Donald Rawley

Geographically these stories are set in and around Los Angeles but cover a lot of ground emotionally. There are coming of age stories (Demarco’s Jazz), the end of life stories (A Thief in August), and those in between. Rattlesnake Season is the disquieting story of impending madness among a displaced couple house-sitting in isolation. In Nirvana Drive an estranged wife murders her husband and apparently gets away with it. Scheherazade in Hollywood (which I believe I remember reading in the New Yorker in 1994) tells of a beautiful woman scamming her way through Hollywood with designs on Beverly Hills. “The lies are floating skyward, like cut balloons.”

Donald Rawley inhabits a variety of characters as flawlessly and intimately as any writer, his prose vivid and alive. Some examples:

“It is a surprisingly hot January morning, exotic with pine and leftover tinsel glittering on the street. The air is full of chocolate and nuts and young citrus; it is the perfect moment to re-enter someone’s life.”

“Then in her own bedroom of lavender carpet and silk flowers, she lets Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra hold her in the yellow-tinged dark. As the night blooms in silence and shadowed citrus, the music stays in her dreams, somnolent and exhausted.”… (lisätietoja)

Miss Kathi Kind - unglamourous secretary to the scion of Hollywood mogul is murdered and dismembered in her Los Angeles apartment. Hours later, her life story is sold to a B-grade producer intent on creating a lurid, skin-flick loosely based on her uneventful life. A writer from the East Coast is hired to write the script - he discovers the secrets Miss Kind was hiding beneath her bland exterior and is drawn into a peculiar sexual/social powerplay between a macho producer, his silicone-breasted Hollywood wife and his pretty, spoilt son. Rawley was a skilled and poetic author: his depiction of Hollywood is part forensic and part mythological.
I devoured this murder mystery in an hour sitting - then read it again to savour Rawley's prose.… (lisätietoja)