Customer Reviews

Out There in the Dark

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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.

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.

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.

I bought this book on a whim and didn't regret it. Strick pinpoints a particular time and place and puts you right smack in the middle of it. I found it a quick, enjoyable read, but engrossing all the way through. For fans of "Old Hollywood" the name dropping of figures of the era is fun (love the titles of the movies starring Harley Hayden!) and the atmosphere is vividly re-created. What's next on the horizon, Mr. Strick?

I haven't started the book yet. I am taking it to read on my trip to new york

The review I read for this book was quite positive, and since I am a fan of "old Hollywood," I ordered the book. It was most disappointing. Not very well written, cardboard characters, dull plot, tended to ramble. I did finish it, but felt it was a waste of time and money.