Tinseltown

An excellent nonfiction account of an actual Hollywood killing, this is a well-written and researched investigation of the (as yet) unsolved 1922 shooting of director William Desmond Taylor. The murder was committed right when scandals, including Fatty Arbuckle’s, besieged an ascendant Hollywood.

Also of interest: A Murder in Hollywood by Casey Sherman, which recaps the killing of Johnny Stompanato, Lana Turner’s gangster boyfriend, supposedly by her teenage daughter, Cheryl. This crime inspired entertainment from Harold Robbin’s potboiler, Where Love Has Gone, to Woody Allen’s self-serious movie, September.

It’s been said that true crime provides a window into the past.

Well, that’s certainly true of Tinseltown, which plunges readers into the early days of the Hollywood studio system. More specifically, William J. Mann’s justly popular book focuses on the unsolved murder of the silent movie-era director William Desmond Taylor.

Besides being an atmospheric and compulsively readable account of his death and its aftermath, the book offers a persuasive reinvestigation of this once-famous crime. 

This page-turner dives into the underbelly of old Hollywood and the circumstances surrounding the lurid and still unsolved 1922 murder of actor and director William Desmond Taylor, with more than a splash of sex, drugs, and decadence spilling over everything. It breaks new ground in what was already a well-documented case.