Devil's Garden

✍ Scribed by Atkins, Ace

• Publisher: Putnam Adult
• Year: 2009;1968
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 210 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Exclusive: Megan Abbott Reviews Devil's Garden

Megan Abbott is the Edgar-winning author of the crime novels Queenpin, The Song is You and Die a Little. Her new novel, Bury Me Deep, which is loosely based on the Winnie Ruth Judd "Trunk Murderess" scandal of the 1930s, comes out in July 2009. She lives in Queens, New York.

One might call it bold or even arrogant. An author takes on not only one of the most storied scandals of the 20th century as his subject of his new novel but, at the same time, deploys one of America's most celebrated writers as one of its central characters. That is precisely what Ace Atkins does in his new novel, Devil's Garden, a giddy, swaggering take on the Fatty Arbuckle trial, with a young detective named Dashiell Hammett navigating the scandals heady convolutions. But you need only get through the dreamy, haunted prologuebased on Hammett's famous account of being offered money to murder a union leaderto realize that Atkinss choices are not driven by arrogance at all. Devil's Garden is an act of love.

From frothy show girls to sly-eyed grifters, from machinating hangers-on to Arbuckle himself, so shocked by the speed and cruelty of his descent he can barely lift his head upall of Atkins' characters are treated with wit, understanding and, frequently, clear-eyed affection. While we see repeated glimmers of the Hammett to come, Atkins never lets the story, or the prose, slip into hardboiled kitsch or winking parody. Nor does he let any reverence cloud his vision. Many of characters that populate Devil's Garden feel like they could emerge, gin-clouded and blood-simple, in Hammett's Red Harvest or The Glass Key, but we can see why: they are so clearly the figures that inspired him. While it tips its hat to Hammetts world, Devil's Garden caroms along with a style and velocity all its own.

A marvelous extension of Atkins' fascination (White Shadow, Wicked City) with the cunning and often cruel ways that hustlers high and low, board room and back alley, manipulate power, * Devil's Garden revels in contradictionsit is both sprawling and intimate, rollicking and poignant. The novel begins on Labor Day weekend, 1921, when beloved screen comic Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle threw a wild party in a suite at San Franciscos St. Francis Hotel. One of his guests, a young woman named Virginia Rappe, fell ill and died shortly after from peritonitis brought on by a ruptured bladder. As the story took on momentum and news headlines screamed, Arbuckle himself faced criminal indictment. Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst reputedly boasted that the scandal sold more papers than the sinking of the Lusitania*.

The fact that pre-Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett was one of the Pinkerton detectives assigned to the Arbuckle case is pure literary gold and Atkinss mines it with great care. His Hammett feels real, a raw-boned young man with a sharp eye and a writers gimlet eye and beating heart. He is our trusty guide through a seamy tour through the worlds of yellow journalism, backroom politics and the merry band of hucksters, thieves and B girls who circle around Arbuckles downfall, picking pockets along the way. As big as the scandal grows, and as larger-than-life as Atkinss characters (William Randolph Heart, Marion Davies, Arbuckle himself) are, they never feel anything less than human, petty, troubled, heartbroken, real. Its quite an achievement.

Late in the novel, Atkins gives us a scene of Arbuckle and his wife, actress Minta Durfee, at the piano playing old songs from their journeymen showbiz days, singing as loud as they can until the windows of their soon-to-be-lost mansion shake. Its the kind of moment that lingers. You have the feeling, as you do so often when youre reading Devils Garden, of watching some shuddery lost Jazz-Age film. It's as glittery and jubilant as New Year's Eve noisemaker one minute, but the next, one of those haunting silent-movie faces loom out at us, telling us their whole, sad stories with just a twitch of the mouth, a flicker in the eye.

(Photo Joshua Gaylord)

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The 1921 rape/manslaughter trial of silent film star Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle provides the gritty backdrop for Atkins's outstanding crime novel, in which Dashiell Hammett, then a Pinkerton operative living in San Francisco, plays a significant role. A wild party Arbuckle throws at San Francisco's posh St. Francis Hotel results in tragedy after an actress, Virginia Rappe, is mysteriously injured and later dies. As the author explains in a behind the story introduction, the future creator of Sam Spade was actually assigned to help the defense on the Arbuckle case. With enviable ease, Atkins (Wicked City) brings to life Hammett, Arbuckle, William Randolph Hearst and other real figures of the period. Those familiar with the historical case will be impressed by how well the book meshes fact and fiction. Genre fans who enjoy the grim realism of James Ellroy's post-WWII Los Angeles will find a lot to like in Atkins's Prohibition-era San Francisco. (Apr.)
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