3/12/2023 0 Comments Screenwriter starlet![]() I love the way Baldacci weaves actual people and movies into his fiction with casual references to Hitchcock movies or seeing Clark Gable or Bob Hope at the bar. He literally stumbles across the smuggling ring but when he recognises crates he saw being brought ashore when he’s tracking down his client, it’s obvious that there are linkages afoot. This opens with Archer arriving in LA to visit Liberty and we’re all immediately foisted into the action with a murder, a missing woman, a smuggling racket and two attempts on Archer’s life… all on his first night there. and where the powerful people responsible for his client’s disappearance will kill without a moment’s hesitation if they catch Archer on their trail. With the help of Callahan and his partner Willie Dash, he launches an investigation that will take him from mob-ridden Las Vegas to the glamorous world of Hollywood to the darkest corners of Los Angeles-a city in which beautiful faces are attached to cutthroat schemers, where the cops can be more corrupt than the criminals. Missing client or not, Archer is dead set on finding both the murderer and Eleanor. Archer suspects that Eleanor knows more than she’s saying, but before he can officially take on her case, a dead body turns up inside of Eleanor’s home. It’s the eve of 1953, and Aloysius Archer is in Los Angeles to ring in the New Year with an old friend, aspiring actress Liberty Callahan, when their evening is interrupted by an acquaintance of Callahan’s: Eleanor Lamb, a screenwriter in dire straits.Īfter a series of increasingly chilling events-mysterious phone calls, the same blue car loitering outside her house, and a bloody knife left in her sink-Eleanor fears that her life is in danger, and she wants to hire Archer to look into the matter. We (along with Archer) are reunited with wannabe starlet Liberty Callahan here – though she’s more of a sounding board (and object of desire) than involved in Archer’s case. A couple of years (in book-land, one year in real life) have passed since we last met Archer in A Gambling Man and he’s obviously been honing his detecting skills under stalwart and old-school PI Willie Dash. The book was adapted into a one-woman Broadway play starring Vanessa Redgrave.Dream Town by David Baldacci is the third in the Aloysius Archer series featuring former soldier, turned inmate, turned private investigator. Both tragedies became subjects of Didion’s prose, including in The Year of Magical Thinking, which she wrote as a form of therapy. In 2003, Dunne died of a heart attack at 71, and their adopted daughter suffered a near-fatal bout of pneumonia she would die two years later at 39. ![]() She and Dunne also co-penned 1996’s Up Close and Personal, starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert Redford, about an ambitious young journalist trying to build her career. ![]() It was released in 1972 and starred Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins.ĭidion later would reteam with Dunne and with Frank Pierson to write the script for 1976’s A Star Is Born, starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, about the rise and fall of a Hollywood starlet. She was married to Time writer John Gregory Dunne, and they collaborated on several screenplays after adapting her 1970 novel Play It as It Lays together. She also pointed her pen at the likes of hippie culture, The Doors and the immigrants of Miami. Didion was born in Sacramento and was drawn to stories about her home state.Īs a journalist, she wrote political essays including “Salvador,” about the U.S. ![]() Didion’s career blossomed in the midst of and reflected sea changes in America, with books published in the 1960s and ’70s including Run River, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Play It as It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer and The White Album, an anthology of her magazine writing for the likes of Life and The Saturday Evening Post that detailed stories mostly about California.
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