Simon&Schuster, London 2009

Daniel Depp is the (older?) brother of Jonny Depp, the Pirate of the Carribean, and worked as a Hollywood screenwriter and producer before writing this first novel. So he intimately knows what he is talking about. The title is taken from a quote by Robert Mitchum about LA: “LA is a loser´s town. ...You can make it here when you can´t make it anywhere else.” Maybe this is also true for writers?

Depp creates a world of greed, duplicity, hypocrisy, and random atrocities with young and coming filmstar Bobby Dye at its center. When Bobby finds himself blackmailed and threatened, he engages David Spandau, an ex-stuntman and now private eye. At 39 Spandau has seen it all and plays his role as cynical voyeur of the rich and beautiful really cool. I am sure for the initiated the novel is an unmasking roman a`clef, this reader here is not quite so enthusiastic, mainly, because after the first couple of promising pages Depp gets lost in his grudge against everything that keeps Hollywood going.

By the way, can you really believe 39-year-old Spandau was raised by his German NAZI father, back from WWII?

Depp certainly is good at writing stunning dialogues, abundantly filling the blanks in with creative f-words, but the plot is sadly lacking in substance.