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DEATH BY HOLLYWOOD
by Steven Bochco
Bloomsbury, October 2003
288 pages
12.99GBP
ISBN: 0747570310


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Steven Bochco is no stranger to the world of fiction. He has won ten Emmy awards. Hill Street Blues, LA Law and NYPD Blue were the shows that garnered for him these tributes to his writing but now he turns his talents to producing a story in a different format: a novel.

Mind, the physical appearance of the book is different from any other I have read. It is more like a typescript to look at, being set in a generous font called Sabon and being presented in double spaced lines -- an odd conceit which delivers a smaller word count than one would anticipate on a brief inspection.

The narrative is told in the first person present tense. Eddie Jelko is an agent, mainly for screenwriters. One of Jelko's clients is his friend Bobby Newman, but Bobby has his head around bottles of alcohol more often than over a keyboard and is suffering writers' block. Bobby is horrified to discover that his wife Vee is having an affair and precipitates a fight with her, which culminates in Vee leaving him.

Bobby has a powerful telescope which he tells his friends he uses to watch the stars. In fact, he peers through it to watch his neighbours. Engaged in this delightful distraction Bobby watches the wife of a Hollywood millionaire clobber her Latin lover Ramon with an acting award, rendering the would-be blackmailer speechless -- and lifeless.

Bobby sees this little adventure as the solution to his inability to write. He goes to the house where the corpse is lying and discovers that the caddish Ramon used to film his bouts of sex, keeping a record of all his inamoratae together with their score, graded A to F. To his mortification, Bobby finds a video of Vee (graded B+) in the treasure trove and removes that as well as the incriminating film of the murder.

The writer then sets out to produce a screenplay which will see him back on the track to success. He befriends both the murderer, Linda Paulson, and the detective in charge of the case, Dennis Farentino, in order to get inside the minds of the future protagonists of his screenplay. An unlooked for benefit is that Dennis discovers he has the potential to collaborate with Bobby in writing so that there is a distinct possibility they will both be rich.

Eddie explains his knowledge of scenes that he portrays by saying some of them were told to him by Bobby and some he just plain invents as they seem to be logical. Eddie sees himself as a decent man yet comes across as just as amoral as the other characters in the cast.

I can't say I cared much for any of the dramatis personae of this work. They all seemed particularly ruthless and amoral, if not downright immoral. The author did his best to make them appealing -- even the murderer -- yet somehow didn't quite make it in print. This is not to say that the story doesn't work, because it does. I just didn't care for the characters.

On the whole, the book is quite entertaining and displays a fair bit of humour. There is, of course, a quirky ending that I doubt leaves room for a sequel. Nonetheless, I would be interested to read any more novels from this writer, should they appear in the future.

Reviewed by Denise Wels Pickles, December 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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