Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood

In the early 1920s, as Hollywood was emerging as America’s glittering new dream factory, its future was threatened by a string of lurid, headline-grabbing tragedies-including the murder of the handsome, secretly haunted actor and director William Desmond Taylor, a crime that went unsolved for nearly a century.

Now, in this fiendishly involving New York Times bestseller-hailed as a must-read by Liz Smith-William Mann draws on a rich host of sources, many untapped for decades, to revisit the case of the enigmatic Taylor and the diverse cast that surrounded him-including three loyal ingenues, a grasping stage mother, a devoted valet, a gang of two-bit thugs, the industry’s reluctant new morals czar, and the moguls Adolph Zukor and Marcus Loew, locked in a struggle for control of the exploding industry. Along the way, Mann brings to life Los Angeles in the Roaring Twenties: a sparkling yet schizophrenic town filled with celebrities, party girls and drug dealers-a dangerous place where the powerful could still run afoul of the desperate.

A true story re-created with the suspense of a novel, Tinseltown is a thrilling joyride for lovers of both the world of celebrity and the underworld that always lurks beneath.