Your Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Reading List

Get Shorty, by Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard was a master of minimalist crime stories with crackling dialog and smart, zippy plots. Get Shorty is easily one of his best, examining the often hilarious intersection of organized (and not-so-organized) crime and Hollywood and its glamorous (and not-so-glamorous) denizens. As small-time legbreaker Chili Palmer pursues Harry Zim, producer of bottom-of-the-barrel schlock, he starts to imagine he might be a producer himself, and goes about trying to convince megastar actor Michael Weir of that fact (Weir is the titular “Shorty,” a character reportedly based on Tom Cruise). In a sublime meta moment, it was adapted into a hit film a few years later. Both book and film served to set the tone of Hollywood mockery that Tarantino’s film touches on.

Hollywood Homicide, by Kellye Garrett
Garrett brings a modern sheen to the Hollywood crime story via Dayna “Day” Anderson, a struggling actress very familiar with the lower levels of economic hardship. When she runs out of gas and sees a billboard offering a $15,000 reward for information regarding a hit-and-run murder, she figures it’s better than chasing acting roles she won’t get and launches her private eye career with the help of a few friends who are also enmeshed in the Dream Factory. The fresh take just proves that the classic elements of a Hollywood mystery—the rotten glitz, and cynical glamour—are still potent forces for a modern mystery.

Hollywood Tough, by Stephen J. Cannell
Stephen J. Cannell, godfather of many beloved television shows (including 21 Jump Street, The A-Team, and The Greatest American Hero) was also a pretty prolific novelist, and his third book in the series following Detective Shane Scully is one of his best. Weaving together a plot by organized crime to take over the craft unions in Hollywood, a slowly collapsing big-budget film project, and a sting operation conducted by the LAPD, Cannell’s genuinely twisty yarn offers a satirical take on Hollywood that has the ring of authenticity—no surprise, considering Cannell had already logged more than three decades as a producer by the time of its writing. What sets the novel apart is that it’s not just about a crime that happens to have been committed (and thus investigated) in Hollywood, it about crimes that could only be committed in Hollywood.

The L.A. Quartet, by James Ellroy
Tarantino’s film promises to dig into the dark side of Hollywood, with Charles Manson, Sharon Tate, and Roman Polanski as primary characters—which makes Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz) must reads alongside the movie. Although the plots concern events occurring a decade earlier, familiarizing yourself with Ellroy’s seedy Hollywood is the ideal way to prepare for another peek at the seamy underbelly of the dream factory. It’s filled with corrupt police, perverted criminals, and decent people who’ve been fed to and ground down by the machinery of power. There’s not much glamour here; Ellroy fills that vacuum with powerful, punchy writing.

Money Shot, by Christa Faust
There’s an old saying about film production teams: the A-team does big features, the B-team does straight to video, and the C-team does porn (the D-team, the joke goes, does television). Faust is one of the most interesting writers working today: having tackled the novelization of Snakes on a Plane, she became the first woman to be published by Hard Case Crime with this 2008 novel (which won the 2009 Crimespree Award for Best Original paperback). The story’s brutal, for sure. It’s concerned with Gina Moretti, a former adult star who thinks she’s been lured into doing one last scene, but is instead beaten, raped, and left for dead. The subsequent fast-paced, gritty investigation she launches reveals ties to human trafficking and the international sex trade. Uncompromising in its vision, this is the Hollywood crime story you need, although perhaps not the Hollywood crime story you want.

The Song is You, by Megan Abbott
If you’re only familiar with Abbott’s more recent novels set in contemporary times, get thee to her classic noir The Song is You, which seems so old-fashioned at first blush, it’s easy to miss its electrifying subversions. Set in Golden Age Hollywood, it’s got all the boozy, jazzy earmarks of a period piece, aping the bleak mood and decadent style of the time. The gender roles the characters fall into seem traditional as well—the protagonist is a “fixer” for the film studios, taking care of business when scandals arise, and he’s haunted by his involvement in covering up the disappearance of a young starlet. Dig deeper, and you find Abbott knows exactly what she’s doing, and what tropes she’s playing with. The end result is an Ellroy-esque twister that revels in the debauchery of old Hollywood, but with razor-sharp purpose—which might remind you of a certain filmmaker.

The Player, by Michael Tolkin
Michael Tolkin’s brilliant, subversive novel—made into a brilliant, subversive film by Robert Altman—is itself a bit of a period piece these days, but it’s still as sharp and biting as ever. Griffin Mill is the self-absorbed, self-satisfied Hollywood executive who is so close to claiming control over his studio he can taste it—all he needs are a few more hits and to avoid makinging a single mistake as he navigates the etiquette and jockeying of the power lunch set. When he starts to get threatening postcards from a disgruntled writer, he opts to launch his own sketchy, sloppy investigation rather than call attention to the potential embarrassment—and a dark comedy of Hollywood superficiality and moral bankruptcy commences. This book will likely be the perfect followup to Tarantino’s film, offering a clear-eyed look at Hollywood in the 1990s.

The Little Sister, by Raymond Chandler
You can’t discuss noir without at least one Chandler book entering the mix. The Little Sister isn’t his best-known, but it’s a novel directly inspired by his own experiences working as a screenwriter in Hollywood—years that didn’t exactly leave Chandler with a good opinion of the place. The story involves movie stars and gangsters and Philip Marlowe being followed by a series of ice pick murders, and is told with Chandler’s usual disdain for coherent plotting. The story features characters who are clearly based on real people—legendary writer and director Billy Wilder does not fare well—and is soaked in Chandler’s world-weary love/hate relationship with Hollywood and Los Angeles.

Devil in a Blue Dress, by Walter Mosley
Offering a different perspective on mid-century Hollywood, Mosley’s debut introduces Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, a down-on-his-luck laborer in desperate need of money in 1948 Los Angeles. He’s hired to find a white woman who has gone missing. A he becomes embroiled in a complex web of crime and duplicity—and is framed for murder along the way—Rawlins undergoes a transformation, evolving into the classic noir detective right before readers’ eyes in a story that puts the race issues of the time (and ours) front and center. Tarantino’s had an inconsistent dialogue with issues of race across his films; adding the perspective of one of the best black crime writers of all time might offer some context before your viewing of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Epiphany Jones, by Michael Grothaus
Grothaus’s debut novel is the outlier on this list: not so much a noir story or even a crime novel as it is a fascinating character study. Which isn’t to say there isn’t a criminal element here—the main character, Jerry, suffers from psychotic delusions in the form of Figments—people who seem perfectly real to him but aren’t really there—and is shocked when a co-worker at the Art Institute of Chicago is murdered and a painting by Van Gogh is stolen. Jerry is more shocked to come home to find the painting in his apartment, and to discover that one of his Figments, Epiphany Jones, is actually a real person. Epiphany has framed Jerry for the crimes in order to compel him to help her track down a sex trafficking ring that serves the biggest Hollywood power players. It’s a weird, grim, and hilarious book that offers a satirical look at modern celebrity culture (not to mention a stark connection to recent headlines about powerful men who exploit young women) without skimping on the crime story aspects of its plot. Considering that Tarantino often dives into weird, metafictional satire in the midst of his stories, this one should fit right in.
What are your favorite Hollywood crime stories?