It is "true confessions" The best detective novel ever written about Los Angeles?
I well remember the day I first saw John Gregory Dunne’s classic Los Angeles murder mystery, “True Confessions.” It was 1984 or 1985 and I was in downtown Los Angeles on a sweltering summer day. I was a financial guy at the Atlantic Richfield Company, working at the ARCO Tower headquarters at the corner of Fifth and Flower Streets, and had walked across the street to the strangely magnificent (and non-air-conditioned) Los Angeles Central Library, built in 1926 by the architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue in a style that has since been known as “Egyptian Revival”. I was there primarily to research Gulf Oil Company’s annual reports in an effort to gather some necessary statistics for my boss, who was doing an analysis of the company’s financials before ARCO made an offer for it (the company was acquired more late by our competitor, Chevron).
Taking a break from my chores, I walked through the huge library, looking at shelf after shelf of fiction. And there it was, standing out on the shelf in a freshly varnished cloth binding of the kind that public libraries used to put on books in those days.
“True Confessions,” I thought to myself, “wasn’t that the name of a pulp magazine that featured detective stories in the 1930s?”
If I recognized the name John Gregory Dunne, it was only as the husband of the much more famous Joan Didion, who had established her reputation twenty years earlier with her essay collection “Slouching Toward Bethlehem.” But the title alone was enough to grab me, and I checked out “True Confessions” without tearing up the cover before I got home with it.
If Robert Towne had written “Chinatown” as a novel and not a screenplay, he would surely be in the running for “best Los Angeles crime novel ever written.” That’s the only story that comes close, in my opinion, to “True Confessions.” I suppose there are those who would defend one of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe stories, and there would be some justice to that, but Chandler’s writing sounds a bit dated by now, and “True Confessions” still reads today as if it were just written.
The story begins with the shocking discovery of the naked body of a beautiful young woman, cut cleanly in two at the stomach, an unidentified murder victim found torn in two on a vacant lot, in an area north of downtown the city. The joking and highly competitive Los Angeles press soon gave the corpse a catchy nickname, then as now a favorite pastime of jaded crime reporters, “The Tramp Virgin,” and suddenly a “nice little homicide that should have disappeared.” from the front pages.” in a couple of days” becomes a political and cultural storm.
So far, the story is true enough. I had seen it happen in Los Angeles myself during the seven years I lived there, and Dunne’s plot spilled over from a real case: the 1949 murder of Elizabeth Short, who was found dead in a vacant lot under nearly identical circumstances. That case was dubbed “The Black Dahlia” in a play on the name of a popular late-’40s B-movie starring a lovely but brain-dead actress whom Raymond Chandler, who worked with her on that movie, had dubbed ” Moronica Lake”. “
Enter the two heroes of the story, the young brothers, Tom and Desmond Spellacy. He played the movie version of “True Confessions,” which came out a year or two after I first read the novel, by Robert Duvall and Robert De Niro. The movie, by the way, is brilliant, almost as good as the novel itself, a rare example that belies the rule that great books rarely make a great movie. That was probably because Dunne and Didion wrote the script themselves and worked closely with flamboyant director Ulu Grossbard to actually make it sing.
Tom Spellacy is a homicide detective. Des is a fatally ambitious Roman Catholic priest who has already achieved the honorary “Monsignor” and has his eyes set on a bishopric and perhaps even greater things in the Catholic Church hierarchy still in his future.
The murder investigation provides the backdrop against which the ever-changing loyalties of the two brothers are played out. Theirs is a world of favors and fixes, power and promises, inhabited by priests and pimps, cops and contractors, boxers and jockeys and lesbian fight promoters and lawyers who know how to fix it. “True Confessions” is fast-paced and often hilarious, a classic crime adventure that has no solutions, only victims. More importantly, it paints an unforgettable picture of the City of Angels at the end of World War II, a city that dominates history and becomes the drama’s true central character.
To my great delight, I recently discovered that Amazon’s Kindle program has republished John Gregory Dunne’s “True Confessions” as an e-book with a new introduction by the brilliant novelist and screenwriter George P. Pellecanos, a modern Dunne heir. I can’t seem to go more than a couple of years without wanting to reread this classic text, and now I can choose between hardcover, paperback, or Kindle. What more can you ask for in this miserable world?
John Gregory Dunne was the author of six novels: Las Vegas; true confessions; Dutch Shea, Jr..; The red white and blue; playland; Y nothing lost; as well as seven book-length nonfiction works, including the memoir harp and two books that take a critical look at Hollywood, The studyY Monster. Born in Hartford in 1932, he graduated from Princeton University in 1954. He collaborated with his wife, Joan Didion, on many screenplays, including Panic in Needle Park Y true confessions. John Gregory Dunne died in December 2003 in Manhattan.