True Confessions (First Edition)

Dunne, John Gregory

ISBN 10: 0525223657 / ISBN 13: 9780525223658

Published by Dutton, New York, 1977

About this Item

New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977. First edition. First printing, with full number line. Hardcover. Green cloth over boards with gilt spine lettering. Green endpapers. Fine in a very good dust jacket, with slight wrinkling to the cover. Publisher s original price intact on jacket flap ($9.95). Comes with archival-quality mylar dust jacket protector. A tight clean copy. Octavo, 341 pages. This was Dunne s fourth novel, a noir-inspired exploration of postwar Los Angeles corruption and Irish-Catholic power structures, loosely based on the 1947 Black Dahlia murder. The novel was adapted into the 1981 film "True Confessions," directed by Ulu Grosbard and starring Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall as the Spellacy brothers a priest and a detective entangled in a murder investigation. Dunne co-wrote the screenplay with his wife, Joan Didion.

Seller Inventory # Fiction-Dunne-1

Bibliographic Details

• Title: True Confessions (First Edition)
• Publisher: Dutton, New York
• Publication Date: 1977
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0525223657
• ISBN 13: 9780525223658
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine

About this title

Synopsis

In 1940s Los Angeles, an unidentified murder victim is found bisected in a shadowy lot. A catchy nickname is given her in jestâ "The Virgin Tramp"â and suddenly a "nice little homicide that would have drifted off the front pages in a couple of days" becomes a storm center. Two brothers, Tom and Des Spellacy, are at the heart of this powerful novel of Irish-Catholic life in Southern California just after World War II. Played in the film version by Robert Duvall and Robert De Niro respectively, Tom is a homicide detective and Des is a priest on the rise within the Church. The murder investigation provides the background against which are played the ever changing loyalties of the two brothers. Theirs is a world of favors and fixes, power and promises, inhabited by priests and pimps, cops and contractors, boxers and jockeys and lesbian fight promoters and lawyers who know how to put the fix in. A fast-paced and often hilarious classic of contemporary fiction, True Confessions is about a crime that has no solutions, only victims. More important, it is about the complex relationship between Tom and Des Spellacy, each tainted with the guilt and hostility that separate brothers.

About the Author

John Gregory Dunne was the author of six novels—Vegas; True Confessions; Dutch Shea, Jr.; The Red White and Blue; Playland; and Nothing Lost—and seven works of nonfiction, among which are the memoir-like Harp and two books that look at Hollywood, The Studio and Monster. Born in West Hartford, Connecticut, in 1932, he graduated from Princeton in 1954. He collaborated with his wife, the writer Joan Didion, on many screenplays, including Panic in Needle Park and True Confessions. John Gregory Dunne died in December 2003.