Unstrung Harps

By R.Z.S.

TRUE CONFESSIONS by John Gregory Dunne Dutton; 341 pages; $9.95

"Tommy liked to tell stories about the lowest kind of human behavior." The storyteller, Thomas Spellacy, is a 72-year-old retired Los Angeles cop who has either witnessed or heard them all.

There are the ones about a rapist who preyed on the elderly, the hood who stuffed a rival into a laundry dryer, a sort of Jack the Shaver who depilated his victims with a razor, and the tale about the monsignor who died in a brothel: the police dressed him and propped him in his car, which they parked at a shopping center. It was piously announced that the prelate had suffered a heart attack while reaching for his glove compartment.

Spellacy's own career was blotched by petty corruption, his private life by weaknesses of the flesh. Still he remains cheerful, for like his brother the Rt. Rev. Desmond Spellacy, chancellor of the Los Angeles archdiocese and an outstanding golfer, Tommy knows that vice is far more interesting than virtue. For wickedness offers the double pleasure of sinning and confessing.

True Confessions, John Gregory Dunne's first novel, is Tom Spellacy's unrepentant recollections of his life as a tarnished blue knight. He proves to be a gifted, foulmouthed raconteur who can charm the reader down to a plane where cynicism and sentimentality are indistinguishable and the difference between social history and gossip is irrelevant. His "book" on Lois Fazenda, a would-be starlet whose naked body was found neatly cut in two at the torso: "She lived in a series of boarding houses much like the one on North Cherokee. On West Adams Boulevard she thought she was pregnant. On Camino Palmero she hemorrhaged. On North Orange Drive she was tattooed ... On Linden Drive in Long Beach she left behind a poem that said, 'Remember me and keep in mind/ A faithful friend is hard to find.' "

The style has a touch of Raymond Chandler; the Fazenda case has a fleeting similarity to the unsolved 1940s Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles. The novel continually echoes tabloid history to enliven its central incident: a 28-year-old murder known as the "case of the Virgin Tramp."

For Author Dunne, whose credits include Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, The Studio, Delano and film scripts written with his wife, Novelist Joan Didion, Lois Fazenda is the hapless fly that jiggles a grotesque web of relationships. As Spellacy discovers, the path of the victim's life crisscrossed his own world of Irish-American Los Angeles just after World War II. It is a lively place where an archbishop plays weekly croquet with Samuel Goldwyn, a hard-luck punk goes to the gas chamber for kidnaping a girl on V-J day, and a leading Catholic contractor short-weights the church. It is also a place where, as Spellacy reminds us, new money and social pretensions cannot disguise the old-country "harps." On the fringes is an assortment of pimps, prostitutes, pornographers and eccentrics who seem cast from what the author has elsewhere referred to as the "freak-death pages" of the daily papers. They are a small army that threatens to trip on its tangled plot lines. Yet Dunne manages to get them through with wit, vitality, affection and that uncommon commodity, good writing. --R.Z.S.

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