PLAYLAND [Signed]

While researching a story in Detroit, screenwriter Jack Broderick meets 1940s-child-star-turned-bag-lady Blue Tyler, whose life had taken a precipitous turn when she fell in love with underworld killer Jacob King. 50,000 first printing. Tour.

A child movie star disappears and emerges 45 years later as a blue-haired trailer-park hag in Dunne's lurid tale of Hollywood sex, crime, and deception. In the 1930s, Blue Tyler was Tinseltown's highest paid ``cinemoppet''--Cosmopolitan Studio's meal ticket until she turned 23, when she fell from the biz and, to all appearances, off the planet. Decades later, researching a dopey cop movie, screenwriter Jack Broderick (back from The Red, White, and Blue, 1987) crashes into her accidentally in Detroit, where she is living in anonymous squalor. He alerts his producers that the real story is the discovery of the now elderly Blue Tyler, scraps everything else, and--helped by a vulgar extortionist policeman--gets the scoop on her life. All this is done through interviews with people who knew her, notably her ex-lover and publicist who afforded her a lifelong stipend, and her director, a one-legged war veteran and one of the only men in LA who didn't sleep with Blue (he's gay). Other sources include newspaper articles and court transcripts that reveal Blue's affair with vicious gangster Jacob King, who was gunned down in Playland, his tacky Las Vegas hotel, and various classified documents unearthed by shady connections. Interviews with brassy, foul-mouthed Blue herself (before she disappears again) offset the testimony of those who knew her. The result is an intriguing puzzle of identity. Does Blue's self-portrait match the image that friends and the public paint? Jack's compulsive fixation and frustration with her mount as he struggles to complete his research and cram her legend into a hit screenplay with integrity. At the end of the seamy story, the truth remains unclear, but nobody cares. The constant maybes and the run-on rants are made tolerable, even beguiling, by Dunne's bristling prose and savage cinematics. Dunne delivers grit with polish in this wicked celebrity archaeology. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

YA?A terrific read. Screen writer Jack Broderick finds himself in several awkward situations even before he winds up sharing a late-night cab ride with Blue Tyler. Tyler, a former child star 40 years removed from Hollywood, is now Autumn Breeze Trailer Park's answer to Norma Desmond. Sensing a story with a big payoff, Broderick tries to answer the questions surrounding her long hiatus. Young adults will be swept away as Jack Broderick tries to piece together the wild story of Blue Tyler. Dunne's vibrant characters and true-to-life dialogue make Playland impossible to put down.?Philip Clark, R.E. Lee High School, Springfield, VA
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Fitful, often contradictory memories of a former child film star's decade of fame and the cloaked brutality that surrounded her in the film industry give shape to Dunne's latest, enthralling novel, a tragic tale of behind-the-scenes Hollywood from the '30s to the present. Skillfully interweaving numerous small narratives, Dunne ( True Confessions ) explores the steep price of stardom, the potentially destructive power of storytelling (including filmmaking) and the illusory nature of truth. Screenwriter Jack Broderick, scion of a late Hollywood billionaire, has recently lost his wife in an automobile accident and is halfheartedly researching a movie when he finds Blue Tyler living in a trailer park outside Detroit. More than 40 years after leaving Hollywood--she was blacklisted as a Communist and grieving over the death of her flamboyant gangster lover--an impoverished Blue, though mildly delusional, still retains much of her glamorous charisma. Determined to solve the puzzle of Blue's contradictory versions of her life and the real reason for her disappearance, Jack pores over records and interviews other survivors of the era--each of whom, in turn, tells a slightly different account colored by self-interest. Dunne's ear for vernacular is as keen as ever, producing gritty, on-pitch, often funny dialogue. His sharp eye and his gift for the precise, almost journalistic detail evokes Hollywood in successive eras, and his characters are as vivid and memorable as any he has ever created. Major ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The quest that drives this shrewd, ironic, caustic, and extremely well written Hollywood novel involves finding what became of Blue Tyler, one of the hottest child stars of the late 1940s. Blue, actually Melba Mae Toolate, was cast as a pure and innocent little girl, but there was always something risque about her, something inviting more than paternal pats on the head, something that inspired her more demonstrative fans to send her letters encrusted with a certain bodily fluid. Dunne's hilarious and hapless narrator, Jack Broderick, estranged son of a mean-spirited billionaire and a modestly successful screenwriter, ends up finding Blue in a trailer park outside of Detroit after weathering a series of bloody disasters fraught with absurdity. Indeed, most of the initial plot shifts are precipitated by unexpected deaths. This is in keeping with the nasty, hypocritical machinations of postwar Hollywood, when gangsters were as glamorous as movie stars, and chic segued into violence with horrifying alacrity. Sex scandals, casino deals, the red scare and blacklisting all play a role in the cynical tale of Blue Tyler and her love affair with handsome hit man Jacob King. Everyone has an angle, whether it's money, power, lust, or the perspective of the camera. In sum, this is a wickedly funny, foulmouthed, hard-boiled, and perfectly executed bit of adult entertainment. Donna Seaman

Recovering from his wife's sudden death, Hollywood screenwriter Jack Broderick (the hero of Dunne's last novel, The Red White and Blue, LJ 4/15/87) flies to Detroit to research story ideas. In a Michigan trailer park, he discovers a coupon-clipping bag lady named Melba Mae Toolate who claims to have been Blue Tyler, one of the biggest child movie stars of the 1940s. Melba tells Broderick her life story, focusing on her scandalous liaison with Jacob King, a flamboyant gangster and Las Vegas visionary modeled on Bugsy Siegel. Playland offers a compelling film noir vision of Tinseltown during the war years, with cameo appearances by real-life personalities such as Walter Winchell. Unfortunately, Warren Beatty's recent film Bugsy covered much the same ground, and long sections of the book read like a remake of that movie. In the end, it is Dunne's colorful minor characters who hold the reader's interest. Recommended for larger collections of Hollywood fiction.
--Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law School Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.