Dream Town, by David Baldacci is another in Baldacci’s popular Archer series. Set in early 1953, it features Aloysius Archer, a tough World War II veteran and private investigator. Baldacci assumes the reader already knows a bit about Archer, so he gets right into the story. Archer is visiting Los Angeles to spend New Year’s Eve with his beautiful friend, actress Liberty Callahan. Though they once slept together, for some reason, they value each other more as friends than lovers. This is part of Archer’s somewhat overdeveloped sense of honor. Most men would be putting the moves on Callahan around the clock. Not him… though maybe he has feelings for her that he hasn’t sorted out.
As Archer and Callahan make their way through fabulous 1950s style Hollywood New Year’s Even parties, they are approached by Callahan’s friend, screenwriter Eleanor Lamb, who wants Archer’s help because she is afraid someone is trying to kill her. She lives alone, so she’s scared. He tells her he will be in touch, but later that night, when he calls her, a man answers and says she’s not there. Archer decides to go out and see Lamb at her place in Malibu.
Once at Lamb’s house, Archer runs into a series of unpleasant surprises. Lamb is missing. There’s a dead man on the floor of her house. Someone knocks Archer out with a sap to the back of his house. Then, he runs into a bunch of smugglers on a nearby beach, who try to kill him. Battered but not down, Archer calls in the murder anonymously and makes his way back to Los Angeles.
Thus starts a book’s worth of gumshoeing. Archer is intent on finding Lamb, but also solving the murder of the man he found in her house. He talks to the investigating cops, but doesn’t tell them that he was the one who found the body. They’re skeptical, and Archer realizes he’s at risk of being charged with the murder and locked up.
As Archer peels back the glamorous curtain of Hollywood stardom and movie magic, he finds himself immersed in a filthy parallel universe of predatory people and broken people who look like the have it made on the surface. A matchbook leads Archer to a creepy bar in Chinatown where it seems that movie stars are being blackmailed for their sexual deviancies and heroin addictions. He nearly gets killed as he escapes the place.
Archer starts to talk to everyone who knows Lamb, including a fat cat movie producer and his partner, an up and coming (and unusual) female movie director, a set designer who knew Lamb in college, and other seductive and repulsive characters. The mystery around what happened to Lamb grows more intense and frightening. Bad people are involved, and they shoot to kill… Archer gets beaten and bloodied a few more times, and narrowly escapes what seems like certain death in the desert outside Las Vegas. Throughout, his personal honor code shines through. He wants to solve the case, do the right thing, make the world a better place…
Like everything else Baldacci writes, Dream Town is an engaging piece of fiction. I apply what I call my “rule of 10” to this book, which is that Baldacci at his worst is still at least 10 times better than almost anyone else on the market these days. I will say the same for Michael Connelly, Lee Child, and a few others.
Still, Baldacci has a problem, at least in my view. It’s almost impossible for a book like this to avoid seeming derivative. He’s working fields plowed many times by Raymond Chandler and other great writers of the noir era. The book reads a bit like a James Ellroy novel, except with correct punctuation and grammar. He’s also at risk for parody. As I read the book, I kept hearing Leslie Neilson’s narration in The Naked Gun movies, which riffed on this kind of fiction.
Archer’s 1950s Los Angeles is too perfect, in some ways. Baldacci wants you to see the fifties as a time of silver martini shakers, classic cars, women in risqué gowns and on an on… a Hollywood image of Hollywood making an image of itself. If you’re into that, it’s great, but he’s taking a risk of seeming ridiculous. However, like all Baldacci books, he keeps up the suspense with taut writing and (as always) overcomes a tendency toward overplotting with some amazing wrap ups at the end.
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https://youtu.be/_DZkmOxmN8I