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Amazon.com Review

Amazon Exclusive: Megan Abbott Reviews Devil's Garden

Megan Abbott is the Edgar®-winning author of the crime novels

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 scandal’s heady convolutions. But you need only get through the dreamy, haunted prologue—based on Hammett's famous account of being offered money to murder a union leader—to realize that Atkins’s 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 up—all 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 Devil's Garden caroms along with a style and velocity all its own.

A marvelous extension of Atkins' fascination (_ Devil's Garden_ revels in contradictions—it 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 Francisco’s 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-

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. It’s the kind of moment that lingers. You have the feeling, as you do so often when you’re reading Devil’s 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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