Loser's Town [Paperback]

This edgy and irreverent crime thriller skewers the perpetual Hollywood movie machine, offering up a punch-drunk journey into the industry and its possible connection to organized crime. At the center of this tale is David Spandau, a washed-up beaten down ex-stuntman with a broken nose and tired eyes, who is being employed by as a private investigator. Forced to cut his vacation two days short, David is summoned to the Beverly Hills office of his boss Walter Coren. The shiny teethed Walter, "one of the best kept secrets in LA society" tells David that he's been expressly requested for a case. His important client is the up-and-coming young hotshot Bobby Dye.

Bobby is achieving a great deal of notoriety around town for his starring role in Wildfire. This is his one big breakthrough. Even his foul mouthed agent Annie Michaels, says there's even a possibility that Bobby can make the A-list if he can prove his acting mettle. Yet Bobbie is increasingly frustrated. A dark secret is threatening to derail his starry rise in the form of a death threat on a sheet of paper with a message in cutout letters glued onto it: "You're going to Die, Dye!" While Bobby is truly flummoxed at the note, suspecting it could be a pissed-off boyfriend of one of his muses, David is sure that the threat is somehow linked the evil machinations of local crime and drug king Ritchie Stella.

Owner of the notorious Voodoo Club on Sunset strip, Ritchie desperately wants to be a movie producer and wants Bobby for one of his movies. The script and financing are all in place and Ritchie, with a razor sharp brain that is always calculating the odds, will even resort to blackmailing Bobby with a series of incriminating photos to get him to star in the film. Bobby's Ritchie's meal ticket. But when the spoilt and neurotic Bobby threatens to go ballistic, David brings in his best friend, Irishman Terry McGuinn to go undercover, mining Ritchie's employee Allison Graff for information on Ritche's illegal maneuverings and any possible evidence that may connect Ritchie to Bobby.

As Depp moves is through the Los Angeles criminal underworld, all his characters come across as emotional and spiritual wrecks, tossed out and spun around by the vast Hollywood machine. While David drinks too much and is plagued by memories of his marriage to the beautiful Dee, his thoughts are constantly filled with the hope that she might want him again. Terry courts Allison with false promises that he can get Ritchie off her back, seeking comfort in the world of Middle Earth. Meanwhile, the author's other flawed protagonist, Dobbs, along with the huge pale and dumb Squires, is hired to clean up some mess, in this case an underage junkie girl with a needle in her arm found in the bathroom of Bobby's palatial glass-fronted Hollywood hilltop mansion. Even Potts, however, is not without his demons, having spent five years in a Texas prison, the man is mired in the burdens of self-deception.

An exercise on the price of duplicity and hypocrisy with dialogue that crackles with total irreverence, Loser's Town is all about people with such twisted world-views and high opinions that appear to be drunk on a vision of their own self-importance, especially the spoilt and transparent Bobby with his over-inflated ego. As the stifling heat of an LA summer shimmers and wavers, the western horizon turning a lovely but unnatural smoggy orange, Depp's city glides past like an overexposed film. In the end, three people are dead - "four if you count the poor stupid girl who started it all." In this fast-paced, entertaining and devilish expose on the ramifications unbridled power and money, crime bosses are star struck to the Hollywood A-list and innocence gets people in trouble, even getting them killed. Throughout it all, Depp's new hero David Spandau is determined as ever to follow his gut and instinct even as he roots out the bad guys, while eventually left to ponder the collateral damage of the price of fame in this big city of broken dreams. Mike Leonard 2009.

A fantastically enjoyable read filled to the foaming brim with pathetic, lonely, evil, hilariously funny, believable people.

Daniel Depp clearly knows his landscape and his characters personally; you can practically smell the smog and the petrol fumes, see the heat-haze rising from the black top. The sleaze and the glamour - and occasionally, the terror - of the movie world is described in such hateful detail, you're practically living in Bobby Dye's trailer, being assaulted by his self-loathing and anger.

Spandau's a fabulous character. I enjoyed his quiet self-confidence and cynicism; he's the reality check that holds everything together - but Terry owns it, totally. He has all the best dialogue:

"It could be worse. You could've let him have his way standing up in the lavatory." She gave him an angry look since this was exactly what she'd done.
"...I want a drink."
"You'll be in mourning for your lost honour, and I wouldn't presume to intrude upon it," Terry said to her.

The low-key, downbeat final ending took me by surprise - very not-Hollywood and thoroughly splendid.

I'd really love to know what happened to Potts, his was the one loose end I really cared about.

David Spandau's a former Hollywood stuntman turned private detective/security consultant. Estranged from his wife (although they both still love each other), he's seen all the craziness that goes with the movie business and knows the hubris, darkness and insecurities that fuel it. But when he's hired to investigate who's sending death threats to Bobby Dye - a hot, upcoming young actor - he finds himself sucked into Hollywood's underworld of drugs, blackmail and murder. As the bodies pile up, Spandau finds himself running out of allies just as the death threats become more personal.

Daniel Depp's debut novel is a glossy thriller that mixes Hollywood gloss with its dark underbelly. As stories go, this is well-trodden territory and although Depp has an insider's eye (both as a result of having worked as a script-writer and because his half-brother is Johnny Depp), he doesn't bring much that's new.

Spandau thinks that he's seen it all and he's used to dealing with Hollywood's players, movers and shakers. However for a supposedly cynical character he's surprisingly naive about how things actually work and his desire to help and protect Bobby Dye, who never seems other than a shallow, self-obsessed and ungrateful idiot. Similarly his relationship with his ex-wife has floundered due to his inability to talk or express himself and while some of this is explained by his brutal upbringing, much of it seems to be there to tie in with the stereotype of the loner detective with the unfortunate love life.

There are some enjoyable scenes in the book, particularly those involving Potts, an ex-con who runs errand for Richie (a club owner who works for the L.A. mob) to earn enough money to try and win custody of his daughter and who finds a chance for redemption when he meets a school teacher. I also liked Terry, a short Irishman and martial arts expert who loves Tolkein and has a weakness for beautiful women. However even these characters veer close to cliché at times.

The story is fast paced and there were enough twists and turns to keep my interest, but the strands come close to falling apart towards the end and I found the ending itself to be an unsatisfactory cop-out.

All in all, it's an okay read that kept me turning the pages, but there's nothing new here and I'm not sure I'd continue with the series.