Devil's Garden

This is a highly enjoyable tale of the Fatty Arbuckle scandal seen through several perspectives, chief among them a young lunger working for the Pinkerton's in the City by the Bay named Sam Hammett. This book may look like a thriller, but it's really a historical novel ala E.L. Doctrow. There's lots of period flavor and sharp dialogue, but the whole affair is unpretentious and fast-paced. The portrait of Hammett that emerges and references to his later work are fun and subtle. He comes off as a fully realized character, which isn't always the case in the Poe thriller industry. This would make a great double-bill with the recent Spade & Archer.

With the publication of WHITE SHADOW and WICKED CITY, the novels published just prior to DEVIL'S GARDEN, Ace Atkins entered into the big leagues of great, memorable fiction. Now with the publication of DEVIL'S GARDEN, Ace proves that he deserves a permanent slot on every major best seller list (New York Times, USA Today, etc.) and that people who enjoy a great read should stand up and take notice. Ace has a wonderful flair for taking unique historical events, researching them impeccably and then turning them into "movies for the mind". I've been a fan of Ace for a long time and have read all of his books. And DEVIL'S GARDEN is Ace's best book yet. This is an author who deserves to be sharing the spotlight with everyone from Grisham to Parker to Patterson to any other of today's biggest names in fiction. If you haven't read Ace Atkins, then you are truly missing out. And if you miss reading DEVIL'S GARDEN, well, you might just not be a serious reader. Do yourself a favor: if you only buy one novel to read this Spring, make it DEVIL'S GARDEN.

Ace Atkins went from being a good writer to an amazing one seemingly overnight. The transformation occurred with WHITE SHADOW, a fictionalized account of an unsolved murder that took place in Tampa, Florida, in the 1950s. His next novel, WICKED CITY, about a corrupt town in Alabama, was every bit as good as its predecessor. But his latest work blows both of them, and just about everything else, out of the water. DEVIL'S GARDEN begins on a fateful Labor Day weekend in 1921 when silent film comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle came to San Francisco for a holiday of drunkenness and debauchery. Within 72 hours a woman would be found critically injured in his suite of rooms at the St. Francis Hotel; upon her death a short while later, Arbuckle would be charged with manslaughter. Students of the silent film era are familiar with the incident and how it played out; those who are not probably would not care. So Atkins is faced with a double dilemma: How do you make interesting a story whose ending is already writ in history, and how do you attract a reading audience from those whose interests may lie elsewhere? The solution --- one that Atkins accomplishes with amazing, almost magical ability --- is to paint each character with a vividness that causes them to stay in the mind's eye long after they have passed off the page, all the while sprinkling them through a narrative that flows unhurriedly even as the next sentence, paragraph, page and chapter demand to be read immediately. Atkins performs this Herculean task quite handily, even as he recreates the San Francisco of the 1920s with such vividness that it seems to take over the real world of the here and now if and when one stops reading. The inside front and back of DEVIL'S GARDEN is thoughtfully illustrated with a contemporary street map of the downtown area (coffee stains, creases, and all) so that one might follow along with what happens in the sprawling story. And what a story it is. With a subtlety and irony mastered by but a few others, Atkins suspensefully reveals how Arbuckle, a man of excessive and unhealthy appetites, came to be charged with manslaughter, which almost immediately derailed his film career. The temptation to tell the story through Arbuckle's eyes must have been strong, and indeed at points it is necessary. It is but one of the many manifestations of Atkins's genius, however, that the viewpoint most prominent here is that of the Pinkerton investigator who was hired by Arbuckle's attorney to conduct a search for the truth that would form the basis for his defense. That investigator would be a tuberculotic-war veteran named Sam Dashiell Hammett, who would later become far better known for far different reasons. Hammett painstakingly begins to uncover who is behind what amounts to be an official vendetta against Arbuckle, and, even more importantly, the "why" that drives it, even as the city's establishment inexorably begins to grind Arbuckle down. While the City of San Franci

In 1921, following a wild party at a San Francisco hotel, silent film star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle is arrested for the alleged murder of actress Virginia Rappe. The evidence is circumstantial at best, but William Randolph Hearst using his colossal newspaper kingdom assaults the actor accusing him of suffocating the poor starlet with his humongous weight. Pinkerton private investigator Sam Dashiell Hammett investigates the case for the defense. He finds at best a sloppy official inquiry by SFPD and an even more questionable autopsy; as if everyone feared the wrath of Hearst. Rightfully so, as the newspaper mogul keeps up the tirade until Arbuckle is condemned in public and his comedic movie career buried under innuendos and disinformation. Hammett finds all sorts of Hollywood scandals, but none as perverse as Hearst's unethical efforts that the sleuth believes is to save the movie career of his mistress Marian Davies at the expense of Arbuckle. Ace Atkins' third historical mystery (see WHITE SHADOW and WICKED CITY) is a terrific silent movie era noir focusing on the notorious Arbuckle murder case. The story line is fast-paced, filled with action, loaded with real persona, and captures the era especially how influential the newspapers (specifically Hearst) as well as anyone since Citizen Caine. Harriet Klausner

Dashiell Hammett investigating the first-ever celebrity murder trial on the foggy streets of San Francisco, a silent-film star hounded in the newspapers by William Randolph Hearst himself -- Ace Atkins knows how to make historical fiction out of a hard-boiled detective story. Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle was roaring through the '20s with plenty of showgirls and hooch when he pajama-partied a little too much and a starlet got dead. At the time, Hammett was a Pinkerton operative hired to find witnesses whom prosecutors were hiding. Hearst, of course, deployed his yellow-journalism reporters to crucify the "portly beast" Arbuckle. (Chris Farley wanted to play Fatty in a movie, and it would have been a match, because Arbuckle was a self-loathing porker with a gift for making people laugh and no desire ever to grow up.) Ace Atkins -- yeah, that's really his name -- writes cinematically: Short scenes with clever "buttons" alternate with long swaths of snappy dialogue. One flimflam man, for example, describes another as "a phony bird. That's halfway between crazy and a con man, and that's the middle of the road, brother." Hammett -- he was "Sam" then, back before his Dashiell days -- tails tricksters and crooks into ornate hotel lobbies and up San Francisco's hills, wheezing with the effort and pausing to spit blood into his handkerchief. While some good-hearted folks appear -- Sam's first wife, one of the Pinkertons, a snitch named Pete the Fink -- the speakeasies and courtrooms of The City are filled by people with their hands out, thumbing their noses at what passes for an upright legal system. Atkins works too hard at blackening Hearst's character in the epilogue, but Devil's Garden still rises far beyond pulp fiction to a much higher level. The three central characters -- Sam, Fatty and W.R. -- are all blameworthy, all filled with shame but unwilling to do much about it. In Atkins' world, prudes are really grifters, a power broker is just a little boy, a legal case is like a melodrama and a scalawag can be a stand-up guy. There aren't many moralistic blacks and whites in Devil's Garden -- just a lot of grays, melting off into that San Francisco fog.