Why am I passionate about this?
I’m an English nonfiction writer who is, I suppose, best-known for Members Only, my biography of the London strip club owner, theatre impresario, property magnate, and porn baron Paul Raymond, which was adapted into a big-budget movie called The Look of Love. Like many of my books, Members Only strayed into true crime, a genre that has, for all sorts of reasons, been attractive to me as a writer. Probably the most important of those is that it provides the opportunity to tell inherently dramatic stories and to convey a vivid picture of the past, thanks to the wealth of documentation associated with major crimes.
Paul's book list on twenty-first century true-crime
Why did Paul love this book?
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.
2 authors picked Tinseltown as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
New York Times Bestseller Edgar Award winner for Best Fact Crime The Day of the Locust meets The Devil in the White City and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in this juicy, untold Hollywood story: an addictive true tale of ambition, scandal, intrigue, murder, and the creation of the modern film industry. By 1920, the movies had suddenly become America's new favorite pastime, and one of the nation's largest industries. Never before had a medium possessed such power to influence. Yet Hollywood's glittering ascendency was threatened by a string of headline-grabbing tragedies-including the murder of William Desmond…