Ellis Dunaway

Created by Keith Edward Vaughn

Wannabe screenwriter ELLIS DUNAWAY inherited his dad’s Los Angeles-based Dunaway Private Investigation agency in a series that pretty much drips with Hollywood tropes and touchstones, 1990s style.

Broke? No clients? A bad coke habit? Lousy at relationships? Cult nut jobs? Vicious thugs? Seductive starlets? Classic rides? Drugs cartels? Malibu beach houses? Porn in the Valley? Hollywood scumbags? The Galleria?

All present and accounted for. But it’s not just the ingredients that make the meal, but what you do with them, and author Keith Edward Vaughan turns out to be a pretty good chef, adding just a splash of much-needed gonzo and garnishing it with some unexpected soul.

In his debut, The Loneliest Places (2023), screw-up Ellis is running on fumes and looking for a way out. He’s pretty much run the detective agency into the ground, despite his father Hank’s celebrity status as a P.I. to the stars,  and the author of  Get ’em!: The Private Investigator’s Ultimate Guide to Tracking Missing Persons and Fugitives for Profit and Vengeance. 

Even his dad’s beloved Porsche, which Ellis also inherited, has seen better days — the AC doesn’t work, and a cassette of Billy Joel’s An Innocent Man has been stuck in the player for a decade.

With nothing better to do, he agrees to do his coke dealer Terry a favor, and motorvates out to Malibu to see if the guy crashing in Terry’s beach house is still there — or what.

You can see what’s coming, right?

But even as he goes down the checklist, Vaughn keeps it loose enough to slip in some great and wonderfully seedy characters and a few WTF scenes, plus music-obsessed, coke-snorting Ellis is definitely fun to follow, even if — tsk, tsk — he finds himself allegedly clean and sober and about to put the detective biz behind him to return to screenwriting in the 2025 sequel, Bad Actor.

We’ll see…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Keith Edward Vaughn‘s writing has appeared in Carla, Angel City Review, and Levee Magazine. He lives and works in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

UNDER OATH

• “The Loneliest Places isn’t just a terrific debut, it’s authentic L.A. noir… In the tradition of Nathaniel West and James M. Cain, Keith Edward Vaughn reminds us that the brighter the sunlight, the darker the shadows.”
  — Joseph Schneider
• “Failed nepo baby PI Ellis Dunaway is the perfectly imperfect man to go down these mean freeways, and Vaughn had me right with him through every last wrong turn.”
  — Howard Michael Gould
•  “If you’re into Michael Connelly but wish Harry Bosch swore more, smoked more weed, and wandered into surreal Hollywood detours, this is your book.”
  — Literary Titan
• “A gritty, assured mystery debut, right up to its satisfying final notes.” 
  — Kirkus Reviews on The Loneliest Places

NOVELS

• The Loneliest Places (2023) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
• Bad Actor (2025) | Buy this book | Kindle it!

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

• City of Angels, City of Dicks
  Los Angeles Eyes

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.