Angel's Gate: A Shortcut Man Novel
Hollywood was never so deliriously debauched as it is in Sturges’ latest Shortcut Man novel. From an opening scene that echoes the Tinsel Town melodrama, The Bad and the Beautiful, to a curiously sentimental epilogue, Sturges lays on the action, the emotion, the violence, the twisted sex, and the black comedy with an oversize trowel, but somehow, it all works splendidly. Dick Henry is the Shortcut Man, a fixer who always finds the most unencumbered route from problem to solution. This time, though, he’s awash in encumbrances. It all starts when a movie mogul, who keeps a harem of starlets, gives his kinky director a solid gold gun, and the director uses said gun to abuse one of the mogul’s starlets in a particularly unsavory fashion. Meanwhile, the Shortcut Man and the housemother to the harem attempt to sort it all out. The violence-fueled comic crime novel is harder to get right than it looks—to parody over-the-top melodrama is to risk losing hold of your narrative as it sails over its own top—but Sturges never loses control. Think the Marx Brothers with blood, sex, and, shockingly, a hint or two of genuine human feeling. --Bill Ott