Loser's Town

Summary

In this darkly comic thriller set in modern-day Hollywood, an aging private eye is hired by a rising young actor at the center of a scheme gone wrong.

David Spandau is a P.I. and sometime rodeo cowboy. At the tail end of some much-needed vacation time, he takes a meeting with a talent agent whose client, Bobby Dye, is being blackmailed and threatened. Dye is young, brash, and on the verge of becoming a major star—if he lasts that long. It turns out that Dye faked a threatening note to hide a far more incriminating secret. When Spandau agrees to investigate, the game gets deadly.

Spandau looks like Robert Mitchum and speaks like Humphrey Bogart playing Philip Marlowe. He is surrounded him with other fantastic characters: sadistic talent agents, ambitious mobsters intent on breaking into showbiz, small-time hustlers trying to stay out of the limelight. The setting is Hollywood today, but the mood is L.A. noir: crackling dialogue, a fast-paced plot, and the temptations and illusions unique to the City of Angels.