress...from his brutality during the course of the evening. Going back early the next morning to retrieve her possessions, Mark finds Morton face-down "doing a William Holden" in his swimming pool, and his frantic call to 911 quickly brings the LAPD, eager to charge him with Murder One once they can discount accidental death. From that point on, don't plan on putting this spellbinder down. Mark is a clueless Alice blundering through the warped underbelly of Hollywood's looking-glass world, desperately searching for answers while trying to corner a remorseless killer before he winds up very dead himself.

To quote classic noir hero, Rick Blaine, this wickedly wry novel has "...a WOW! finish!" which is exactly what I was thinking when I turned the last page with its pluperfect zinger and finally shut off my light. Tour-de-force plotting! Wonderfully real (and wonderfully realized) characters are just the tip of this blockbuster of a literary iceberg. Mr. Lankford's gritty, insider's take on the film business made fascinating reading, but it was his style that completely blew me away. The writing here is simply so good...so true to its genric predecessors...that savoring its nuances was a genuinely delightful experience. Long and short...if there were a Richter scale for modern noir, "Earthquake Weather" really is 'the Big one'!