Created by John Kaye
(1941–)
In John Kaye’s well-received The Dead Circus (2002), a noirish ode to dark secrets and the buried past, it’s 1986, and GENE BURK is an ex-cop turned Hollywood private eye, obsessed with rock’n’ roll, and still reeling over the death of his girlfriend in a plane crash (how very rock’n’roll!).
Haunted by his loss, he tries to bury himself in a case of his own: the peculiar Hollywood death twenty years earlier of up-and-coming rockabilly singer Bobby Fuller of “I Fought the Law” fame.
It turns out that Gene had been one of the LAPD cops assigned to the case way back then, and he’d never bought the official verdict (which has never really been resolved… Was it really suicide? Or an accident? Or murder? Did Sinatra have him whacked? Or Phil Spector? Did he anger some mobster? Or a romantic rival?).
But the more Gene tears into the past (The sixties! The seventies!), the darker it gets, bumping up at last against true evil, as he discovers disturbing facts about his his own dysfunctional family and his past, including a troubling connection to Charles Manson.
For those looking for Tinseltown slime, this ought do it — imagine a rock’n’roll chapter from Hollywood Babylon. Then Google “Bobby Fuller”…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Kaye’s previous book, Stars Screaming (1997), followed Gene Burk’s kid brother, a network censor struggling to break into screenwriting. It’s turf Kaye knows well — he’s worked as a film director, and as a screenwriter himself such on films as American Hot Wax, Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins and Where the Buffalo Roam it was rumored that The Dead Circus would be the second of a planned trilogy of novels dealing with Los Angeles in the last half of the 20th Century.
UNDER OATH
- “… the story remains reasonably tight despite the abundance of characters and the presence of several tangential subplots. Kaye does a nice job with scenes of real-life entertainers, and the lurid details of Manson’s decadent lifestyle add narrative momentum. While the climax doesn’t quite justify the buildup… but this book packs a major wallop nonetheless.”
— Publishers Weekly - “Kaye calls up a richly atmospheric and surprisingly small-town version of L.A., where everyone seems to be connected and who becomes famous is completely arbitrary. Masterfully creating and sustaining a palpable, pure, elegiac paean to lost hopes and dreams, Kaye seems to suggest that the human impulse toward yearning and hopefulness can exist unmarred by and side by side with rampant corruption and pure evil. Although Kaye himself is a screenwriter, his literary narrative can legitimately be called anti-Hollywood because it never feels forced and is entirely unpredictable.”
— Joanne Wilkinson (Booklist; starred review)
NOVELS
- The Dead Circus (2002) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
- Hollywood Dicks
Tinseltown Troupers
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
