Fisher, Carrie. Postcards from the edge, New York : Simon and Schuster, 1987.

When Carrie Fisher wrote this comic and profound debut novel, she had known fame as an actress (through the Star Wars movie franchise) and as the child of Hollywood royalty: Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher. Postcards from the Edge is the prism through which she interprets her personal life, family and the movie industry, all realised with striking candour, pathos and wit.  Fisher chronicles her alter ego Suzanne Vale (in career and emotional meltdown) as she struggles with the fame game, drug addiction, relationship crises as well as deep-rooted family conflict, mostly involving her mother Norma, a thinly disguised Debbie Reynolds.

She delivers a late-Eighties portrait of Los Angeles that is no less revelatory of life lived in the fast lane, than that of the milieu of Jane Austen's Bath, a slower but no less problematic time.  Fisher's prose style is dialogue-driven and explores different formats: the first quarter of the book composed in diary form before switching to conventional third-person narrative. It hardly surprises that Hollywood promptly filmed this book (in 1990) or that Fisher wrote the screenplay; nor that she has penned a further five successful novels.  She continues to act in film and television.  As does her mother.

Crawford, Christina. Mommie dearest: a true story, New York : William Morrow, 1978.

This torrid autobiography set the gold standard for Hollywood "tell-all" memoirs in the late 1970s, and opened the floodgates for baser forms of biography. On publication, Mommie Dearest was judged as a scandalous demolition job by a daughter (albeit adopted); one who was intent on fracturing the public image of her mother, the legendary star Joan Crawford. 

With considerable relish, Christina demolishes Joan as "Mommie" - and human being to boot.  A frightening portrait emerges of  Crawford as abusive, sadistic, alcoholic...an all-round head case.

The book became a movie (in 1981) with Faye Dunaway as Joan, and was an instant cult hit. Ironically, the film stopped Dunaway's career in its tracks, the over-the-top performance being deemed to have forever damaged her credibility.  

       VIDEO: Joan Crawford with Christina: rare archive footage





   VIDEO: Faye Dunaway as Mommie Dearest...

Chandler, Raymond. The long good-bye, London : Hamish Hamilton, 1973.

For most of his adult life he fought alcohol addiction and ill-health, but Raymond Chandler also produced some of the finest short stories and novels of American life in the twentieth century.  Along with Dashiell Hammett, Chandler reinvented the crime novel as literature, far beyond the realm of the crime caper or who-dunnit

Six of the novels feature the wisecracking, cynical private detective Phillip Marlowe, who was to be so famously portrayed by Humphrey Bogart in films such as The Big Sleep.

The Long Good-bye is seen as his finest novel and it exemplifies the Chandler touch; remarkably observant characterisation combined with humourous dialogue, complicated plot lines and an overriding sense of locale - how and where people lived. 

VIDEO: Bogart as Phillip Marlowe in THE BIG SLEEP       


         

                                         

Bukowski, Charles. Come on in! : new poems, New York : HarperCollins, 2006.



Charles Bukowski the poet was an important figure in the counter-culture days of the 1960s. 

This collection of new poems was published posthumously for Bukowski died in 1994.  An alcoholic, a social outcast, often poverty-stricken, Bukowski's subject matter was Los Angeles itself and the so-called losers or marginalised people 

Come on in! : new poems covers familiar territory...sex and alcohol and relationships.  An excerpt from his poem "down and out on the boardwalk' summarises his rather special gift:

she described

her boyfriend

in detail

to me

then took out her

                                                    guitar

                                                    and started

                                                    singing.

                                                    later that night

                                                    I sodomised her

                                                    and told her

                                                    not to

                                                    come

                                                    around any

                                                    more.

                                                    I got lucky:

                                                    she

                                                    didn't.