Loser's Town: A David Spandau Novel [Hardcover]

 

 

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You will like this book though if you are into gritty, dark, crime and mystery novels.

I can't say that this is a genre that I am completely familiar with, at least the more modern offers of such. I grew up reading mystery novels of the Rex Stout variety, so this novel was a bit of a change.

That being said I did enjoy reading it. It was the perfect type of book for a long weekend. I can see it being very popular vacation reading.

Loser's Town appears to be the first in a new series featuring the main character, David Spandau. He's an interesting character, and I look forward to seeing him developed further.

My one criticism is with the author's opinion that the reader needs to be shocked into seeing how gritty the book's setting is. With gratuitous sex scenes, that seem to serve no purpose, and language thatattempts to be "street" but just comes across as stilted and forced, Depp would do better to work on his prose then pure shock.

This edgy and irreverent crime thriller skewers the perpetual Hollywood movie machine, offering up a punch-drunk journey into the industry and its possible connection to organized crime. At the center of this tale is David Spandau, a washed-up beaten down ex-stuntman with a broken nose and tired eyes, who is being employed by as a private investigator. Forced to cut his vacation two days short, David is summoned to the Beverly Hills office of his boss Walter Coren. The shiny teethed Walter, "one of the best kept secrets in LA society" tells David that he's been expressly requested for a case. His important client is the up-and-coming young hotshot Bobby Dye.

Bobby is achieving a great deal of notoriety around town for his starring role in Wildfire. This is his one big breakthrough. Even his foul mouthed agent Annie Michaels, says there's even a possibility that Bobby can make the A-list if he can prove his acting mettle. Yet Bobbie is increasingly frustrated. A dark secret is threatening to derail his starry rise in the form of a death threat on a sheet of paper with a message in cutout letters glued onto it: "You're going to Die, Dye!" While Bobby is truly flummoxed at the note, suspecting it could be a pissed-off boyfriend of one of his muses, David is sure that the threat is somehow linked the evil machinations of local crime and drug king Ritchie Stella.

Owner of the notorious Voodoo Club on Sunset strip, Ritchie desperately wants to be a movie producer and wants Bobby for one of his movies. The script and financing are all in place and Ritchie, with a razor sharp brain that is always calculating the odds, will even resort to blackmailing Bobby with a series of incriminating photos to get him to star in the film. Bobby's Ritchie's meal ticket. But when the spoilt and neurotic Bobby threatens to go ballistic, David brings in his best friend, Irishman Terry McGuinn to go undercover, mining Ritchie's employee Allison Graff for information on Ritche's illegal maneuverings and any possible evidence that may connect Ritchie to Bobby.

As Depp moves is through the Los Angeles criminal underworld, all his characters come across as emotional and spiritual wrecks, tossed out and spun around by the vast Hollywood machine. While David drinks too much and is plagued by memories of his marriage to the beautiful Dee, his thoughts are constantly filled with the hope that she might want him again. Terry courts Allison with false promises that he can get Ritchie off her back, seeking comfort in the world of Middle Earth. Meanwhile, the author's other flawed protagonist, Dobbs, along with the huge pale and dumb Squires, is hired to clean up some mess, in this case an underage junkie girl with a needle in her arm found in the bathroom of Bobby's palatial glass-fronted Hollywood hilltop mansion. Even Potts, however, is not without his demons, having spent five years in a Texas prison, the man is mired in the burdens of self-deception.

An exercise on the price of duplicity and hypocrisy with dialogue that crackles with total irreverence, Loser's Town is all about people with such twisted world-views and high opinions that appear to be drunk on a vision of their own self-importance, especially the spoilt and transparent Bobby with his over-inflated ego. As the stifling heat of an LA summer shimmers and wavers, the western horizon turning a lovely but unnatural smoggy orange, Depp's city glides past like an overexposed film. In the end, three people are dead - "four if you count the poor stupid girl who started it all." In this fast-paced, entertaining and devilish expose on the ramifications unbridled power and money, crime bosses are star struck to the Hollywood A-list and innocence gets people in trouble, even getting them killed. Throughout it all, Depp's new hero David Spandau is determined as ever to follow his gut and instinct even as he roots out the bad guys, while eventually left to ponder the collateral damage of the price of fame in this big city of broken dreams. Mike Leonard 2009.

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