The Song Is You (Crime Scene) [Large Print] [Hardcover]

Megan Abbott (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2007 | Series: Crime Scene

On October 7, 1949, dark-haired starlet Jean Spangler kissed her five-year-old daughter good-bye and left for a night shoot at a Hollywood studio. She was never seen again. The only clues left behind: a purse with a broken strap found in a nearby park, a cryptic note, and rumours about mobster boyfriends and ill-fated romances with movie stars.
Drawing on this true-life missing person case, Megan Abbott's The Song Is You tells the story of Gil 'Hop' Hopkins, a smooth-talking Hollywood publicist whose career, despite his complicated personal life, is on the rise. It is 1951, two years after Jean's disappearance, and Hop finds himself unwillingly drawn into the still unsolved mystery by a friend of Jean who blames Hop for concealing details about Jean's whereabouts the night she vanished. Driven by guilt and fear of blackmail, Hop delves into the case himself, feverishly trying to stay one step ahead of an intrepid female reporter also chasing the story. Hop thought he'd seen it all, but what he uncovers both tantalizes and horrifies him as he plunges deeper and deeper into Hollywood's substratum in his attempt to uncover the truth.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Fans of James Ellroy nostalgic for his gritty, cynical take on postwar Hollywood in such noir classics as L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia should enjoy Edgar-finalist Abbott's second novel (after Die a Little). The author uses a less-celebrated real-life crime—the disappearance of actress Jean Spangler from Los Angeles in 1949—as her hook to spin a downbeat tale about a journalist-turned-studio-flack, Gil "Hop" Hopkins. Hop was with Spangler, a stunner but a second-rate acting talent, the last night she was seen, and harbors guilt over leaving her in the company of a famous acting and singing duo, Marv Sutton and Gene Merrel, who have a reputation for rough play. Hop's efforts at amateur sleuthing unearth a blackmail ring and a possible mob connection to Spangler's disappearance. Abbott deserves credit for resurrecting this virtually forgotten case and concocting a plausible fictional solution to a true crime. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Apply a sly feminist sensibility to postwar Hollywood noir, and you get a sordid saga in which women normally consigned to one-note victimhood turn out to be alarmingly complicit in their own downfalls. At least that's the tale Abbott delivers in this solid follow-up to 2005's lustrous Die a Little. Gil Hopkins--Hop to his friends, of which he has either a million or none, depending on your definition--is a studio fixer who helped cover up a song-and-dance team's involvement in the disappearance of an aspiring actress. When a gal pal shows up years later demanding help, Hop tries coming to grips with the conscience he never knew he had. A fevered, schizophrenic exploration of L.A.'s darkest corners follows as Hop opens cans of worms only to work desperately to keep any from wriggling free. It's Hollywood as meat grinder for Midwesterners too eager to swap snow for stardust, a place that can leave one "uncomfortable, disgusted, and vaguely aroused at the same time." And although it wallows in third-act melodrama, it's tasty stuff. Frank Sennett
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 367 pages
• Publisher: Thorndike Press (May 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786294841
• ISBN-13: 978-0786294848
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,946,033 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

MEGAN ABBOTT is the Edgar-winning author of the novels Die a Little, The Song Is You, Queenpin and Bury Me Deep, which was nominated for six awards: the Edgar Award, Hammett Prize, the Macavity, Anthony and Barry Awards and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her writing has appeared in Wall Street Noir, Detroit Noir, Best Crime and Mystery Stories of the Year, Phoenix Noir, Storyglossia, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Believer, Queens Noir and the LA Noire Anthology.

Her upcoming novel, The End of Everything, comes out in July 2011.

Born in the Detroit area, she graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.A. in English Literature and went on to receive her Ph.D. in English and American literature from New York University. She lives in Queens, New York City.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Song is a Hit, January 21, 2007

By 

J. Nazare - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Song Is You: A Novel (Hardcover)

Megan Abbott, in her terrfic second novel, The Song is You, proves a writer with a keen understanding of hard-boiled noir and a vivid sense of the time period of which she writes. The novel instantly transports the reader to the Hollywood scene of the mid-20th Century, in all its grandeur and grotesqueness. Readers interested in (the inner workings of) Hollywood will love the sense of realism that this novel creates.

Inevitably, the comparisons will be to the work of James Ellroy (Like The Black Dahlia, The Song is You offers a fictional extrapolation of a real-life unsolved mystery from mid-century L.A.). In many ways, though, Abbott's is a quieter and tighter novel, a more affecting reading experience. Abbott deserves kudos for foregoing the use of first-person narration by a male protagonist A)because it's been done to death in this genre, and B)because the third-person perspective simply works better here. As readers, we are able to get inside the protagonist's head and experience his doubts and dilemmas as he proceeds with his investigations (rather than having a first-person narrator telling us his story in retrospect). We are on closer terms with the whole character, and not just recipients of the voice of a narrator. This, of course, only heightens the impact of the novel's ending (which is as moving as it is surprising).

I recommend this book highly not just to fans of noir-tinged mysteries, but also to anyone who appreciates good writing. Like many of the characters and settings depicted here, the prose is wonderfully seductive. Some genre fiction is meant to be hastily consumed, and some is meant to be relished. The Song is You definitely falls into the latter category.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Your new favorite SONG, April 5, 2007

By 

Shannon Clute "Clute at noircast" (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Song Is You: A Novel (Hardcover)

Megan Abbott's THE SONG IS YOU may be the best throwback hard-boiled novel ever written. It's part Chandler, part Ellroy, yet all her own--a masterpiece of nostalgic longing and pulp nerve.

Abbott's fictional worlds are as glamorous and ugly as Rick's Café Américain--teeming with life, and darkness both foreign and familiar. They make you say "what the hell" and belly up to the bar, where an endless procession of compelling lowlifes and tarnished heroes file past you like a cortège, so close you can smell their breath as they whisper stories you'd swear were your own.

Her prose is bourbon straight-up; it makes your heart burn and your guts hurt, and as it goes to your head a crooked smile twists your mug and sticks. All you can do is nod, and mutter, "you're right, Megan, you've got us pegged--we're all suckers." But you hang around like a bad blind date. Why? Because somewhere in your aching marrow you know the French are right: melancholy is the sweetest emotion.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Literary Noir, March 4, 2007

By 

Dorene (West Bloomfield, MI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Song Is You: A Novel (Hardcover)

Megan Abbott has made a solid fan of me. She's smart, she's talented and she knows how to do her homework. The dark underbelly of 50s Hollywood, replete with characters whose motivations run the gamut from simple survival to satisfying their grotesque and sometimes terrifying urges, is evoked effortlessly in prose the big boys of noir can't touch. The Song is You may be a noir fan's dream, but the writing is so lyrical and precise that this book will appeal to all readers of great fiction.