A Beautiful Way to Die
When naïve British actress Ginny Watkins arrives in Hollywood in 1953, she has a lot to learn about the unwritten rules of the film industry, where men have all the power and women must do everything they can to avoid being labelled ‘difficult’. With a new look and a new name, she catches the eye of ageing – and married – heartthrob Max Whitman, who promises to open doors for her – but can she really trust him?
Nine months later, after a near-disastrous car crash on Oscar night, Max’s soon-to-be-ex-wife and former co-star Stella Hope arrives in London, to try to salvage her career at the Ealing studios. She befriends her makeup artist Maggie, unaware that Maggie has her own secret agenda – and then a blackmail letter arrives, threatening to expose a shameful secret from her youth. But Stella isn’t the sort of woman to take the threat lying down…
This noir novel about the sinister underbelly of the film industry is inspired by several real-life scandals and unsolved mysteries from the Golden Age of Hollywood, as the author explains in her informative endnote. The level of misogyny and abuse of power that all the main characters encounter is shocking – particularly as it’s possible such behaviour is not entirely a thing of the past. Written primarily in the third person, the novel is also threaded through with the first-person narrative of an actress incarcerated in an insane asylum, whose identity is only revealed in the dramatic climax of the book.
The characters are satisfyingly complex, the plot is twisty but not implausibly so, and the short chapters ensure that the pace never flags as it grinds inexorably towards its heart-breaking yet also hopeful conclusion. Highly recommended.
