3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"But Hollywood in a monster.", July 3, 2008
This review is from: The Last Embrace (Paperback)
Weaving into her novel a series of murders in 1949 Los Angeles, and loosely basing her work on the disappearance of the statuesque Jean Spangler, a 27-year-old actress, and dancer who mysteriously disappeared in October 1949, Denise Hamilton has written a tense and compelling mystery that encapsulates every part imaginable of this multi-faceted and at times darkly menacing city.
Lily Kessler, an ex-OSS investigator who worked in Europe with her late fiancé, Major Joseph Croggan, has just arrived in Los Angeles to search for her sister-in-law, Doreen Croggan. Lily had never met Kitty, a girl who'd come to Hollywood dreaming of stardom in 1944, around the same time that Lily had fed to Europe. Doreen was a fiercely spirited girl who'd graduated from walk-on roles to a studio contract, changed her name to Kitty Hayden, and seemed awash in projects right up until last week when she disappeared into the L.A. air.
Let loose in the city of her childhood, "with its sugar-white beaches and pastel bungalows with red tile roofs," Lily ends up staying at the Hollywood Wilcox Boarding House for young Ladies, where under the under the watchful, strange eyes of the officious Mrs. Potter, the girl is positively overwhelmed by the ghosts and shadows of Kitty that no amount no sunshine could possibly dispel. It is her Lily's friendships with Kitty's roommates, their casual cruelty and silky competitiveness, that tell Lily much about the reality of Kitty's genteel poverty, which contrasted sharply with Mrs. Croggan's boasts about her daughter taking Hollywood by storm.
Lily soon learns from the other girls that the camera loved her sister-in-law: "even if she's only on screen for five minutes, you see the vulnerability, the nakedness, it's like you gaze through her eyes and see her soul." When Kitty's body is discovered in a ravine beneath the Hollywood sign, strangled, her purse and shoe missing, but with no obvious signs of sexual violation, the heartbroken Lily is empowered to delve even further into her sister-in-law's murky existence in those final days before she was murdered.
Teaming up with local newspaper photographer Harry Jack and then with two detectives from the Central Homicide Bureau, Detective Magruder, built like a pickle barrel and the loose limbed but dashingly handsome Detective Pico, Lily steadily pieces together the motives for Kitty's death. The girls at the Boarding House, with their swirls and eddies of conflicted allegiances, positively swear that Kitty had no vices - she worked long hours and dated a lot, but had no one steady, except of course, the RKO special effects technician Max Vranizan who had a crush on Kitty and who Kitty's roommates warned her was eccentric and prone to obsessions.
Had Max tried to control Kitty then killed her when that proved impossible? With the support of Pico, whom Lily becomes completely smitten with even though she suspects he knows things about Kitty's murder he hasn't yet told her, Lily tries to build her case. Unfortunately, the discovery of Kitty's body has also gets the attention of some powerful players, particularly local mobsters, Mickey Cohen and Jack Dragna who are currently are engaged in a fierce turf war that is reverberating throughout Los Angeles' criminal underworld.
This is also a company town where the movie studios rule, often desperate to protect the images of their movie stars who are considered gods and who think they can do anything they want, yet are also fearful of the negative publicity that would damn their careers and scandalize their marriages.
As Hamilton's narrative powerfully swirls and unfurls atop each page, the net begins to draw tight around Lily, the search for Kitty's killers and indeed the attentions of Pico unleashing strange desires inside of her. Where characters are more often than not fuelled by blackmail and greed and where criminals abound in a city of lost souls, Lily, now in danger of her own life, must try to navigate her way through this anti-paradise, its dreams written on parchment-thin bougainvillea that is in danger of crumbling with the first breeze of fall. A page-turning mystery from the outset, Lily finds herself battling a possible betrayal even as she finds herself the center of the novel's violent conclusion high atop the Hollywood Hills and beneath the sign, that eternal and almost mythical symbol of all that has come to represent Los Angeles. Mike Leonard July 08.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing Los Angeles Noir..., November 30, 2008
This review is from: The Last Embrace (Paperback)
Reviews of this novel suggested a Los Angeles noir novel with echoes of Raymond Chandler. But I found it frustrating and disappointing on multiple levels.
Hamilton writes skillful prose and creates an interesting story, but far from the tough-guy language of Chandler and traditional noir there is a girlish quality that runs through the voice of this story. Her heroine is a former OSS WW II spy, which is a promising idea. But rather than convincingly using skills she acquired as a spy, she barrels around like an amateur sleuth putting herself into danger time and again, showing little judgment.
As the story moves along coincidences pile up upon one another, characters cross paths too conveniently and as we get toward the later portion of the novel, clues and leads that were readily discoverable much earlier in the story conveniently emerge when it suits the narratives purposes. Hamilton tale becomes increasingly convoluted, so that she ends up stumbling over herself explaining things away. Soon it becomes clear that much of the action of the novel was simply a series of convoluted red herrings that simply pad the story's length. And most frustratingly once we reach the unmasking of the real killers and the mystery's solution, it has little to do with most of the story we've just read. Aside from being somewhat out of left field...it feels minor and disappointing.
Hamilton also disregards the construction of most noir detective fiction...and most mysteries by intercutting the point-of-view amongst several major characters and even veers off to include moments with minor characters. This also is a frustrating direction for a mystery. In for instance Micheal Connelly's Bosch novels, we remain in Bosch's perspective, discovering clues and leads as he does. But by diverting to other points of view the reader becomes aware that the mystery is being created by the AUTHOR WITHOLDING INFORMATION. In an interview at the end of the book, Hamilton says she used this narrative structure because she envisioned the book as movie. Maybe better to envision the book as book! Clearly, she seems more influenced by noir cinema than noir fiction.
Hamilton also allowed some anachronisms to creep into her 1949. Odd, for a writer who spent time researching the stop action animation techinque that went into the movie MIGHTY JOE YOUNG and spends pages explaining this. But at one point one character refers to another as Ms...at least two decades before that word had been invented. At another point a character uses having been at a tv 'taping' -- about a decade before videotape techhology was invented and a good 15 years before this was a common place way of shooting tv shows. At another point a character pulls a reel-to-reel tape recorder out of a drawer -- a nice trick in an era when the average reel-to-reel recorder was the size of a suitcase.
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