Its Cover Tells You Nothing

If you are a dinosaur, like me, you find that one of life’s great pleasures is to go into a bookstore with a little time, without a specific agenda, look around, wait for that magical moment of inspiration, or recognition, when you pick up the book that speaks to you. “Please take me home with you,” it whispers, “I promise you won’t be sorry.”That honey-voiced moment came to me a few days ago when I was looking for just the right book to review. “Take me, take me with you. Oh, yes,” it said. “I’ll make you happy, even if only for a little while.”She lied. Oops, I mean it lied. Title? Fabulous: “The Song Is You” (Simon & Schuster, 242 pages, $23). Author? Highly recommended and charming: Megan Abbott. Her first book, “Die a Little,” was nominated for an Edgar, an Anthony, and a Barry.Dust jacket? Stunning: The sexy young woman on the front cover looks like every randy teenager’s nasty dream, just as the great hardboiled vintage paperbacks of the 1950s used to tempt browsing males.Inspiration? A sure winner: The true story of the disappearance of a starlet who, on October 7, 1949, kissed her five-year-old daughter good-bye to work on a night shoot, and was never seen again.The dessert? The setting: Hollywood in the Golden Age of noir movies, the years in which such films as “The Third Man” (1949), “White Heat” (1949), “In a Lonely Place” (1950), “The Asphalt Jungle” (1950), “Sunset Boulevard” (1950), and “Detective Story” (1951) were released.The clincher? Analogies: An enthusiastic (perhaps drug-addled) editor compared it with two of the most distinguished novels of the past quarter-century: James Ellroy’s “The Black Dahlia” and Joyce Carol Oates’s “Blonde.”The story begins two years after the disappearance of Jean Spangler, a luscious young thespian of undistinguished talents. Collecting boyfriends as if they were 78-LP jazz recordings, Miss Spangler was more discerning about her recording artists than about the men with whom she played around. Her entourage included studio executives more interested in enjoying her than in employing her, actors involved in the kind of kinky stuff that they didn’t share with their fan clubs, and the obligatory gangsters.Gil “Hop” Hopkins was with Jean that last night, and he’s brimming with guilt for having left her in a place that no gentleman would have. No problem here, however, since it’s unlikely his own mother would have called him a gentleman. A former newspaperman turned Public Relations man for a major studio, Hop’s tasked with keeping her name out of the papers in order to avoid embarrassment for the studio. With the elevated sense of honor with which Hollywood studios are famously imbued, that task must have been as easy as avoiding embarrassment for lawyers who advertise on subway cars.As Hop investigates Jean’s vanishing act, he digs deeper and deeper into a world he barely knew existed at such a level of depravity and degradation. Excess in everything — drugs, alcohol, sex — was commonplace as he crawled lower and lower until he solved the mystery. Hop’s wife left him because of his serial cheating and his nonstop drinking, and the deepest thought he appears to have had in a dozen years is whether he’ll get lucky with whichever girl is in his sights at that moment. I’ll grant him this: He has a sense of self.Our Sherlock breaks into an apartment to conduct a search. Peering here and there, opening drawers, he discerned that the occupant had skedaddled because they were empty. On his second time around the room, however, he finds a suitcase on the floor, clothes spilling out. Darn, just missed that little bugger the first time.The protagonist’s lack of a moral core is shared by everyone in the book with the possible exception of Jean Spangler’s daughter, “the most blank-faced five-year-old you ever saw,” whose primary occupation, and joy, is the endless playing of jacks, making her the most interesting character in the book — she appears in two sentences.It is unfathomable that all the lurid sex Ms. Abbott describes can spur unrelenting waves of narcolepsy, but of course that’s because we don’t really care what happens to people about whom we could not possibly care less.Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.

Its Cover Tells You Nothing

Its Cover Tells You Nothing

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