Angel's Gate by p.g. sturges
Saturday, March 9, 2013 at 9:26PM 
Published by Scribner on February 26, 2013
Angel's Gate lampoons Hollywood and parodies crime fiction. If you're looking for a serious thriller, look elsewhere. Angel's Gate is more comedy than thriller. It isn't what you'd call deep literature, but it's funny and fast moving and written with an insightful eye for human foibles.
Any good Hollywood story has its share of obnoxious (and wealthy) producers and directors, as well as aspiring actresses who do their best work on their backs. So it is with Angel's Gate. A producer (Melvin Shea) plays the role of part-time pimp and drug dealer, supplying the roguish studio head (Howard Hogue) with cocaine to snort and actresses to shag, including Rhonda Carling. Badly behaving director Eli Navaria is notorious for abusing women. Devi Stanton, a tattoo-covered ex-Marine and current housemother at Ivanhoe Studios (Howard's place), is a less conventional character. She gets into a bit of trouble involving Melvin, Eli, and Rhonda, and needs the sort of cleanup help that only someone like the Shortcut Man can provide.
The novel's second plotline involves Ellen Arden, whose sister hasn't heard from her in years. The Shortcut Man is hired to find her. That plot thread appears early in the novel and then submerges until it resurfaces at the very end. Naturally, the two stories are connected in an unlikely way. The connection is a little too cute but it's not completely outrageous.
The Shortcut Man is Dick Henry, an ex-cop and "freelance opportunist" who specializes in solving problems in unconventional ways. Henry isn't the sort of morally stalwart hero who struggles to make ethical choices, although he occasionally struggles with just how unethical he wants to be. Should be earn a fee by blackmailing a bad guy? He has to think about that one.
Angel's Gate is a satisfying novel in that the bad guys get what's coming to them (more or less), often in ways that are quite fitting. Karma is in the air.
Some of the characters are sexually adventurous. Some are kinky. Some use foul language. If that sort of thing troubles you, this probably isn't the novel (or writer) for you.
At one point, The Shortcut Man compares Charles Bukowski's direct, minimalist writing style to Malcolm Lowry's erudite prose and announces his preference for the former because Bukowski leaves unspoken content between the lines while Lowry puts everything in the lines. I'm not sure p.g. sturges leaves much content between the lines, but he's adopted the "simple and clear" writing style that he attributes to Bukowski and it works for him. His prose is intelligent without being pretentious. The same can be said for the plot. It's light but smart.
RECOMMENDED