Hollywood and Levine

Andrew Bergman, the director of "Honeymoon in Vegas" and the underrated "Striptease" was a novelist before his scripting/directing career took off and an excellent novelist at that. His detective is a Mensch forced to deal with McCarthy-era Hollywood, a few stiffs and screenwriters under the black list. Very genre but very good. A really funny encounter with Dick Nixon is hallucinatory. A small-hours tour of the Warner's Studio backlot western town unforgettable and the ending image echoes the best of Chandler. You'll want to read it again.