Manifesto for the Dead, by Domenic Stansberry
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Manifesto for the Dead, by Domenic Stansberry
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Manifesto for the Dead is a surreal noir that takes as its main character the master of noir, the late crime novelist Jim Thompson at the end of his career, suspecting he has been framed by a Hollywood producer for the murder of a young starlet. An intricate blend of biography, fiction, and suspense, this literary thriller offers a hair-raising portrait of one of crime fiction’s most notorious true-life figures—and a brutal satire of the entertainment industry in the tradition of The Day of the Locust. As the novel opens, the aging writer is at the end of his string—a habitué of Hollywood bars and endless drinking sessions at the Musso & Frank Grill. Here he is approached by a small-time producer, Billy Miracle, with an offer to work on a project designed to resurrect the career of a fading screen star. Thompson accepts, and soon finds himself at the center of a lurid triangle, inadvertently following a trail that leads from a dead starlet—found strangled in the back of a Cadillac—to the doorstep of one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. Set in the seamy back streets of Los Angeles, in 1972, Manifesto for the Dead tells the story of legendary crime writer Jim Thompson in his darkest hour. It is a book about desire and lust, about a writer struggling with illusion, disillusion and fate on the back lots of Hollywood. But the Manifesto is also a novel-within-a-novel, telling two stories that intertwine—one set in Hollywood, the other in Thompson’s imagination—each rushing headlong into the other, into that area where fact and fiction are no longer distinguishable, and the darkness is inseparable from the light.
Manifesto for the Dead, by Domenic Stansberry - Amazon Sales Rank: #843885 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-06-09
- Released on: 2015-06-09
- Format: Kindle eBook
Manifesto for the Dead, by Domenic Stansberry From Publishers Weekly The always-adventurous Stansberry, whose The Last Days of Il Duce (1998) was nominated for both an Edgar and a Hammett Award, endeavors to bring the talented, troubled noir icon Jim Thompson to life, and comes close to pulling it off. Certainly the real-life details ring true: it's 1971, and 64-year-old novelist Thompson is on the downward curve of his career, drinking too much at the famous Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard. After writing dozens of successful novels and two movie scripts with Stanley Kubrick, Thompson is out of money and ideas. His wife, Alberta, is disillusioned with him, and the couple is forced to move into a cheaper apartment. Then a sleazy producer called Billy Miracle and a fading star named Michele Haze sign the vulnerable Jim to write a novel based on a screenplay, scheming to rope movie mogul Jack Lombard into bankrolling both the book and the film. The tale turns seamy when a starlet is murdered, and Thompson is set up as the chief suspect. Though the book is clearly an homage to the late noir writer, Stansberry is less successful with his murder-mystery stylings than he is with his uncanny recreations of Thompson's writing. Stansberry works heroically to distract his readers with chapters of the protagonist's novel-in-progress, which channel Th0mpson's masterful use of dark, simple, powerful imagery. He also describes the hero coping with, and mirroring, the notion of plot inconsistencies: "He'd been up against that wall himself, clutching all those ragged ends, stories within stories that almost webbed together...." Though committed Thompson fans may quibble, there's a lot in this bluntly articulate tale to like. The book-within-a-book concept, even if it develops at the expense of the plot line, flashes with Stansberry's brand of fresh, stark prose. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews Fresh from his well-regarded The Last Days of Il Duce (1998), Stansberry plunges into an elegiac, crummy folly: a mystery starring legendary pulpmeister Jim Thompson, still on his uppers in 1971. The dark master is 64, but he's still got the raging appetites of a youngster, and quick as any callow noir hero he's allowed low-rent Hollywood producer Billy Miracle to inveigle him into a deal to use a grisly newspaper anecdote as the basis for a screenplay Thompson expects to sell as a novel titled, inevitably, Manifesto for the Dead. The assignment not only brings the aging writer up against hired killers and dead beauties, a frame-up and a dozen betrayals, but plunges him into his own fiction as his life and art become intertwined. The gimmick of alternating Thompson's real-life adventures with the macabre fiction that's gradually swallowing him up is an ingenious conceit, but Stansberry isn't the writer to pull it off. His occasional bleak zingers (``He had not died after all. He was in Beverly Hills'') are offset by amateurishly purple prose (the first victim is ``strangled about the neck''), and Stansberry's Thompson doesn't write any better than Stansberry. The final effect is like a highball of Kafka and 7-Up, or a trailer for an anthology of Coen Brothers' movies from Blood Simple to Barton Fink. At no point, sadly, does it sound like the real Jim Thompson. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
From the Publisher REVIEWS AND PRAISE FOR MANIFESTO FOR THE DEAD
"A dark and brooding novel... Stansberry's prose is an eerie echo of a dead man's style. And his insights into a writer's anxiety about losing his identity to his characters would make Thompson's own skin crawl." --The New York Times
"Fascinating, beautifully written.... Thompson is alive on the page, and the questions that Stansberry poses about the nature of noir seem part of Thompson's own disintegrating persona... an enviable achievement." --San Francisco Chronicle
"Stansberry buries a sense of cosmic foreboding in nearly every line. Through a poetics of menace that at times takes on a positively hallucinatory beauty, Stansberry exposes the Manichaean heart of noir." --LA Weekly
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Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Off-beat Classic By Susan D'Angelo This book did not get as much attention as Last Days of Il Duce, but it is in many ways a more interesting novel--with its novel-within-a-novel structure and its dynamic portrait of crime novelist Jim Thompson. A short, punchy book that defies easy categorization. Stansberry defintely twists the genre to his own purposes here. I liked Il Duce a lot, but this is more gold from a very good writer working on the fringes of the convenentional crime genre.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful. Grimey By Geoffrey S. Hineman I've got a love hate relation ship with this book. I must admit that it was an impulse buy-a 99¢ special with a cool cover sitting near the checkout at a Border's outlet. I figured, what the hell.While there seem to be raves about the premise of the protagonist, Jim Thompson, writing a story in which he, in reality, is becoming a character. The technique is really not worth the hype, nor is it particularly groundbreaking like, say "House of Leaves" by Mark Danielewski. That gripe aside, what we do have here is a refreshing, intriguing story that, if nothing else has a convincing tone that made want to keep turning pages.While I'm not too well read in the hard-boiled genre, this is a book that might make me want to dig deeper. Set in 1950s Hollywood, Stansberry gives us a look at the grime beneath the glitz: the hookers and alcoholics, the invalids and crazies. If it were a movie, Quentin Tarantino would be behind the camera and Harvey Keitel would be starring lead, carrying a pocketful of pimp swagger left over from Taxi Driver.To the story, Jamesy!Thompson is asked, by Billy Miracle to write a script for a movie that Miracle is shopping. Miracle is in debt up to his forked-tongue in people who wouldn't hesitate to break his legs. The alcoholic Thompson accepts the offer and gets the lead line from Miracle. As Miracle gives him direction, Thompson starts to realize that events happening around him (murders, cover-ups, and mistaken identities) are running parallel to the story Miracle is feeding him. Before too long, Thompson sees where things are going, but it might just be too late. (Cue the spooky string music here).In a seemingly simple turn of events, we reach the climax of the book. On page 162 of my copy, Miracle explains everything. From a technique perspective, the whole thing is a total mess. One full page of monologue reads like a list of he said/she said drivel. Rather than trusting the reader to figure out what was going down-which would have taken just a little bit more effort on the author's part-we get a summation that leaves us confused rather than shocked. It was shortcut that could've (and should've) been avoided. Since the book tips the scales at 184 pages, there is plenty of room for more development.That said, rare is the book these days that makes me want to park my posterior at the controls and mash the keyboard all day. Stansberry's mysterious characters and convincing descriptions of Hollywood's underbelly was plenty of motivation. Ultimately, if your looking for a light read to knock off in a long afternoon, I'd say that, at 99¢, Manifesto for the Dead is money well spent.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Stansberry Takes You Inside the Glitter ... By Anthony ... and shows that all isn't golden. I don't know if Jim Thompson would have appreciated the story, but Stansberry captures his voice and puts us in the booth next to the creaters of the noir classics for a ride that captures both the voice and atmosphere of classic noir. While some may complain that noir is too dark, the problem may lie in the fact that it's too real for fiction. Stansberry captures that in the work and does an excellent job creating a story within the story which reflects the voice of Jim Thompson while remaining true to his own voice within his own narration. Not a great book, but a good addition to the canon.
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