Hollywood in 2005 may not have changed all that much in the past 50 years, but the names and faces are certainly different.
Megan Abbott delved deeply for her research into Hollywood in the early 1950s, the setting for this film noir novel of life on both sides of respectability.
Lora King, who narrates this tale, is a school teacher whose brother, Bill, is a junior investigator in the district attorney’s office. Lora is a conventional sort and is devoted to her brother. Brother and sister have been especially close since losing both parents at an early age.
Life changes for both Lora and Bill when he meets a glamorous film studio costume attendant, Alice Steele. Little is known about the slender Alice, but she takes Bill by storm and soon they are married.
Alice resigns from her job and quickly transforms herself into the traditional housewife. She becomes just about perfect, keeping an immaculate house, cooking gourmet meals, entertaining neighbors and coworkers of her husband. She claims Lora as her own sister.
Lora is wary of this new relationship that comes between herself and her brother, but she makes a valiant try to be attentive and friendly to the new sister-in-law. When Alice shows interest in a teaching position, Lora puts in a good word with her principal, and Alice is soon teaching home economics at Lora’s school.
Gradually, Lora grows more suspicious of Alice’s background. Friends from her Hollywood wardrobe days keep showing up, and they appear shrouded in an unsavory past.
Lora turns herself into an unofficial detective to determine just how deep and slimy Alice’s background can be. She uncovers the lurid side of Hollywood life, then finds it difficult to disentangle herself from a trap of whose making she cannot be certain.
The sleuthing part is clearly amateurish, but the author has succeeded in picking up the styles, the scents and conditions of the 1950s. The entertainers of the day — Bette Davis, Greer Garson, Doris Day — are mentioned, as are the books and cosmetics of the era. Abbott did an excellent job of research, and the book flows easily with lucid prose and a quick eye for ambience. The plot is on the pale side, but the story is a sharp reminder that although personal morals may not have changed in the past 50 years, our outlook has turned all the way around.
Abbott is also the author of the nonfiction work, “The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir,” an inside look at the “tough guy” novels such as those written by Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain.
