Bite Me, Tony

Author James Ellroy kicks off his latest opus,  The Enchanters , with antihero Fred Otash, and his law enforcement buddies on the Hat Squad ,  brutalizing a kidnapping suspect, and then tossing him off an 80-foot cliff into traffic on the Pasadena Freeway below. That's just the first two pages of Ellroy's densely plotted, staccato-narrated thrill-ride set in the hot-box Hollywood summer of 1962. Populated by real-world luminaries, has-beens, and wannabes, the Tinseltown of The Enchanters  is a Confidential Magazine -inspired den of iniquity where everyone is constantly scheming, spying, lying, and conspiring to gain or maintain the one thing that truly matters: power. There are few good guys (or gals) here, and fewer still by the end of the novel.  If you're not already familiar with Fred Otash, then you obviously haven't read Ellroy's 2021 novel, Widespread Panic , one of my ten favorite books of that year. Consider  The Enchanters  a sequel to...

Based on a play by George S. Kaufmann and Edna Ferber, Dinner at Eight is a movie classic released by MGM in 1934, the year my mom was born. I feel safe in saying that Mom's parents, avid moviegoers though they were, likely gave this film a pass during my grandmother's confinement, their preferences being geared more towards westerns featuring Johnny Mack Brown , Rex Bell and newly-minted star, John Wayne. Dinner at Eight is urbane and sophisticated, the type of witty fare Hollywood excelled in producing when public morale was at its lowest (national unemployment during filming was at 25% and the country was in the doldrums of the Great Depression ). It is equal parts very funny and equal parts mawkish and manipulative, which makes Dinner at Eight a mixed bag for me.  Billie Burke (Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz ) plays Millicent Jordan, a ditzy New York socialite planning a swanky dinner party for visiting British aristocrats. Her husband, Oliver (a fine Lionel ...

Donna Tartt was catapulted to literary fame when Alfred A. Knopf published her debut novel, The Secret History in 1992. Receiving enormous acclaim, The Secret History  signaled the arrival of a major literary talent, among the best of her generation. Yet, to the surprise of many (and disappointment of others) Tartt's ensuing output proved less than prodigious: one novel, The Little Friend , published in 2002, and another, The Goldfinch , published 11 years after that, in 2013. There are also 4 short fictional works (in The New Yorker and Harpers , both 1993, in GQ , 1995, and The Guardian , 2005) and several non-fiction articles, as well as the afterword for the Overlook Press reprint of Charles Portis' True Grit in 2010. When she does write, Donna Tartt is a woman of many words: her three novels run to well over 500 pages each. I only wish she wrote more often.  It is Tartt's insightful and well-structured prose and character development that transforms  The Secret H...

In Jonathan Kemp's first novel, London Triptych , the lives of three gay men intersect and unravel over three distinct periods of English history: the late Victorian era, ultra-conservative 1950's, and the AIDS-haunted, sexually charged 1990's. The connective tissues between the men--the titular city of London and sex work--drives the narrative of their respective stories as each chapter moves through time to examine the loves, obsessions and obstacles that cements their fates.  Jack is a teen-age postal messenger stuck in a poverty-stricken household with a drunken, abusive father and a mistreated mother with too many mouths to feed. As a means of bringing money into the downtrodden household, Jack begins turning tricks on the side. Soon enough, he finds himself in an upscale, all-male brothel whose select clientele includes Oscar Wilde, various posh boys and members of the aristocracy. Based on the notorious Cleveland Street habitues of Victorian London, Jack's advent...