Review of Die a Little by Megan Abbott (Pocket Books, 2005)

In 1950s Los Angeles, school teacher, Lora King, is living with her brother, Bill, an investigator for the DA’s office when Alice Steele, a studio seamstress, breezes into his life.  A short time later, Bill and Alice are married after a whirlwind romance.  Alice quickly settles into her new life as a housewife, endlessly baking and organizing social parties.  Lora, however, senses that there is more to Alice’s past than meets the eye and finds herself becoming suspicious of her stories.  Gradually she starts to investigate elements of her sister-in-law’s history, slowly becoming acquainted with Hollywood’s underbelly.  But the more she digs, the more she risks her own safety and Bill’s job and happiness.

Die a Little is a thoroughly noir tale about the tension between two femme fatales - a sister and wife - battling over the same man.  The main strengths of the novel are the atmosphere, tight plotting, strong characterisation, and crafted prose.  Abbott captures both the hopes of post-war US and its seedy underbelly of vice, drugs, and exploitation, filtered through a darkly tinted lens.  The plot is layered and nicely paced as Lora transitions across the arc of the story as her relationship with her sister-in-law comes under increasing strain.  All three main characters are well penned, being complex and deep, the support cast are more than simply ciphers for the story, and the interactions between the players is nicely portrayed.  The story is told through lyrical, literary prose that adds to the atmosphere.  Overall, an enjoyable noir tale that adds a distinctive voice to the genre.

Review of Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott (Pocket Books, 2009)

Marion Seeley is married to an older man, a doctor with a morphine addiction. Struck off from practising, her husband has abandoned her in Phoenix and headed to Mexico to work for a mining company. Living in a guest house, Marion finds work in a medical clinic where she meets Louise, a woman who lives on the edge and by her wits. Louise invites the lonely Marion to the parties that she and her housemate, the sickly Ginny, host in which they entertain some of town’s most powerful men. The three of them quickly become friends, Marion spending ever more time at their house. At one of the parties Marion meets Joe Lanigan, a well connected businessman and womaniser, and falls for his charms. Unable to resist, she takes ever more risks that puts her on a murderous collision course with her friends, who rely on Lanigan to stay above the breadline.

Bury Me Deep is inspired by the notorious 1931 ‘trunk murders’ crime. It follows certain factual aspects of that story to frame the narrative, but the story itself is fiction and the ending is substantially different. There is plenty to like about the book, but the real strengths for me are the prose, the pace, the character development, and the plotting. Abbott is clearly something of a wordsmith and the prose is very nicely written. The pace is even and relenting, where it could have been rushed. This I think allows the story and characters to develop and the rationale for the crime that occurs about three fifths into the story to become clear. The characters are all well penned, especially the three lead women and their developing relationship, and the plot is well constructed with a good sense of historical detail. The only thing that seemed to be missing for me was a strong sense of place and geography. I had to keep reminding myself that it was set in Phoenix. I just got no real sense of the town or its landscape or indeed its social organisation and people beyond there being a group of important men that ran the place. As a result, the book felt a little decontextualized, reduced to the relationships between the four main characters and the distant Dr Seeley. Nevertheless, this is superior crime fiction and is well worth checking out.

Fiction based on real crimes

I finished Megan Abbott's excellent Bury Me Deep last night. As with Eoin McNamee's Orchid Blue, which I posted about earlier in the year, I'm still not sure what I think about fiction that's based on real crimes. Bury Me Deep makes it very clear that whilst some elements of the book are true to the crime in terms of what was reported at the time and in subsequent true crime books, a lot of it is imagined and the ending is completely different. Funnily, I have much less trouble with biographical films, except where they radically alter the history. Bury Me Deep is a kind of alternative history crime novel. Very good, but for whatever reason the fact that it was so strongly based on the infamous 'trunk murders' I found somewhat unsettling. I think it's something to do with family and living legacies. I don't know; it just seems unnerving somehow. Maybe I shouldn't have looked at the author notes at the back of the book until I'd finished reading the novel. Funny what unsettles one's comfort zone. Review tomorrow hopefully.

Cover art seduction

One of the things I was constantly drawn back to with Megan Abbott's The Song is You was the cover art. Heck, is it good - strong, evocative image and great design. It cries out, 'pick me up and take a browse' - 'go on, you know you want to'. Donna Moore's Old Dogs is another great, striking cover. Much better than the generic, air-brushed and hazy photo covershots that adorn many bestselling novels. I'm having a good think about The White Gallows cover design at the minute as I due to liaise with the designer in the next week or so, and so far I'm really lacking in ideas. Hopefully something will emerge over the weekend.


I know they say that you should never judge a book by its cover, but I'm wondering - how many of us are actually influenced by the cover? I know I bought my first Malcolm Pryce novel purely because the novel screamed 'pick me up' across the bookshop. What book covers have seduced you? And did the book live up to the cover?

Review of The Song is You by Megan Abbott (Pocket Books, 2007)

Jean Spangler, a rising starlet willing to take chances and risks to make the big time, disappears after a night on the town with two Hollywood stars. The only thing found the next day is her handbag containing a cryptic note. Gil (Hop) Hopkins, every star’s friend and publicist, was there that night, and in the following days helped to create a smokescreen to protect his studio’s stars and misdirect the police investigation. Two years later and Iolene, Jean’s sultry friend, tracks Gil down fearing for her life. Jarred by Iolene’s visit, Gil starts to make sure that his web of lies is still intact, but in the process gets drawn into Spangler’s disappearance, retracing his steps that fateful night to discover what really happened to the charismatic young woman intent on stardom.

Megan Abbott’s second novel is a hardboiled expose of the Hollywood studio system in the 1950s, revealing how the dark underbelly of the movie business was kept out of the media or was repackaged as glamour and glitz through the gossip magazines and newspapers. Hopkins is a master of spin, operating at the centre of that world, picking up the stars and wannabes who are living on the edge or skeetering out of control, dusting them down and making sure they retain their all-American, clean-living, family entertainment persona. His charm and success though masks his own dark secrets and shabby life – a serial philanderer unhappy in his own company whose wife has left him for his best friend. The Song is You is both an in-depth character study of Hopkins and his work, and a mystery tale of Jean Spangler’s disappearance. With a steady pace, careful plotting and a nice turn of phrase, Abbott spins a dark tale of sex, ambition, blackmail, greed, violence, and psychotic deviance – a tale that gets very dark in places. The characterisation is excellent, and like Ellroy, Abbott manages to evoke the time and place of 1950s L.A., immersing the reader in its the murky world. Overall, an enjoyable, dark story and I’m looking forward to reading more of Abbott's books. My review of Queenpin is here.

Saturday Snippet: Queenpin by Megan Abbott

Megan Abbot’s Queenpin charts the relationship between the legendary Gloria Denton, the city’s chief moll, and a young woman who she takes on as an apprentice (my review here). Abbott sure can write and her two principal characters are multi-layered and complex. Here’s how both are introduced.

I want the legs.
That was the first thing that came into my head. The legs were the legs of a twenty-year-old Vegas showgirl, a hundred feet long and with just enough curve and give and promise. Sure, there was no hiding the slightly worn hands or the beginning tugs of skin framing the bones in her face. But the legs, they lasted, I tell you. They endured. Two decades her junior, my skinny matchsticks were no comparison.
In the casinos, she could pass for thirty. The low lighting, her glossy auburn hair, legs swinging, tapping the bottom rim of the tall, better stools. At the track, though, she looked her age. Even swathed in oversized sunglasses, a wide-brimmed hat, bright gloves, she couldn’t outflank the merciless sunshine, the glare off the grandstand. Not that it mattered. She was legend.

Hell, I’ll admit it, I had a taste for the other from the start. Where would a twenty-two-year-old kid rather be? Setting the table for corned beef and cabbage dinner with her old man, forks scrapping, moths fluttering against the window, the briny smell from the kitchen sinking into my skin with each tock of the imitation grandfather clock? Or gliding my way through the fuzzy dark of the Tee Hee, vibrating with low, slow jazz, clusters of juniper-breathed men and women touching, hands on lapels, fingers on silk nylons, cigarettes releasing willowy clouds into every acid green banquette? Sure, it was no El Morocco, but in this town, it might as well have been. The place felt alive, I could hear it beating in my chest, between my hips, everywhere. Clock-out time and I never wanted to leave. I’d grin my way into a Tom Collins from Shep, the lantern-jawed bartender, and watch from the corner stool, watch everything, eating green cherries, the candied drink soaking into my lips, my tongue.

Tell me you don’t want to get to know these two feisty, scheming women?

Review of Queenpin by Megan Abbott (Pocket Books, 2007)

Every morning a young woman studies accounting at the Dolores Grey Business School, in the afternoons she cooks the books at Club Tee-Hee, a rinky-dink joint on the Starlite Strip owned by the mob. She soon attracts the attentions of the legendary Gloria Denton, the city’s chief moll, responsible for collecting the takings from the casinos, racetracks, and betting parlours, paying off the local law, and organising scams and take-downs. With the legs and figure of a twenty year old showgirl, but a poker face that’s now starting to show her age, Denton offers the young woman an apprenticeship, starting her off as a runner and educating her as to the ways of the world and the criminal underworld. The young woman takes to her new life like a duck to water, but despite her own misgivings she falls for a charming loser, and everything starts to fall apart. She’s suckered into a big money scheme, betraying Denton’s trust but at the same time binding them together in order to repair the damage and stave off retribution. Soon they are circling round each other, both unsure of where each other stands but determined to survive.

Abbott’s writing is in the best traditions of noir – dark, edgy, atmospheric, lyrical. The prose is excellent, the narrative taut, and the dialogue snappy. Queenpin is essentially an in-depth character study of two women and their evolving relationship, and Abbott excels at bringing both women fully to life and one is drawn fully into their worlds. My only quibble is that the book really fails to broaden out beyond the master and apprentice relationship to further contextualise them in the world in which they operate; it would have been good to know more about the nitty-gritty of their jobs, the grip of the mob on the city, the local politics and law, their personal histories, and so on (and hence a four star review; The Foreign Correspondent I reviewed on Monday was excellent at siting an in-depth character study in wider social and political contexts at multiple scales). Like Lucarelli’s The Damned Season I reviewed a couple of weeks ago, Abbott has pared the book back as about as far as it can go without losing the essential plot. As a result, the book is quite slight at 180 pages and I wanted more – much more - there and then! This is writing to savour and I didn’t want it to end. This is the first Megan Abbott book I’ve read and I’m looking forward to reading the others post-haste.

A poor hunt turns good

Last Thursday I had to travel into Dublin for a meeting. Since my pre-order splurge has still not arrived I went armed with a list of 15 books I wanted to read and took the opportunity to quickly browse in Murder Ink, Hodges Figgis and Waterstones. I managed to find only two of those desired, but I did manage to come away with four others, so I did feel somewhat sated.

One thing that strikes me about these covers is that they're all quite different, but with perhaps the exception of the rather generic Frost at Christmas, they're also very good and strong designs. There does seem to be a trend at the minute to have quite generic covers with 'atmospheric' tinted photos that bears no relation to the story (for example, Graham Hurley's The Price of Darkness that I reviewed recently), so these are a welcome change.





I'll be posting a review of Queenpin tomorrow and looking forward to tucking into the others in the coming days (although I'm saving the Frost book until Christmas).