This is a novel of twos-- two brothers, two "houses", a woman severed in two pieces. They are the Spellacy brothers, Tommy the cop, Desmond the priest. The "houses" are the LAPD and the Catholic Church. The butchered woman is Lois Fazenda, lowlife, hooker, vagrant. Never a character in the book, Ms. Fazenda becomes the focal point for John Gregory Dunne's sprawling novel of crime and corruption in 1940's L.A.Detective Tom and Father Des have a love/hate relationship. As brothers, their fierce competitiveness fuels their undoing. A failure in love, Tommy finds solace only in sex. The celibate Father Desmond, equally lonely, lives his brother's sex life in a sordid, vicarious fashion. (Tommy's girlfriends tend to find themselves in Desmond's Confessional.)One can't help but think of John Gregory Dunne's troubled relationship with his well known brother Dominick. Brothers, writers, competitors, they loved and respected one another even as they fought and feuded. Good old Irish Catholic boys, masters of the Grudge. Much of this unfolds in the pages of True Confessions.It becomes a contest as to which entity is more corrupt, the Police or the Church. It's a shameless money-grab from cover to cover.I was struck by the honest, gritty depiction of the 1940's L.A. gutter. Mr. Dunne was the product of privilege, of Princeton, of copious Connecticut money. But he nails the sewer of Los Angeles. The narration and speech are faithfully ugly and racist. There are Mexicans, Negroes, Chinamen, Jews who enter the dialogue in the most disgusting of terms. Never a prude, I encountered sexual metaphors in this book that made me say, "ouch." But it is the Irish, the Catholic Irish who drive the book. The Church has the power to select the Chief of Police. Father Desmond can save Detective Tommy from a corruption indictment. In return, Tommy can cover up the arrests of priests driving drunk. When Father Gagnon dies of a heart attack in the arms of a black hooker, it is Tommy who moves the body to a more appropriate venue. The cops and the church are a two-headed beast. The Police Department and the Archdiocese are dueling snake-pits.This feels like classic L.A. Noir, and it is. But for me it is more, it is a red-blooded American novel that just happens to be about crime. Earlier, I referred to the book as "sprawling." Indeed it sprawls outward in countless threads. But in the world of Mr. Dunne everything is connected. The myriad tentacles of his plot find their way back through cops, bishops, contractors, hookers, bums, informers-- all the way back to its nexus which is the bisected body of Lois Fazenda who was tortured to death. If the top half of her body, the brain and heart, fell into the lofty domain of Father Des, the bottom half, the nether regions, was Detective Tommy's turf.There is plenty of sin to go around here. Tommy is a serial adulterer and a vindictive prick. Desmond, a ruthless, careerist priest, falls prey to "the heresy of self." For him, Pride is the worst sin of them all. Flannery O'connor would approve. In the end they reconcile, proclaiming themselves just "a couple of Harps." But they would be wrong. More to the point, they were just a couple of Americans.Dunne's Los Angeles seems to spring from a relentless anger. Cops. Priests. A pox on both their houses.
The hardest of hard-boiled novels--made all the harder by its moments of restraint--a masterwork of grit, suspense, and narrative control, not to mention a wonderful evocation of Los Angeles and a near-definitive dictionary of racial slurs and terms for female anatomy. While it can be tough to swallow in places, that's also the art of it. George Pelecanos points out in the introduction that the reader is free to judge the characters if they want, but the author refuses to.What makes this book so compulsively readable is not the murder mystery, though that's tantalizing enough: a young woman chopped up and left on a street corner, a la the Black Dahlia. The further we go in this story, the more we realize that the solution doesn't matter. This is a crime from which it is impossible to extract justice, a crime that by its nature can only divide and separate and bifurcate those who come in contact with it. From the outset, True Confessions defeats our expectations. We're accustomed, these days, to detective stories in which the sad-sack, gruffly likeable investigator doggedly, obsessively pursues the killer. For our detective, Tom Spellacy, solving the case is the last thing on his mind most of the time. He's got other problems. Rather than casing suspicious locales or staying up all night digging through old files, or whatever it is a fictional detective should do, he's eating lunch at the Biltmore and going to the fights and doing little favors for his pals, like moving a priest's corpse out of a brothel. He works the murder during work hours, but mostly he's worried about his wife in the loony bin, his mistress, a mobster he's at odds with, and his brother, the monsignor. Not until the end does he really knuckle down. And Tom does crack it. But it turns out that solving the case solves nothing.What matters is the relationship between two men, Tom Spellacy and his brother, Monsignor Des Spellacy. A couple of Irish toughs from Boyle Heights who know how to operate in the worlds they've chosen. Tom works all the angles when it comes to hookers, pimps, mobsters, and fight promoters. Des does the same with cardinals, pastors, laymen, and the many crooked businessmen glomming onto the Catholic church.Almost without you noticing, Dunne layers these characters and crafts something moving out of their relationship. At times the book seems to be nothing more than an almost dreamlike series of conversations, at once philosophical and earthy, rendered with dazzling readability and style. But you've got to have the stomach for it, because these people don't talk nice. If you want a couple of stand-up guys to root for, you're out of luck with the Spellacy brothers. What you get here are complicated, witty, smart, often ugly people at war with their deep affection for and resentment of one another.And that's the really hard stuff. Not hookers and murderers and corrupt cops. Those things are easy. Family, faith. Brothers. That's hard-boiled.
What do You think about True Confessions (2005)?
This novel was the definition of the phrase "slow burn" ....it was definitely a bit slow in the beginning--mainly trying to get all the lingo down. I have read plenty of detective novels but it was getting the slang and the police lingo etc in the time period described. The back story of the book is loosely based on the Black Dahlia murder and is a favorite of James Ellroy so both of these things influenced me to read this one. I have to say, once it got going it was very good. A really nice combination of mystery and straight fiction--the relationships in the story sort of start out being a back story until you realize that a good portion of the way through, the mystery of the murderer while compelling is not as compelling as the relationships between Des and Tom Spellacy and their circle. A really good read and extremely well written.
—Belinda
POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERTSI always loved this story since I saw the movie years ago. Then I realized there must be a book attached to the film and was thrilled to find a copy on Kindle. I actually think I liked the movie a bit more. What is there not to like with Robert DeNiro and Robert Duval playing brothers in this hard boiled story of morality and choice. So as I read it I kept seeing them in their roles. I wonder what it be like to read the book without ever having watched the film?The basic outline is DeNiro plays a priest who is well ensconced in the hierarchy of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and Duval plays a detective investigating the gruesome murder of a young woman. Inevitably the investigation begins to wash around the feet of some of the church's biggest patrons. This is not giving anything away. But it's clear from the beginning that despite appearances the cop, for all his sins, is the "good" brother and the priest is the one whose soul is a risk.I'd read the book first and then find the film. It's hard to believe after watching how many crappy movies DeNiro has made when he was capable of this kind of nuanced, powerful acting.
—Charles Lewis
Once again I was lured to this novel by the movie based upon it, starring Roberts DeNiro and Duvall. The novel is deeper and less dramatic (no great surprise there) and I found it thoroughly involving on several levels. The murder mystery itself-- set in vintage Los Angeles and based rather loosely on the "Black Dahlia" murder case-- almost takes a back seat to the familial and ecclesiastic relationships being explored and the final solution to the crime is a bit more mundane and realistic; for Dunne, things just didn't all tie up neatly and comprehensively. I kind of liked that.
—Tony Gleeson
