Welcome to The Age of Dreaming

One of the great pleasures of reading is discovering a stunning writer totally unknown to you. It's very much like the romantic experience: your first thought is "Where has this person been all my life?"

Nina. I've just met a writer named Nina. Nina Revoyr. Akashic, that wonderful class act run by rock musician Johnny Temple, has sent me a copy of a novel by her called THE AGE OF DREAMING. Not only is it a tremendously intriguing book about a fascinating period -- the 1910s and 20s, the golden age of silent movies -- but it's also a superb work of publishing art: french covers (the fold-over sort that provide instant, unloseable bookmarks), an evocative cover photo, all the trimmings.

Jun Nakayama was a Japanese actor who became a movie star in Hollywood. He might remind you of Sessue Hayakawa, who appeared as the terrifying prison camp commander in David Lean's "The Bridge Over the River Kwai." Into this mix, Revoyr ladles recognizable chunks from a genuine Hollywood mystery -- the murder of a famous director which, although it was never officially solved, was thought to be the work of the mad mother of a very young and emotionally fragile Southern actress.

Jun starts his story in 1964, 42 years after the murder and his abrupt retirement from the film world. Thanks to wise investments, he now lives in comfort, thinking only occasionally about the past. But when a journalist and budding screenwriter calls to ask for an interview, Jun is set off on a truly amazing voyage of self-discovery. Driving his vintage Packard through neighborhoods now unimaginably changed to him, he contacts old associates from the period. A strong undercurrent of ethnic racial prejudice runs through the book: a scene where Jun takes some Japanese associates to a golf driving range in Westwood only to discover that a new rule bars "Orientals and Negroes" from playing there could break your heart.

Revoyr, who is half Japanese herself (her mother was Japanese; her father Polish-American) seems to get it all right. She also is a master of her art who has been compared by advance readers to Kazuo Ishiguro (author of "Remains of the Day") and Nabokov. Enter her dream world. You won't regret it.

Another One Bites the Dust

Before I discovered the Internet as a place to sell review copies, I took frequent advantage of the fairness and knowledgeability of Wilshire Books, a wonderful store in Santa Monica. Now comes word from my favorite blogger, Kevin Roderick of LA Observed, that the venerable landmark has joined the ranks of disappearing bookstores. Ave atque vale and all that...

The Pests Recaptured

"'I haven’t heard any thank-you-Pierre’s for putting your mug on our newscasts last night,' the TV entrepreneur was saying at brunch the next morning. We were at his 'special' table at Farmer’s Market on Fairfax, within shouting distance of a group of usually rowdy and frequently funny writers who seemed to enjoy sending insults his way."

That's Leo Bloodworth telling us about his (very) Geraldo Rivera-like client in Dick Lochte's lovely story DEVIL DOG in Robert Randisi's fine new collection HOLLYWOOD AND CRIME: Original Crime Stories Set During the History of Hollywood, just published by Pegasus.

Lochte, an ace reviewer and crime novelist (Bloodworth first appeared in the memorable SLEEPING DOG) knows the Farmer's Market writing scene well. He was one of the original members of the Suicide Club, which met monthly on Saturday mornings in the Market, right in front of a Cajun restaurant where he could ingest his native po-boy sandwiches. I was a member; so were John Shannon and the much-missed (do they have e-mail in Heaven?) Bruce Cook. Other Suicide Clubbers (the title comes from a Robert Louis Stevenson story) Gary Phillips and Gar Anthony Haywood are also included in the book.

What I call SOS (Sons of Suicide, but others find that a bit creepy -- and as my wife says, "Why are you naming it after a scouring pad?") is meeting on Jan. 26th. Send me an email at dickadler@gmail.com and I'll give you the details. That's Lochte at the bottom right at my 70th birthday party in our lemon grove, and Shannon and his companion, the swell dame Charlotte Riley, just above him.


(Photograph by Dan Adler)

Why King Is the Queen

Everything Laurie R. King writes is first-class, from her modern, totally feminist and often surprisingly touching Kate Martinelli mysteries to her Mary Russell thrillers which manage to carry on with (and improve upon) Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and give him a new life. Her new novel, TOUCHSTONE, is one of the best books of any kind of 2007 -- a terrific combination and culmination of her work so far.

Nobody knows better than King how to capture our attention. "Eight days after stepping off the Spirit of New Orleans from New York, Harris Stuyvesant nearly killed a man. The fact of the near-homicide did not surprise him; that it had taken him eight days to get there, considering the circumstances, was downright astonishing," she writes as she introduces us to one of her main characters, a tough, shrewd agent with J. Edgar Hoover's new American Bureau of Investigation. It's 1926, many years before Hoover changed the agency's name to the FBI and started wearing women's clothes in private. Stuyvestant, a veteran of World War I's worst trenches, is in London where the General Strike started by coal miners has threatened to spread. He's hot on the trail of an anarchist bomber named Richard Bunsen who has already eluded him and caused serious damage to people he loves.

Bunsen is a worthy and frightening adversary, but the book's other villain -- a power-mad Military Intelligence officer named Aldous Carstairs ("What kind of pansy handle is that?" Stuyvestant wonders when he first hears about him) -- is truly scary. "The man behind the desk was in his early forties, slightly older than Harris Stuyvesant, and smooth: dark, oiled hair, the sheen of manicured fingernails, a perfectly knotted silk tie, and nary a wrinkle on his spotless shirt. A visitor's gaze might have slid right off him had they not caught on his striking eyes and unlikely mouth.

"The eyes were an unrelieved black, with irises so dark they looked like vastly dilated pupils. They reminded Stuyvesant of a wealthy Parisian courtesan he'd known once who attributed her success to belladonna, used to simulate wide-eyed fascination in the gaze she turned upon her clientele... Personally, her eyes had made Stuyvesant uneasy, because they'd robbed him of that subtle and incontrovertible flare of true interest. This man's eyes were the same; they looked like the doorway to an unlit and windowless room, a room from which anyone at all might be looking out."

Carstairs, for reasons very much his own, agrees to help the American in his search for Bunsen. He sends Harris to a remote part of Cornwall, down near Land's End in the Southeast corner of the country. That's where another important character -- Capt. Bennett Grey, a man who came extremely close to death in the same trenches where Stuyvestant suffered -- is hiding out, drinking to keep his pain under control. Grey is the "touchstone" of King's title ("a soft stone used to prove the purity of gold or silver"). He has, probably because of his severe injuries, extraordinary mental powers, including the ability to conjure up what he calls "mixed metaphors of perception. Dissonance might be a closer description," he tells Harris. "I came across a fake Rembrandt portrait a while ago; standing in front of it was like being assaulted by the clamor of a dozen mismatched bells, out of tune and very disturbing."

Carstairs has been observing Grey for some years, because he recognizes how powerful his gifts could be in the intelligence and political world. Grey hates Carstairs for the evil he senses in him, and the pain he seems to enjoy inflicting. But Grey also loves two very different women who are deeply involved in the Bunsen search. Grey's former lover, Laura Hurleigh, is the oldest child of a Mitford-like family who live in an astonishing house in Oxfordshire -- a place where an ancestor fought off the chill by installing a hypocaust, an underfloor heating system designed by the Romans, and where extra guests stay in The Barn, not in beds of straw but in beautifully and ingeniously designed (and described) theme rooms.

Stuyvestant (in his role as an executive of Ford Motors in England to stimulate sales) has come to Hurleigh to meet Laura -- who is Bunsen's lover -- through her chief assistant, Sarah Grey, Bennett's younger sister, also deeply involved in Laura's work of helping and healing the poor. Both are formidable and fascinating characters, who play important parts in the book's stunning climax.