L.A. crime and grime

Strange things happen in the realm of noir. Effects don’t result from the usual causes; normal rules of logic need not apply. You may be listening to a tale told by a dead man (like William Holden, floating in the pool at the start of “Sunset Boulevard”), and that story may not make much sense. The story doesn’t always have to: Take “Chinatown,” for instance.

Those movie references would be mother’s milk to Ann Whitehead, the film-wise narrator-protagonist of former L.A. Weekly movie critic Helen Knode’s “The Ticket Out” -- an intermittently exciting if ultimately disjointed walk on the seamy side of the Hollywood scene, past and present.

Film noir was born, of course, in Hollywood (if named in Paris). In noir, things start bad and get worse. We know Whitehead, opinionated movie reviewer for the alternative paper the L.A. Millennium (as one industry type identifies her: “You’re that loudmouth critic everybody hates”), is headed for trouble when she allows herself to be seen yawning through the screening of a major studio release. Soon, Whitehead is telling her boss she wants to drop movie puffery for a grittier hard-news beat.

When a gorgeous young woman is found murdered in the tub of the old Los Feliz mansion where Whitehead lives as caretaker, the victim’s backstory begins to emerge. It seems the dead woman had been trying to solve the case of another female murdered in Hollywood in 1944: “A Black Dahlia with class,” and Whitehead thinks she’s found just the right ticket out of her journalistic rut:

“A film-school star reviving her dead career. A beautiful blond, flat broke and scrounging free meals and movies. Two murders, a burglary, a blackmail scheme -- and a six-figure film script that told the truth about the condition of women.

“My Hollywood story.”

And that’s just the surface-scum of this inky whirlpool. Whitehead’s boss, though, orders her to write instead a hatchet job expose of the LAPD cop investigating the initial homicide who earlier had been tied to scandal in the Rampart Division. Soon, Whitehead is working both stories at once, not unlike the private-eye heroes of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, who often took on two unrelated investigations only to find (as Macdonald’s Lew Archer was wont to say), “It’s all one case.”

Also, like Archer and Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Whitehead covers a lot of Southern California turf in her quest for answers: from Hollywood Boulevard movie theaters to the Chateau Marmont, from the old MGM lot in Culver City to the Pacific Dining Car (catering to “the movie stars who still ate meat”), from the canyons of Malibu to the cop-shop in Glassell Park, from Burbank to Brentwood to Beverly Hills to Baldwin Hills. In L.A., geography is destiny: In “The Ticket Out,” it’s also an index of character.

There’s a lot of smart dialogue and knowing one-liners in this often sharply written thriller. Some samples:

“My point is, since most of what we make is kiss-kiss-bang-bang for the global market, why not make good kiss-kiss-bang-bang instead of bad? The popcorn crowd in Slobovia doesn’t know the difference.”

“Her living room was like her -- a bunch of money spent on gaudy effect.”

“She slept her way to the bottom.”

“Only an actress gets anywhere by being a slut. Women writers have to pick their affairs.”

“Mark ... said that Mike Ovitz worshipped Art everywhere except in movies.”

“Hollywood isn’t about movies, it’s about relationships.”

“The deal is the sex, the movie is just the cigarette.”

Pocket histories of local neighborhoods and institutions add to the appeal of “The Ticket Out.” And there’s plenty of violent action, a lot of it convincingly rendered. Whitehead is no mild-mannered aesthete but a tough streetfighter taking (and giving) brutally savage beatings -- probably the most hard-boiled film critic in all literature. After one memorable scene of slaughter, she reports: “Warm blood glued my eyes shut.”

That line hints at one of the disappointments of “The Ticket Out”: its over-the-top quality. Plot, pace, pitch seem out of control. At times, “The Ticket Out” lingers over the classic murder-mystery minutiae of timings and alibis, but then the book careens beyond the noir horizon, leaving logic and plausibility behind.

As Whitehead says at one point, “There are too many suspects and too many motives.” Too many subplots too, perhaps, including Whitehead’s budding affair with the cop her boss wants her to nail (in print) and the writer’s vexed relationships with her cruel, alcoholic father and frail, self-effacing sister. Aspects of all these strands are affecting, but they don’t tie together in any satisfying way, as the novel lurches toward a messy, unresolved ending. “The Ticket Out” has been rated R, for violence, language and sexual content.