There are two reasons to write a Hollywood novel, and they're both the same: everyone will shell out for a peek backstage. Some Hollywood novels - Jackie Collins's oeuvre, for example - exist to perpetrate the fiction that stars' lives are as glamourous off-screen as on. Others are written, with equal commercial savvy, to expose the shocking vice and greed of the industry. Ultra-glam or ultra-scum; we love to read about either, and the very best back lot potboilers dish out both at once.
Coerte Felske is an ex-screenwriter and he seems to have dug enough dirt during his time in the industry to fill several bookshelves. His hero in Word is Heyward Hoon, who must surely be an exaggerated portrait of Felske: a failed screenwriter whose hobby is Hollywood anthropology, observing the local Wannabeasts, 8x10s, Noguls, Starmen, and Muffin Heads, and so on. Girls, though, are Hoon's real area of expertise - all 2,000 of them that he happens to know. When lonely studio magnate Sidney Swinburn sees him stagger out of a bathroom with four lovely Bullets on his arms, Hoon sees the perfect opportunity to sell his years of research for a slice of success.
It's an old story, and in a way this is an old book. The flicks and chicks may represent 90s excess but the style of Word is pure 40s cool, all choppy sentences and dry wit. It's a pastiche - even a rip-off - but no more than anything else these days; people are getting used to judging authors on what they borrow rather than what they create. And if you like the original - in this case, the work of Raymond Chandler - the throwback can be terrific fun to read.
Felske knows this and has got his chosen style down perfectly. Whole paragraphs swing with voiceover rhythms that put Harrison Ford's famous Blade Runner monologues to shame. "He told me my new work was totally uncommercial. Sure, I'd heard it before . . . But I was damn good at producing work that didn't sell. So why ruin a good thing? He told me I should look for new representation. I told him he should look at my tallest finger."
It's all good, punchy stuff and Felske never falters. Beautiful babes, New York wasps and sleazy zillionaires all flit through Word, larger than life and twice as interesting. The only bit of Chandler that Feltze has chosen not to pilfer is the labyrinthine plot, which is a pity in a way: a long, zippy book like this could use a few more twists and turns. In the end, though, Word is lovable for the addictive dry wit of Felske/Hoon: "As I massaged number 4 into her back, my mind drifted from its search of all that is original, and plopped splat on the cliche." Can you blame him?
