Los Angeles is where noir was born, and with good reason: it’s where most dreams go to die. Writers flock here like vultures, lured by the inherent paradox of this faux Shangri-La and the hopes of seeing their own dreams cashed in. It’s a symbiotic irony that’s given birth to noir staples like Phillip Marlowe, the Black Dahlia and Chinatown. In turn, Los Angeles has become the star of its own stories.
It certainly plays a leading role in John Kaye’s work. The former screenwriter (American Hot Wax, Where the Buffalo Roam) won praise for his first novel, Stars Screaming, and its ruthless portrayal of Hollywood’s back lots. Kaye’s latest fiction, The Dead Circus, is the second work in a proposed trilogy, and cements the author’s reputation as an expert on LA’s seamy underbelly.
This one nominally begins as an investigation into the death of rock & roller Bobby Fuller (“I Fought The Law”). The year is 1986, and ex-cop Gene Burk’s fiancee has perished in a plane crash. Burk assuages his grief by renewing his obsession with the peculiar circumstances of Fuller’s death 20 years earlier. The young rocker’s career was gathering steam in 1966 when he was found dead in his car with gasoline in his lungs. Suicide, said the police, but everyone else believed Fuller had help with the ethanol martini.
But in the course of the new Fuller investigation, Burk discovers among his dead fiancee’s things some letters from a former classmate of hers who became a Manson Family member. The novel now takes an abrupt turn into what one character calls “Mansonabilia.” The gist of the story from then on concerns whether a Manson-made film of the Tate-LaBianca murders actually exists or not, and the ends to which certain interested parties will go to see that it does or doesn’t. Burk’s unofficial look into Fuller’s untimely end reaches a purely speculative conclusion in the last few pages (Hint: Fuller was dating Nancy Sinatra and her father wasn’t thrilled), one inextricably — and sometimes tenuously — linked to the Manson story.
But because tidy endings are rare in LA, and the theory of Six Degrees of Separation is reduced to about 2.5, by novel’s end everyone seems guilty. Burk’s own family goes under the microscope, including his aging father who once ran a strategically located newsstand, his brother the screenwriter (the protagonist of Stars Screaming) and Burk’s nephew, an up-and-coming actor.
Burk and the others cross paths with a tapestry of underworld figures and down-on-their-luck desperadoes, including stock characters like the crooked cop, the junkie snitch, the lonely waitress and muscle-flexing mobsters. And they all conveniently — and believably, for the most part — happen to have some connection to a) each other, and b) Manson (either in his earlier incarnations as hustler, dope dealer, and would-be musician or later as psychopathic killer).
In the hands of a lesser writer, so many cliched characters and fortuitous coincidences would doom a novel. But Kaye pulls it off by humanizing everyone who makes an appearance in The Dead Circus, from the leads to the cameos.
When the informer is about to buy it, for instance, he makes a final call to Mom without letting on that this is in all likelihood their last conversation. Shuffling through a series of childhood memories, the stories give the snitch “the momentary reassurance that everything might still turn out alright, that he could be that boy again, riding in a car with a girl’s hand resting on his thigh, the untamed music pounding on the radio, the windows shuddering, and his body charged with a dizzying freedom.”
Like so many LA dreams, however, the truth is much harsher: “This split second of illusory well-being quickly disappeared, crowded out of his mind by the brutal facts of his life, a life that, put simply, might soon be over.”
Kaye’s characters’ misfortunes put the lie to the myths of eternal sunshine and happy ever after. Kaye never revisits the Tate house on that murderous night in 1969 because he doesn’t have to; those killings are as much a part of the landscape as smog, palm trees and broken dreams. But no one, including Manson and his acolytes, can escape the seductive draw of the Los Angeles lie.
This article appears in Sep 4-10, 2002.
