Scene of the crime

A director, shot dead in his own apartment. Three actresses linked to him romantically -- one by a monogrammed silk nightie she’d left in his closet. Studio thugs trying to cover up the details of a life that turned out, to everyone’s surprise, to have largely been an invention. These are the stories told about the notorious murder of silent film director William Desmond Taylor; his 1922 death remains unsolved.

It is revisited in Nina Revoyr’s new novel, “The Age of Dreaming.” The links between her characters and the historical figures are clear -- her Ashley Bennett Tyler is William Desmond Taylor, Nora Minton Niles is movie star Mary Miles Minter, and so on. The case, despite being anchored in a kind of Hollywood prehistory, remains a fascination, in part because it, combined with the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, brought censorship to Hollywood. The Taylor case got paperback treatment in “A Cast of Killers” (1986) by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick and was rechronicled in “A Deed of Death” (1990) by publishing lion Robert Giroux. For a novelist, taking on such a notorious murder case presents a challenge: to keep the facts in line while bringing something fresh and exciting to the story.

Revoyr makes her most interesting departure in the main character, Jun Nakayama. He’s loosely based on Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, who became a sex-idol sensation after branding -- with an iron -- his lady love in Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Cheat” (1915). Jun becomes a much different man than his real-life counterpart. While Hayakawa was married, returned to Japan and continued to act -- he was even nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role in 1957’s “The Bridge on the River Kwai” -- Jun retires early from acting and remains an expatriate bachelor, very much alone. He lives off his real estate investments, entirely removed from his earlier life in the 1910s and ‘20s. The narrative evolves on dual tracks: with Jun as a young man and as an old man, in 1964.

When we meet him, in his 70s, Jun is almost dormant, a study in quiet isolation. An acquaintance learns of his past and spreads the news -- to the local vendors, a librarian -- and his onetime fame is met with laughs of disbelief. Jun takes umbrage; he begins to think about, relive his past. In remembering it, he begins to reinhabit it, to step back into a version of himself that had long been abandoned.

Jun recalls his years as a Hollywood star and turns to his departure from the film industry. We see that an anti-Japanese sentiment infiltrated Hollywood, although Jun only has a reluctant awareness of the racism he faced. The other reason for his abrupt retirement has to do with Tyler’s murder. Jun plunges into this mystery with the energy of a hard-nosed detective, chasing down witnesses and colleagues, people he’s not spoken to in decades.

In fact, Jun doesn’t have to work too hard. Each person he looks up promptly reveals long-held secrets, like walk-ons in a “Law & Order” episode. This moves the narrative along, but complexities fall aside. Could such a long-held puzzle lead so simply from A to B to C?

Yet if frustrations arise at the mystery plotting, the biographical storyline struggles as well. As he narrates his own history, Jun fails to see anything other than inevitability; he lacks the introspection or self-doubt that might give his rise to stardom some tension. His early years come across as little more than destiny fulfilled and slump into stereotype; even dialogue is not immune. When teenage Jun tells his father he will leave Japan, the scene merely rehearses cliche.

“My father kicked the ground again and spoke. ‘I will not stand in your way, Junichiro. But this opportunity is both more and less than you think. It will change you in ways you can’t anticipate now. And if you go, you will never again see your father.’

“I glanced at him, and then turned my head away. ‘Of course I will see you, Father. It is only four years.’

“ ‘Four years can be a lifetime. . . .’

“I opened my mouth to speak, but he raised his hand and bid my silence.

“ ‘I wish you luck. You have been a good son.’ ”

The flat narrative voice is circumscribed by both Jun’s antique formality and by his strong capacity for denial. It’s as if the character of Jun, the isolated, emotionally closed man of 1964, relies on glossy reminiscences to insulate him from the complex truths of his past. But if this makes psychological sense, it nevertheless presents the reader with a heap of one-dimensional characters and overworn dramas.

The two narrative lines converge as the Jun of 1964, with hope of landing a new movie role, ties up the loose ends in the Tyler case -- and relives the traumatic final weeks of the director’s life. He becomes more active, more emotionally exposed, more thoughtful. But even his revelations are suffused with stereotypes.

“Back in the teens and ‘20s, the making of pictures had been a labor of love, a burgeoning art form that the creators took seriously. And if we became well-known, adored by the public, that was a by-product of our efforts, not the goal. But in present-day Hollywood, people are too enticed by glamour, and the art of making films, if it matters at all, is subsumed to the more alluring prospects of wealth and fame.”

Jun holds the narrative hostage, and how much we are meant to understand the limits of his insights, or how much we are meant to take them at face value, remains unclear. We are trapped by the bubble of his world -- even in the ‘60s scenes, he begins after the fact and then flashes back to the previous day or week. He fully mediates the novel, telling an amorphous “you” what he wants the reader to know.

Nevertheless, some will find this retelling of one of Hollywood’s great scandals enticing. Revoyr’s consideration of racial tensions adds new dimension to the old tropes of ambitious beauties, secretive men, evil showmoms and the glossy emptiness that is fame.