Word: fazenda
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...unrepentant recollections of his life as a tarnished blue knight. He proves to be a gifted, foulmouthed raconteur who can charm the reader down to a plane where cynicism and sentimentality are indistinguishable and the difference between social history and gossip is irrelevant. His "book" on Lois Fazenda, a would-be starlet whose naked body was found neatly cut in two at the torso: "She lived in a series of boarding houses much like the one on North Cherokee. On West Adams Boulevard she thought she was pregnant. On Camino Palmero she hemorrhaged. On North Orange Drive she was tattooed...
...style has a touch of Raymond Chandler; the Fazenda case has a fleeting similarity to the unsolved 1940s Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles. The novel continually echoes tabloid history to enliven its central incident: a 28-year-old murder known as the "case of the Virgin Tramp...
...Author Dunne, whose credits include Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, The Studio, Delano and film scripts written with his wife, Novelist Joan Didion, Lois Fazenda is the hapless fly that jiggles a grotesque web of relationships. As Spellacy discovers, the path of the victim's life crisscrossed his own world of Irish-American Los Angeles just after World War II. It is a lively place where an archbishop plays weekly croquet with Samuel Goldwyn, a hard-luck punk goes to the gas chamber for kidnaping a girl on V-J day, and a leading Catholic contractor short...