Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood

I really enjoyed this book. It read like an Elmore Leonard novel in that it kept making me think of L.A. Confidential, both the book and the movie, with its Noir atmosphere. And early Holly Wood History is fascinating, the struggle to produce the illusion of glamour was a full time job and with the reality of the many actors and actresses being of fairly low breeding with drugs and alcohol running rampant the pretense was nearly impossible to maintain.

William Desmond Taylor's "unsolved" murder happened right in the middle of a series of shocking Hollywood deaths, all young with a brief unsavory history behind them. Three actresses whose young disorganized lives revolved around him, a jealous and paranoid Movie mogul, Adolph Zucker doing everything he can to control the situation - thus hindering the investigation and making payouts right and left one might argue that Taylor's demise was his greatest piece of art. And the cast of possible suspects and their motives will have the reader reflecting back to Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians" thinking maybe they ALL did it. Because if William Desmond Taylor's life and career tells us anything, even trying to be the good guy in Hollywood is destructive.

Overall, I found this book impossible to put down, I so very much enjoyed the gossip and watching the carefully constructed lies peel away and found the dirty truths to be riveting. Having this true crime novel unravel in the fashion of a down and dirty mystery novel just made it better.