Regular marked price: $14.00Discount Price: $12.15
Cost Savings: $1.85 (13%)Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780743291729
ISBN number: 0743291727
Label: Simon & Schuster
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 256
Printing Date: February 19, 2008
Publishing house: Simon & Schuster
Sale Popularity Level: 419234
Studio: Simon & Schuster
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
On October 7, 1949, dark-haired starlet Jean Spangler kissed her five-year-old daughter good-bye and left for a night shoot at a Hollywood studio. 'Wish me luck,' she said as she crossed her fingers, winked, and walked away. She was never seen again. The only clues left behind: a purse with a broken strap found in a nearby park, a cryptic note, and rumors about mobster boyfriends and ill-fated romances with movie stars.
Drawing on this true-life missing person case, Megan Abbott's The Song Is You tells the story of Gil 'Hop' Hopkins, a smooth-talking Hollywood publicist whose career, despite his complicated personal life, is on the rise. It is 1951, two years after Jean Spangler's disappearance, and Hop finds himself unwillingly drawn into the still unsolved mystery by a friend of Jean who blames Hop for concealing details about Jean's whereabouts the night she vanished. Driven by guilt and fear of blackmail, Hop delves into the case himself, feverishly trying to stay one step ahead of an intrepid female reporter also chasing the story. Hop thought he'd seen it all, but what he uncovers both tantalizes and horrifies him as he plunges deeper and deeper into Hollywood's substratum in his endeavor to uncover the truth.
In the tradition of James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia and Joyce Carol Oates's Blonde, The Song Is You conjures a heady brew of truth and speculation, of fact and pulp fiction, taking the reader on a dark tour of Tinseltown, from movie studios, gala premieres, and posh nightclubs to gangsters, blackmailing B-girls, and the darkest secrets that lie behind Hollywood's luminous façade. At the center of it all is Hop, a man torn between cutthroat ambition and his own best intentions.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
Megan Abbott doesn't exactly paint beautiful pictures, and you might not want her characters as close friends. But you can't help but care for the men and women in her novels, especially the women.This differs from DIE A LITTLE and QUEENPIN in that it's told from a masculine third person perspective rather than the feminine very first person viewpoint of her other novels. It still has the grittiness. This one delves even deeper into the rotten underside of society, Hollywood in this case with a more bitter aftertaste than even Chandler and Caine. The story revolves around a studio publicist in the late forties and early fifties. Anyone familiar with the area will feel quite at home in the various locations. Well, in many of them. The author does take us inside a couple of nightspots which we are not, nor wish to be, familiar with. This uses the true-life disappearance of Jean Spangler as the center. The lead character is one of the last people to have seen her and a couple of years later is confronted with this by Spangler's close friend. The story is well told and as in the author's other stories, we eventually learn the story involving the bonding of women during this time period. Highly recommended.
Rated by buyers 
-
A stylish mystery built around a real life disappearance case. A party girl B-actress, in this case.
The protagonist of the piece is a little different, in that he is a studio PR flack that happened to be at the same party on the night she was last seen, with a friend.
In fact, cops, detectives etc. are pretty much absent in this one, apart from implied threats to inflict on the various dodgy characters who inhabit the Hollywood of this time - most of them in this case in the media.
One of the dodgy characters is our publicity man's wife, or ex-wife if you like, as too many nights and too many women have finished that, given his job is to either drink with, be nice to, or get beautiful women out of trouble, a fair bit of the time.
More a stylish piece than pulp thrills, as tough guys and bullets are nowhere to be seen, so perhaps rather tame for someone expecting that from their noir.
Still good though.
Rated by buyers -
OK, I'm kind of ashamed to admit it, but with a few exceptions - Ariana Franklin comes to mind - I don't like female authors. Go ahead, call me sexist, chauvinistic, a Neanderthal obsessed with things blowing up, whatever - most female authors just don't resonate with me. Then, I come across Megan Abbott in an anthology of "geezer" noir compiled by the decidedly not-female Duane Swierczynski and, hit-me-in-the-head with a 2x4 - this "dame" (no offense to the PC police - I'm only in character here) can write! At least a short story. So I go looking for more from Abbott - maybe she got lucky with the short - to see if she can tack together a novel. And I find "The Song is You". And it's even better - you'd think that Chandler or Thompson or Hammett came back as Megan Abbott - she totally nails the genre - has the rhythm, the banter, she can sling the broads and booze around the pages with the best of the pulp masters, creating that uniquely American-crime noir atmosphere that many have copied but few have matched. Here's a gal that can curse as blue and convincingly as a longshoreman, but then come right back with a "smell of, somehow, fresh ironed pillowcases, cut flowers, wind through hanging laundry" lines that the Bruens and Burkes and Swierczynskis and Gischlers could never touch - but then she's back in your face with "just some platinum-studded meat grinder with fresh-faced virgins going in one end and coming out hard-bitten whores." Holy smokes!
Oh yeah - the story - and this is one of the coolest parts: Jean Spangler was a rising starlet of the 40's, who walked out of her apartment in 1951 and never returned, leaving her five-year old daughter and a big time mystery behind. True story. So Abbott takes the facts as they are known and spins her own wholly engrossing, decadent, sleazy and oily story of what may have happened - a brilliant expose of the glamour and garbage of Hollywood at its worst - a vivid dissection of slime we're drawn to like an impending train wreck. Abbott does a terrific job with the characters who, while pretty consistently not the type that will make you proud, are well drawn, credible, and if heroic, only tragically so. Characters in character with the post-WWII setting, comfortable in their "swell" banter in the days when "guys" was gender specific and, if political correctness had a meaning back then, it was likely associated with not being a Communist. Abbott takes us down this seedy path, running us through dive bars and corruption, studio hy-jinx and murder, on the way to a blistering and totally unexpected climax. It's revealing, it's poignant, it's disturbing - a tour de force of contemporary noir cleverly crafted in a period piece. Abbott has shown how to take all the jagged edges, the brutality, and the irony of top shelf crime fiction, but to temper it with a sensitivity and passion that is completely alien to those hard bitten guys of crime we love. Brilliant, Ms. Abbott.
Rated by buyers -
A Hollywood fixer on the make is unexpectedly drawn into a vortex of memory and conscience in this deft noir. The details may be lurid but the tone is poignant and believable. It's like one of James Ellroy's early novels with a more compassionate touch. (But don't make any allowances for the authoress -- she gets her libidinous male lead absolutely right.) The one distraction is the inclusion of some real people as characters here making for some slightly uneasy moments.
Rated by buyers -
You won't find detailed descriptions of 1950's kitchen utensils or food items in The Song is You, unlike Megan Abbott's very first book, Die a Little. What you will get is a less manic James Ellroy-esque parade through the Hollywood star system and the people who clean up after the stars' excesses of the night before. And those people have their work cut out for them in 1950's Hollywood!
There's considerably more plot to this book as well. The pace is breakneck compared to the first, although nothing like Ellroy's amphetamine soaked style. Real and fictional people walk in and out of the plot, all artfully drawn. As with most noir pieces, there is the obligatory head fake, the plot twist, and the surprising ending. All are handled as if Abbott had been doing this effortlessly for years.
It's been a while since we've seen an author advance her craft so far from book to book. I liked Die a Little, but it was hard to see how there could be many interesting follow ups to a 'what is in the kitchen' eye view of the world. That kind of attention is fascinating week after week for AMC's Mad Men, but then the plot is always running in parallel in TV. In a book, detailed observations of food and their accompanying utensils can distract from the story.
In this book, Ms. Abbott moves out of the kitchen and onto the mean streets of West Los Angeles with aplomb. Based on a true historical case, she spins out a compelling and complex story. LA location descriptions are vivid, belying her East Coast upbringing. And she has a good ear for how far she can push the sordidness of an anecdote about a movie star before it comes incredulous.
A little known fact about the author is that she is a skilled academician who wrote her graduate thesis on noir (the largely unavailable The Street Was Mine.) Readers would never guess that blindly because Ms. Abbott can hold her own with the legendary noir authors who often left things to the readers' imagination as well as Ellroy who does not. The walls in this book are not covered in ivy, but more likely in blood.
Ms. Abbott is a very welcome addition to the neo-noir authors flourishing today. She makes the world she describes very real, and draws out her main characters very well. I look forward to reading her subsequent book.
Find other books like this one:
