Hollywood Sinners, by Peter Joseph Swanson

Peter Joseph Swanson is a popular character on gather, with many faithful friends and readers commenting on his postings. He's also the author of Hollywood Sinners and the recently published Joan Crawford Murders.

When I first found Peter's gather home page, I would eagerly await new excerpts from his first novel. He always published them in short neat scenes, with fascinating characters and intriguing dialog. I enjoyed each new read as it arrived, but foolishly imagined I wouldn't be quite so interested in the whole book. The characters, though quirky, didn't excite my sympathy - well, maybe Sister Agatha of the Streetcar did, but I knew it wasn't her story. And I never wanted to be a film star so the setting, 1930s Hollywood, was foreign to me without any of the attraction of the exotic or historically curious. My bad, I guess.

Joan Crawford didn't excite me either, though the excerpts I've read get increasingly intriguing. But ironically, it was reading about present day Hollywood in Delaune Michel's book that persuaded me to finally order myself a copy of Hollywood Sinners. It's a very different book, and I'm very glad I did.

For a start, Hollywood Sinners is not a terribly long book. At 188 pages, it probably didn't matter if I identified with the protagonist, so I started reading without needing to decide where my sympathies lay. Soon I recognized and appreciated the delightful craft in the writing - hardly a spare scene or sentence anywhere. And I noticed what I should probably have spotted in the short excerpts on gather, a feeling of fable and sense of the surreal that, I suppose, is rather appropriate for a novel set in Tinsel town.

Not that Peter's depiction is unreal. But it had never occurred to me beforehand to wonder what Hollywood would be like, just before World War II, or where the sympathies of Americans would lie, not just about the war. I absorbed a feeling for a strange foreign place as I read, and found myself looking through a new foreign lens at the present.

Karin's mishaps had me laughing, even as I saw them coming. The sense of timing, as well as the sense of time, is very satisfying to the reader. And, though I couldn't agree with Karin's aims, I could delight in the resonance of her misfortunes.

By the end of the novel I was simultaneously pleased and searching back through pages to see what I'd missed. I felt contentedly bemused, and could happily have read further. So maybe I'd better start looking out for the Joan Crawford Murders after all. Peter Joseph Swanson's Hollywood is a strange, exciting and curiously thought-provoking place. But my to-read list is rather long so it may take a while. Till then, I'll have to be satisfied with looking for excerpts on Peter's gather page.

©Sheila Deeth, June 2008