Out There in the Dark [Paperback]

Wesley Strick (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 7, 2006

"Out There in the Dark is an old school Hollywood blockbuster. . . . A terrific, grab-you-by-the-throat movieland epic."
---Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight

 

Since leaving Berlin, the proud, distinguished émigré director Dieter Seife has had to content himself cranking out B movies for Superior Pictures in Hollywood during World War II. Finally, Superior's founder, Arthur Lustig, gives Seife the chance to prove himself on a lavish, three-hankie "woman's picture" titled The Big Betrayal.
Set to star is Harley Hayden, the young (and 4-F) actor who's engaged to Lustig's daughter. Though the town's biggest names are in uniform, Seife is convinced he can find a better male lead for his movie. Hayden counters by hiring a disgraced ex-cop named Roarke to look into Seife's private life---does the secretive German have something to hide? What Roarke uncovers is dangerous, disturbing . . . and, maybe, a very different mystery than it seems.
With its atmosphere of lockstep patriotism and rampant paranoia, Out There in the Dark provocatively speaks to our own time even as it brings to life the sordid side of 1940's Hollywood.

 

 

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Strick captures the freewheeling but edgy atmosphere of WWII-era Hollywood. Harley Hayden, a handsome but limited actor à la Ronald Reagan, is conducting an affair with Eleanor Lustig, whose father, Arthur, is the head of Superior Studios. As Hayden tries to make his way up the Hollywood ladder, Arthur hires a detective, Mike Roarke, to make sure the actor is a suitable suitor for his daughter. As Hayden passes muster, he gets a break when German director Dieter Seife—who changes his name to Derek Sykes, more palatable to the American moviegoing public—gives him a starring role in his next picture. Hayden's chance comes at a cost, as Derek turns Hayden into his personal whipping boy, and the director's mercurial, neurotic behavior also conceals a secret that Roarke unveils. Strick shows a fine feel for the period and the nuances of Hollywood film life, and his character writing is rock-solid. But problems surface in the tepid plotting: the material dealing with Hayden's career is well crafted but lacks tension, and the Seife/Sykes subplot arrives too late to have much dramatic impact. (Feb. 14)
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Review

"Stunning! Simply the best Hollywood novel to glide down the freeway since Budd Schulberg and Nathanael West were plying the genre."
---John Blumenthal, author of Millard Fillmore, Mon Amour and What's Wrong with Dorfman?
 
"Wesley Strick's debut novel is a masterful and delicious rethinking of all our Hollywood favorites. From the hard-drinking, cynical-headed, and tenderhearted private dick, to the mysterious and wealthy beauty who only seems in need of rescue; from the ominous, autocratic, and possibly perverse German director, to the ruthless Jewish studio head with a tragic past; from the B actor whose narcissism seems harmless, to the starlet whose innocence hides voracious sexuality---thanks to Strick's deft narrative and witty insights, none of them are who they seem. What in the hands of lesser writers would be shallow clichés leaps into vivid and profound life in Out There in the Dark, a delightfully entertaining mystery that finally reveals itself as a funnier, spookier, and smarter novel than anything I've read about how celebrity and politics have come to make so happy, so lasting, and so dangerous a marriage."
---Rafael Yglesias, author of Fearless

"If you love Hollywood, read Wes Strick's new novel. His actors are sexier, his directors more maniacal, and his executives more Byzantine than their counterparts in our world of media monoliths. Out There in the Dark does what a terrific book about Hollywood must---it makes backstabbing, failing upwards, and cheating glorious fun."
---Robert Cort, author of Action!

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books; First Edition edition (February 7, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312343817
• ISBN-13: 978-0312343811
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,370,274 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I grew up in New York City in the Sixties. Graduated in the mid-Seventies from U.C. Berkeley, where I studied creative writing with the poet Thom Gunn. Returning to New York, I worked as a rock journalist, writing for Circus, Creem and Rolling Stone. (I was lucky enough to interview and profile such seminal Punk and New Wave bands as Talking Heads, Ramones, Blondie, and Television when they were all but unknown outside of Lower Manhattan.) Sold my first screenplay to Warner Bros. just before my 30th birthday, then moved out to L.A. with my girlfriend Marla -- now my wife -- and have written or rewritten a dozen Hollywood movies (including True Believer, Arachnophobia, Cape Fear, Wolf, The Saint, Return To Paradise, A Nightmare on Elm Street) and done numerous production polishes on films by Tim Burton, John Woo and others. Since 1995 I've been a creative adviser at the Sundance Institute's Screenwriters Lab (helping talented people who may or may not have needed my help, like Miguel Arteta, Sherman Alexie and Miranda July). "Out There in the Dark" is my first novel, "Whirlybird" is my second. Marla and I have two sons -- one named for Jake Gittes, the other for Sam Spade.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Love Letter to LA Noir Lore, March 8, 2006

By 

Konstman (Siberia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Out There in the Dark (Paperback)

Wesley Strick's Out There In The Dark is funny, scary, and ultimately touching. Set in WWII Hollywood and featuring a young movie star, an ex-cop PI, a Nazi refugee film director, and even an evil doctor, the story reads like a staccato dream, delivered with a twang that is part Chandler, part Nabokov. True to period, characters speak in hard-boiled haikus as they navigate their twisted plotlines fueled by wartime paranoia. But there is more. Extremely well researched, the book eventually veers into epic territory, transcending cleverness for wisdom, and not merely about Hollywood, but about what used to be called the human condition.
Note to self: worth having in hardcover for multiple re-read potential.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 1942 vs 2006, April 9, 2006

By 

Gary Johns (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Out There in the Dark (Paperback)

On the surface, "Out There in the Dark," Wesley Strick's debut novel, is a well-written, concisely researched, mystery novel that is sure to delight fans of 1940 Hollywood drama. As a result of the subject matter, some readers may want to compare Wesley's book to works by Chandler, but this is somewhat unfair (albeit flattering); Mr. Strick's contemporary, fresh, straightforward writing style enhances the storyline with its clean approach to everyday language. Additionally, and most importantly, strip away the references to the 1940's and here lies a treatise on today's "glorious" world of Tinsel Town.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding Novel of Hollywood, May 28, 2006

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Out There in the Dark (Paperback)

It doesn't seem to me that in 1940 the private eye might be speculating on which luscious movie star was causing Harley Hayden to cheat on his girlfriend--"But who? Rita, Greta, Ingrid, Lana?" Of these names only Greta Garbo was a great star in 1940--and would a savvy eye like Roarke seriously suspect her of having a back street affair with a man? The other names seem of a later date, say 1943, 1944, 1945, 1946, when all had achieved superstardom. (Each had made movies by 1940 of course, but none were yet at Garbo's level.) Outside of that one little error I congratulate Wesley Strick on having everything right, the most difficult thing of all.

I shouldn't say that, because he has done something incomparably different, he has selected a pair of humans who seem between them to balance out between them, like the scales of Scorpio, all that is good and bad in Hollywood. We might compare his allegory to the famous Hollywood novel by Christopher Isherwood, PRATER VIOLET, and I think we would say the laurels go to Strick. I wasn't one hundred percent convinced by the implacable anti-Semitism of the detective, Roarke, which doesn't go any place and just provides for innumerable scornful and offensive putdowns of Hollywood Jews. And yet perhaps the storytelling needed him as a fulcrum from which we get to view the mysterious boy actor, Harley Hayden, and the tragic German director-meister Deiter Seife. Beyond the fireworks of the plot, we see in miniature the ways in which the escapees from the Third Reich who made their way to Los Angeles in the 1930s changed the movie capital forever, providing, if not a moral corrective as has sometimes been assumed, but a cracked lens that skewed all vision into a personal, ethical darkness--an aesthetic choice Strick seems to understand beautifully. This novel is so much better than the scripts Strick has written for Hollywood (FINAL ANALYSIS, WOLF, THE SAINT) one feels that maybe he went there as a spy--a chiel among them. OUT THERE IN THE DARK feels like one of the books we'll be reading in 100 years.