DEVIL’S GARDEN
Ace Atkins
Putnam Adult
Historical Thriller
ISBN: 9780399155369
Ace Atkins went from being a good writer to an amazing one seemingly overnight. The transformation occurred with WHITE SHADOW, a fictionalized account of an unsolved murder that took place in Tampa, Florida, in the 1950s. His next novel, WICKED CITY, about a corrupt town in Alabama, was every bit as good as its predecessor. But his latest work blows both of them, and just about everything else, out of the water.
DEVIL’S GARDEN begins on a fateful Labor Day weekend in 1921 when silent film comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle came to San Francisco for a holiday of drunkenness and debauchery. Within 72 hours a woman would be found critically injured in his suite of rooms at the St. Francis Hotel; upon her death a short while later, Arbuckle would be charged with manslaughter. Students of the silent film era are familiar with the incident and how it played out; those who are not probably would not care. So Atkins is faced with a double dilemma: How do you make interesting a story whose ending is already writ in history, and how do you attract a reading audience from those whose interests may lie elsewhere?
The solution --- one that Atkins accomplishes with amazing, almost magical ability --- is to paint each character with a vividness that causes them to stay in the mind’s eye long after they have passed off the page, all the while sprinkling them through a narrative that flows unhurriedly even as the next sentence, paragraph, page and chapter demand to be read immediately. Atkins performs this Herculean task quite handily, even as he recreates the San Francisco of the 1920s with such a vividness that it seems to take over the real world of the here and now if and when one stops reading. The inside front and back of DEVIL’S GARDEN is thoughtfully illustrated with a contemporary street map of the downtown area (coffee stains, creases, and all) so that one might follow along with what happens in the sprawling story. And what a story it is.
With a subtlety and irony mastered by but a few others, Atkins suspensefully reveals how Arbuckle, a man of excessive and unhealthy appetites, came to be charged with manslaughter, which almost immediately derailed his film career. The temptation to tell the story through Arbuckle’s eyes must have been strong, and indeed at points it is necessary. It is but one of the many manifestations of Atkins’s genius, however, that the viewpoint most prominent here is that of the Pinkerton investigator who was hired by Arbuckle’s attorney to conduct a search for the truth that would form the basis for his defense.
That investigator would be a tuberculotic war veteran named Sam Dashiell Hammett, who would later become far better known for far different reasons. Hammett painstakingly begins to uncover who is behind what amounts to be an official vendetta against Arbuckle, and, even more importantly, the “why” that drives it, even as the city’s establishment inexorably begins to grind Arbuckle down. While the City of San Francisco is ultimately the major character in the book, it is the story as told by Atkins that is the true star.
DEVIL’S GARDEN is storytelling and writing at its very best. With this novel, Atkins establishes himself as the literary heir of a closely edited Faulkner, of a more disciplined Thomas Wolfe. This is stirring, impeccable wordcraft that demands to be read and re-read.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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