Published by Grand Central Publishing on April 19, 2022
Dream Town is the third novel to feature David Baldacci's private investigator from the past, Aloysius Archer. The novel takes place in 1952-53 and is set in Los Angeles, a prime location of American noir in the last decade of noir’s golden age. Compared to crime writers of the 1950s, Baldacci is more David Goodis than Jim Thompson. Like Goodis’ protagonists, Archer isn’t particularly hard-boiled, but Baldacci is similar to Thompson in capturing the corrupt atmosphere that contaminates glitter and shatters dreams of the City of Angels.
The novel’s gritty plot involves human and drug trafficking. Mix in blackmail, murder, and kinky sex in a soulless city and you’ve got the elements of a noir novel. The characters are largely connected to the movie industry, organized crime, or both.
Archer brings a twenty-first century attitude about women to the 1950s as he condemns a culture that requires women to sleep their way to success but won’t allow successful women to sign mortgages without a male co-signer. Well, good for Archer, but I’m not convinced a male PI in 1953 would have shared Thompson’s vision of a better world. I was more convinced by the female characters who understand the unfairness of a patriarchal industry (and society) but are determined to succeed — in some cases, by adopting the corrupt tactics of the men who control the system.
Archer works with his mentor, Willie Dash, in the Bay Area. He’s in LA to see Liberty Callahan, with whom he has (or had) a thing. They’re having dinner when Eleanor Lamb, a screenwriter and friend of Liberty’s, turns up and tells Liberty of her fear that someone is trying to kill her. When Liberty explains that Archer is a private investigator, Lamb hires Archer to track down the source of her fear. Lamb promptly disappears, leaving Archer with a missing person investigation.
Archer’s investigation begins in Lamb’s house, where a man has answered the phone without identifying himself. Archer trips over a dead body in the house and, in the tradition of private eye novels in every era, is hit on the head and left in the house with the body.
Baldacci creates a seedy atmosphere with a mob-controlled establishment in Chinatown that takes advantage of desperate immigrants and blackmail victims to serve the unorthodox sexual interests of powerful men. Following clues to Lamb’s disappearance, Archer encounters violence in Chinatown, and on a beach where he stumbles across smugglers, and in Vegas and Lake Tahoe, and basically everywhere he goes. Archer is a violence magnet, an essential feature of a noir protagonist. Shootouts, fistfights, and car chases ensue.
The novel resolves, at least temporarily, Archer’s uncertain relationship with Liberty. It also portends a change in Archer’s career. He likes the Bay Area, but there’s more work available in LA and there’s something appealing about searching for reality in a city that is based on illusion.
The plot is intricate but, unlike a Chandler novel, it makes sense. Readers might want to make notes to keep track of all the relationships between the characters, and perhaps use pens of different colors to make clear that relationships change as the story evolves. The intricacy will keep the reader on his or her toes, making it a challenge to guess Lamb’s fate and the roles of the various characters who may or may not have been involved in her disappearance. If the ending is not entirely unexpected, that’s only because many possible endings are consistent with the plot. The one Baldacci chose is as good as any. Readers who enjoy 1950s noir and don’t want to revisit the originals should be entertained by Baldacci’s attempt to recapture the past.
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