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A review by socraticgadfly
Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood by William J. Mann
2.0
This wasn't that good.
I'm not a big movies buff, but I do like occasional true crime reading, especially unsolved true crime, so I grabbed this at a library.
I don't know if Mann has movie errors, but I know he has a few obvious non-movie ones.
Like talking about geysers at Yosemite. Did you, perhaps, mean Yellowstone?
Then, there's writing errors, notably, his grating insistence on using "clew" instead of "clue" for authenticity.
Wrong.
Hey, Mann? Google N-gram said that, in books at least, "clew" peaked 25 years before the events of this book, and that in the early 1920s, its use was lower than in 1860. Besides, if you wanted authentic feel, it's kind of silly focusing on one word.
Beyond that, his writing in general is not that good. There wasn't a lot of sizzle, if he was looking for novelistic feel.
Nor did he make a convincing case for his claim as the suspect. Didn't tie him well to Taylor, nor did he explain why he could have killed him rather than continuing to blackmail him.
Finally, book publisher? Don't use a word in a title for alliteration if it's not a part of the book? Heroin might have been, though cocaine was more common, but morphine was not.
I'm not a big movies buff, but I do like occasional true crime reading, especially unsolved true crime, so I grabbed this at a library.
I don't know if Mann has movie errors, but I know he has a few obvious non-movie ones.
Like talking about geysers at Yosemite. Did you, perhaps, mean Yellowstone?
Then, there's writing errors, notably, his grating insistence on using "clew" instead of "clue" for authenticity.
Wrong.
Hey, Mann? Google N-gram said that, in books at least, "clew" peaked 25 years before the events of this book, and that in the early 1920s, its use was lower than in 1860. Besides, if you wanted authentic feel, it's kind of silly focusing on one word.
Beyond that, his writing in general is not that good. There wasn't a lot of sizzle, if he was looking for novelistic feel.
Nor did he make a convincing case for his claim as the suspect. Didn't tie him well to Taylor, nor did he explain why he could have killed him rather than continuing to blackmail him.
Finally, book publisher? Don't use a word in a title for alliteration if it's not a part of the book? Heroin might have been, though cocaine was more common, but morphine was not.