The writing career of James Lee Burke is, in many ways, typical. After a half dozen literary novels that did not sell much, Burke created his South Louisiana detective, Dave Robicheaux, and the Robicheaux books have come in a steady and profitable stream now for many years.
By Don Noble
The writing career of James Lee Burke is, in many ways, typical. After a half dozen literary novels that did not sell much, Burke created his South Louisiana detective, Dave Robicheaux, and the Robicheaux books have come in a steady and profitable stream now for many years.
Ace Atkins has done it like Ginger Rogers, backwards. Atkins began with a series detective, Nick Travers, who taught American Studies and musicology at Tulane and sleuthed in the Mississippi Delta. There were four Nick Travers books, Crossroad Blues, Leavin' Trunk Blues, Dark End of the Street and Dirty South, and it looked as if Atkins had it made. Then he decided to drop the Travers series and write stand-alone novels, still novels of crime and violence but literary.
After White Shadow, set in Tampa in the '50s, and Wicked City, set in Phenix City, Alabama, Atkins has wandered farther from home, to California, to Hollywood, known to the heartland Puritans as "The Devil's Garden."
Atkins has again written a kind of historical, true crime, literary novel. Extensively researched, The Devil's Garden uses all of what is known, evoking with total credibility the city of San Francisco and the fairly depraved Hollywood scene. Everyone in the movie business seems on the make, for money or power or sex, and the wildly erotic amorality is palpable.
I thought I knew something of the Fatty Arbuckle story. I thought he was arrested and found guilty of manslaughter for having raped a young woman at a drunken orgy with a champagne bottle. Nearly everything I thought I knew was wrong.
Arbuckle, who actually weighed 225 but was padded out in his comic roles and publicized at 260, was a national darling of the silent movies and had just signed, in 1921, a three-million-dollar contract with his producer, Paramount.
The novel proper opens with Roscoe Arbuckle at the apogee of his career. "With his two best buddies and his movie star dog,? [he] drove north in a twenty-five thousand dollar Pierce-Arrow that came equipped with a cocktail bar and a backseat toilet." Fatty was, truth to tell, happily on his way to a drunken orgy in the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. He was a hedonist, a big drinker and womanizer and even by the standards of the roaring twenties, excessive.
But Arbuckle was not a killer, and the death of the trampy Virginia Rappe, nee Rapp, was not, probably, his fault, although he was too drunk throughout the party to be absolutely certain.
Virginia is hurt, badly, with a literal broken bladder, and dies. There is an autopsy but afterwards it seems her internal organs are missing, mysteriously discarded. There is only the doctor's word about what was found and the doctor is corrupt. It seems Arbuckle is being set up, but by whom, and why?
The answer may be: by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, certainly one of the most powerful men in America, but why would he bother? Hearst is no Puritan himself, and is madly in love with his mistress, the movie star Marion Davies, a silent star who stutters and whose career will thereby later suffer in talkies.
Of course the police are on the case, with varying degrees of integrity, but for other reasons so is Sam Dashiell Hammett, at this time a Pinkerton detective, not yet the noir writer of The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man and many others, and not yet the lover of Lillian Hellman.
Hammett is a tough guy, despite tubercular lungs. He is cynical, of course, but finally a decent, ethical fellow with a genuine disgust for hypocrisy, corruption and bullying.
The story progresses, the courtroom drama unfolds and, in the end, most, not everything, is known. Ace Atkins is not yet Hammett, but he's getting closer, and here is the first beach read of '09.
This review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio. Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show "Bookmark." His latest book is "A State of Laughter: Comic Fiction from Alabama."
