More noir bombast from Ellroy (The Black Dahlia, etc.), who sets this cops, Commies, crooks, and creeps saga in 1950 L.A. When upright, uptight Sheriff's Deputy Danny Upshaw catches the squeal, it's particularly gruesome: someone removed the victim's eyes, ejaculated into the sockets, shredded his back with a "Zoot Stick," then chomped on the innards with wolverine teeth. Three more murders, same M.O., follow, but Danny's investigation is slowed by his assignment to a grand jury team investigating the Commie menace in the UAES (United Alliance of Extras and Stagehands), including rich, nympho Claire DeHaven, her "queer" actor fiance Reynolds Loftis, and their left-wing pals. With HUAC tactics—blackmail, mostly—much of Hollywood's homosexual community is threatened, while the emerging Teamsters Union under Mickey Cohen is bashing heads and panel member Lt. Dudley Smith—with a murder of his own to keep under wraps—is making sure that Danny's investigation goes nowhere. Still, there are leads: to Loftis; to a Hollywood agent who arranged "pansy" parties; to jive musicians; to a plastic surgeon; and to the official Communist Party psychiatrist. Meanwhile, panel members Considine and Meeks have their own agenda: Considine and his wife are wrangling over child-custody; Meeks, a pimp for Howard Hughes, is sleeping with Cohen's girl and has to blow away bent cop Niels to keep it secret. Danny is accused of the murder—and commits suicide rather than submit to a lie detector test that will reveal his homophilia. Out of guilt, Meeks, with the help of Considine, picks up on his homicide investigation and uncovers a tale of homosexual incest, homosexual betrayal, rage, murder, and revenge, all neatly documented by the Commie psychiatrist. Despite all the Commie-baiting, the jive talk, the wisecracks, this is a cop story—too long by at least a third but propelled by a mean, dark vision of the world, with dank, sleazy language. Depressing, with a convoluted beginning, an impossible ending (the psychiatrist's rehash of the case), but there's a truly strong middle at 200 pages. On balance: O.K.
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1998
ISBN: 0446674370
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1988
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
