Customer Reviews

L.A. Despair: A Landscape of Crimes & Bad Times

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

as Dick Lane used to say on the old TV shows. John Gilmore takes us back to huddle with the King of Western Swing, Spade Cooley, and this is the first and most exhaustive account I have read of Spade Cooley and his conviction for the first-degree murder of his wife, Ella Mae. "Whoa Nellie" Dick Lane is quoted regarding Cooley's drinking problem which got him fired from TV, and Cooley's downhill story is the most tragic account in Gilmore's "five bleeding sides of beef," as he calls them in the well-written introduction by Anthony Mostrom. Western swing music was put on the map by Cooley, ingrained into the American country-western scene, and Gilmore's handling of the Cooley tragedy is detailed and sympathetic, He is able to separate the tortured man from his musical brilliance. Equally, I have given this book five stars for each of the five "side of beefs," each tale unfolding souls as tortured as Cooley's; John Holmes, gas-chamber bound Barbara Graham, mass-killer Billy Cook, poor Barbara Payton, the fallen star. The book appears as a mosaic set into the consciousness of L.A., the megalopolis that, according to Gilmore, knows no pity. A very hard to put down book.

If you enjoyed his other collections of anecdotes and analysis of the Hollywood sub-culture then you will enjoy this collection.I especially enjoyed the chapter on John C. Holmes which actually had some very good insights on Eddie Nash that had me wanting to know even more about this arab Godfather.Fascinating reading is to be had here without a doubt!

A mind-blowing read. Hard to take in at times it is so stark and the style so jabbing, intricate and hard-boiled. The images Gilmore summons up are unforgettable and the photographs shocking. They are sorrowful and hard to look at if you are not a crime scene freak. Especially harsh are the shots of the children victims of William Cook, raised from an abandoned well and laid in a row along with the murdered mother and father. I have read Gilmore's other books, but this one seems different. The writing is sharp as a razors edge and dark, so very dark it makes you want to run into the sunshine and bathe in the glory of being alive.

I have followed the work of John Gilmore for several years, the fiction, nonfiction, and true crime. By far this is his most aggressive work; an overwhemilng quality to it, thrusting at you as it does. Few writers have this capacity. The tragic timbre that lays beneath the surface of this work is devastating. A true presentation of where contemporary literature should be and, unfortunately, is not. A fine book on the vanguard of this author's body of work.

The most thorough and accurate account of the life, crimes and times of hooker/murderess Barbara Graham that has ever been presented. For the first time, the real story unfolds before us. The public has been brainwashed by the media (movies/television) into thinking Graham could have been railroaded when there was NEVER a question of her guilt, only a question of whether she would get the gas chamber with her child-murdering co-horts, Jack Santo and Emmit Perkins. Graham was convicted of beating an elderly lady to death with a pistol. The later execution of all three (the same day) in the California gas chamber is told in precise, hair-raising detail. The other accounts in L.A. DESPAIR, expecially the story of mass-killer William "Billy" Cook, are without equal in the true crime genre. I saw the movie "WONDERLAND" about John Holmes, but came away knowing nothing new about the case. Now, in Gilmore's account, "BAD EDDIE AND OTHER NO GOOD PEOPLE," the story takes full-blown, grotesque shape. John Holmes was a true L.A. "mutant," a tragic, awful story of the darkest side of the street. The book is a balance betwen the crazy, the bloody, and the remarkable. An amazing read, packed with fantastic photographs.

I bought the book mainly for the chapter on the infamous Wonderland murders in 1981. And while the author's prose is, as some have stated, sparkling, I have to say that I stopped reading after finding numerous factual errors in just this chapter. Luckily for me, it was the first one.

For instance, two pictures of dead victims at the crime scene (Ron Launius and Joy Miller) were incorrectly labeled (names transposed), despite the fact that the photos in the book were still shots captured from the famous LAPD crime scene video, where detectives walked through the house and identified exactly the room they were in at the time.

Susan Launius was found alive in the same room with her dead husband, not, as the author writes, in another bedroom.

Perhaps most unsettling was the author's version of the murder event itself. Given the fact that Holmes never testified at any legal proceeding, and despite the fact that none of the actual killers were identified, it's obvious the author invented the whole dialog.

These are just a few examples of what caused me to discard the whole book.

Moreover, I believe it was a wasted opportunity. There has not been a serious literary treatment of the Wonderland murders. "Four on the Floor," a book by the two investigating detectives, apparently was never published. "Long Time Money and Lots of Cocaine" is merely a reprint of the transcript from John Holmes's preliminary hearing.

Ironically, the most informative source on the crimes is the 2003 movie "Wonderland" starring Val Kilmer.

No one gets across the scorching picture of the "dark side" more disturbingly than John Gilmore. Quoted in books, media, television interviews, bogs, journals, updates, etc; he is an icon of the true crime, Hollywood memoir and "pulp fiction" generation. He has lived, loved, performed and written about some of the most exciting people of the past half-century, individuals who we, not even born at the time, only admire or worship from afar. At the risk of presumption, John Gilmore appears to have lived as a wandering poet through the American headline and tabloid culture, telling his tales and travels, and we are the richer or maybe smarter for them. He is still going strong, as in L.A. DESPAIR: A Landscape of Crimes & Bad Times. In slashing boldly to get at the "the thing in itself" (as he says in interviews), he often risks our displeasure, our consternation, even our anger. A few individuals throw rotten tomatoes and often bricks. But his "landscape" of fans, the majority applauding him, understand this is expected of any controversial figure. Gilmore has stated that he anticipates the "displeasure of many..." every time he writes a book. They step forth quickly, the same as in any oppressive regime, seeking to squelch original voices that challenge the status quo, the propaganda, or, more succinctly, the basically colorful albeit fake world of the TV sitcom and other ersatz or pop-psychology offerings.

L.A. DESPAIR: A Landscape of Crimes & Bad Times captures a section of the human condition we choose to brush under the carpet because it fails to guarantee a profit for the promoters of mediocrity. Gilmore's "Landscape" is a hostile, threatening environment as an earlier reviewer has suggested, indeed a "mad dog" world we are a part of, the same as each is connected by our humanity to the tragedies around us. The undertow in Gilmore's work brings this point uncomfortably home. We thrive in loveless sex, lust, drugs, murder, bloody, bloody murder; Hollywood glitter and suicide by gun shot, poison or pills. He writes of desperation and failure to love, of DESPAIR and tragedy, and this is LITERATURE. Not to be confused with a sitcom or fan zine or a pizza or bag of popcorn. This is ART, as Gilmore is quoted in the introduction by Anthony Mostrom, his "five bleeding sides of beef."

But a word of CAUTION: Gilmore's writing hits below the belt. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Indeed, L.A. DESPAIR "goes for the heart as well as the throat,: and Gilmore has never been as definite as in this presentation. It is impossible to take the book lightly. Readers seeking "light" reading must look elsewhere. L.A. DESPAIR is about human horror. It is about the failure we face every step of the way through life. I was left with the thought, we can be thankful to whatever gods one chooses for allowing the life we own, and the fact that we're still alive says there is HOPE, and through hope there is life. As the word DESPAIR signifies, this book is about hoplessness in the megalopolis of L.A., a city with its own code of horrors, the "front office," as it were, being the manufacturers of high-priced illusion, and then there is the bitter pill and how the cost translates down to us.

Take him or leave him. One is hard pressed to deny John Gilmore's special niche as a major, literary voice, and unquestionably he is one of the movers and SHAKERS of our culture. For example: SEVERED: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder; Gilmore's book about Elizabeth Short, her dreams and her hideous murder, was the first-ever true crime book on the life and death of the Black Dahlia. It has subsequently changed the face of an industry. Few of the nay-sayers can say as much. L.A.DESPAIR is an astonishing book.

In his introduction, Anthony Mostrom describes this book as "Portraits of the Unredeemed: John Gilmore's Desolate Landscape." And a desolate landscape it is for certain. These five stories of the famous or near-famous are raw, shocking, and written in the best Gilmore "true crime" style. These are true crime classics, painstakingly researched and told from an insider's perspective.

"Bad Eddie and Other No Good People" details the life of John Holmes and his benefactor, sometimes friend Eddie Nash. In his heyday, Holmes was hailed as the God of Porn, for reasons that will be clear to readers. Eddie Nash was a ruthless hood who knew how to grease wheels and make piles of money. Their uneasy alliance forms a backdrop to Holmes' doomed career and final years as pathetic has been flunky to
Nash.

"Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye" is a Hollywood success story gone horribly bad. Barbara Payton showed up in Hollywood an electrifyingly beautiful young girl and left as a ruined shell, feet first. Her early promise fizzled fast thanks to drugs, alcohol, and insatiable sexuality. Franchot Tone thought she was just what the doctor ordered
and was briefly married to her. Bob Hope enjoyed her wildness for awhile. Barbara had an untamable wild streak and took whatever she wanted, but in the end Hollywood showed her who was boss.

"Hard Luck" shares the awful life journey of Billy Cook, a soulless young man with H-A-R-D L-U-C-K spelled out on the fingers of one hand. Those who knew him said Billy lived in his own world, totally lacking in human compassion, feeling, or sentiment. The murderous rampage he cut through life is brilliantly written and powerfully
told by Gilmore. Cook comes off as what he was: an unloved stray cur that somehow survives to adulthood with no reason to love or trust anyone. From birth to death, he caught no breaks and gave none.

Barbara Graham is the infamous "Ice Blonde" with an angelic face, curvaceous body, and emptiness where her conscience should be. Graham followed her impulses, used people for her own ends, and was never sorry for anything. Except for her outward beauty, she had no saving graces. She liked to hang with criminals and murderers and no
amount of pretending to be sweet and innocent could save her in the end. Her part in the vicious slaying of an elderly woman takes Graham to the gas chamber.

In "Shame on You" we follow the meteoric rise and spectacular burn out of Spade Cooley, Hollywood's King of Western Swing. The popular "Fiddlin' Cowboy" entertained his fans in movies and on TV, was a friend of Roy Rogers, and built an empire with his musical talent. But like so many other phenomena before and since, his weaknesses ruined him. The shocking murder of Cooley's wife ends his career, and his
privileged life.

A review of Gilmore's work in Maximum Rock 'n Roll says, "John Gilmore is one of the best nonfiction writers of our time, the type of writer that grabs you by the throat and by the heart." I agree totally with that assessment. His topics may be unsettling, and not for the squeamish, but his writing is pure Grade A.

review by Laurel Johnson for Midwest Book Review

L.A. DESPAIR gives us a tragic, fragmented landscape of degradation and misery; each portrait reaches relentlessly into the deeper, dark side of this thing called human. What unfolds across Gilmore's desolate landscape is a bleak shadow-world populated by desperate people; some lives without promise, others grabbing feverishly for anything and everything we are told to dream for: success, fame, love; all are shocked asunder by these embedded forces Gilmore lays bare: self-destruction, psychological crucifixion and plain, horrific self-deception. The tragic consequences hurtle through the author's episodes (as in Spade Cooley and Barbara Payton) with a stark, merciless accuracy that jolts the reader beyond the hard-boiled into a terrifying confrontation with the forces that can and do go wrong.

It has been established that in previous books, Gilmore has revealed a brave, new kind of writing in which the genres of true crime, investigative journalism and biography collapsed beneath the brutal intimacies of personal recollection. His great capacity to peel away the layers and reveal the twisted deception that lurks within our idealized vision of beauty, fame, and success. He puls no punches in this vivid, exciting read and show a profound grasp of human perversions and life experience. Here, in L.A. DESPAIR, he appears to clarify a personal vision of human hell, embodying a predominantly hard-boiled theme so powerful it supersedes the ordinary concepts of an unsentimental, matter-of-fact approach to violence and death. Gilmore's writing is powerful and unique and rivets us as he dashes across this horrific landscape like a mad dune-buggy amidst a jungle of emotional wreckage... A sorrowful history of an equally mad environment. This book is a major accompolishment by a major writer and will be read and re-read with no end in sight.

John Gilmore's L.A. DESPAIR is a pure literary wonder. I'm in agreement with another reviewer about the originality of this book. It shrieks originality and one of a kind style. Here is an impassioned voyage into the back alleys, the mind haunts, fears and terrors of "the dark side of the moon". I highly recommend this to all goths, geeks, freaks, underground readers and the intelligensia of today's literary world. Possibly too strong for a lot of people, but wow, does Gilmore know how to deliver a knock-out punch. I must add that I find it abominable that a reviewer(or one using different names)singles a section on Barbara Payton to discredit Gilmore, urging readers not to buy L.A. DESPAIR, but wait for the reviewer's book to be published and buy that. This "reviewer" obviously does not belong to the big following of ardent John Gilmore fans. Maybe some sour grapes? As Gary Indiana says, Gilmore's the greatest, and L.A. DESPAIR sits tops the stacks of this author's exciting, hard-hitting books. He's Mister L.A., and maybe a little too hard-hitting for the movie mag fans? Hey, get real!