Clea's Moon

Rating:
Summary: A superb debut novel
Review: CLEA'S MOON comes to us with high expectations. In Great Britain it has won the CWA Debut Dagger for fiction which is not the award for best first novel (The Creasey Award) but judgment based on a 500 word synopsis of the book and the opening pages up to 3000 words . (I anticipate a nomination for the Creasey Award this year.) Though first published in Great Britain, the author is American and the characters and setting most assuredly are as well. It is a gem and another one of the year's best debuts.
John Ray Horn is a former star of B-movie westerns. Along with his "Tonto" or sidekick Indian friend Joseph Mad Dog, they provided many hours of enjoyment for young moviegoers. Now, however, Horn is out of the movie business after a prison term that resulted in a divorce. He works for his old friend, Mad Dog, collecting debts for the Indian's casino business. One day, Horn is contacted by an old friend, Scotty, who wants to show him some his father's pictures which he discovered after his father's death. The photos reveal very young girls in provocative positions. One of the photos is of Clea, Horn's former stepdaughter. When Horn contacts his ex-wife inquiring about Clea, he is told she has disappeared. Horn then pursues her. The search takes him to the dark and forbidden underworld of Los Angeles in the late 1940s.
CLEA'S MOON is an exceptional novel and what is even more remarkable is that it is a first novel. It runs on all cylinders right out of the starting gate. Characters, plot, pacing all combine to perfection in this wonderfully atmospheric novel. Horn, being a faded cowboy movie star, is an interesting main protagonist. What is especially intriguing throughout most of the book is the question as to why he was in prison. We learn the answer late in the book. Nothing is left to chance. The search for Clea propels the story along. However, once she is found, the question arises as to why she ran away. Pages fly by as we find out the stunning truth. Edward Wright is a journalist and, like so many journalists before him, has written a superb debut novel.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing--Doesn't Live Up To Its Promise
Review: Edward Wright's debut novel, _Clea's Moon_, has a lot of promise, but never quite delivers. When I first read a blurb about this a few months back, it sounded great--just the sort of book I would like. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work.

Wright's protagonist is John Ray Horn, a former cowboy movie star who played the character of Sierra Lane in dozens of low-budget westerns during the 1930s and 1940s, before being sent to prison for two years for assault. Since his release, he's been working as a collection agent for his friend Joseph Mad Crow, who used to be his faithful Indian sidekick in the movies. Horn finds that having to occasionally muscle late payments out of the dead-beat fathers of boys who remember Sierra Lane isn't much fun.

When his friend, rich playboy Scotty Bullard, contacts him regarding a cache of photos he's discovered in the desk of his recently deceased father, a real estate mogul, Horn discovers that one of the underage girls posed in a provocative manner is Clea, who for a brief time was his stepdaughter, in a marriage that didn't last his prison stint. When Scotty is killed shortly thereafter, Horn gets involved in the search for his killer, as well as the group of men who were involved in the picture-taking and worse.

As I said, there is a lot of potential here. Even reviewing my quick plot intro, the book still sounds like a grabber. With its hero who can't quite live up to his onscreen heroics (there are some flashbacks to his time in WWII, when he came face-to-face with paralyzing fear) and the neat reversal of roles with his Indian partner, as well as the time period, an era when Los Angeles was going through fast growth and development (not too far removed from the time portrayed in _Chinatown_), and careful attention to period detail and history, all the elements would seem to be in place for a riveting novel. Unfortunately, this just isn't it. The book is very slow-moving and covers some of the same ground over and over, as Horn searches for the missing Clea, finds her, then loses her, then has to find her again. Wright tends to over-write and he has a hard time keeping the pace moving. Ultimately, the book is just sort of dull and was a real disappointment. I might still give a second John Horn book a chance, but it would have to correct some of the flaws in this first outing.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Debut
Review: This is one of those novels that leaves you wondering why the guy hasn't been writing books since he was sixteen or something. It's a detective story, yes, a private eye novel with all of the atmosphere and intellegence that the genre requires to be well done. It's also a wonderful period piece and a decent picture of Hollywood's past.

John Ray Horn is a former rodeo bronc-rider turned B-Western star who tanked his career when he decked the son of the head of his studio, putting the guy in the hospital with a broken jaw. He did two years in prison for that, and when he returned, he discovered that his old boss had blacklisted him and his acting career was over. His faithful Indian sidekick, though, had invested his earnings from the movies and bought a poker parlor/casino on the edge of L.A., and he offers Horn a job collecting bad debts from gamblers. Horn reluctantly takes it, though he hates the work.

When a friend approaches him with some intriguing information about Horn's former step-daughter (the wife divorced him while he was in jail), he decides to look into things. Then the friend is apparently a suicide, and of course Horn doesn't believe it and looks into that too.

The action is interesting, with not too much violence, but enough to keep things exciting, and the characters are wonderfully drawn and intelligently portrayed. Los Angeles has never been more authentically depicted (to my mind the author easily outdoes Ellroy) with the settings, from restaurants to studio lots to the developing San Fernando Valley all wonderfully toured.

I loved this book, and I would recommend it to anyone who has an interest in old movies, detective stories, or Los Angeles.