Dead-on Hollywood

“So,” asks a policeman, after a corpse has been found floating face down in the swimming pool of a Mount Olympus estate, “can you tell us if the deceased had any enemies?” This jolts a laugh from the man who found the body -- and this explanation: He “was a Hollywood producer.... He had nothing but enemies. Even his friends hated him.”

There’s no shortage of hatred in the movie-town world of Terrill Lee Lankford’s knowing and atmospheric mystery-thriller “Earthquake Weather.” Hate seems to alternate with greed as the ruling passion in a town where everyone is always on the make: for a hot script, a hit film, a career advantage or just a quick fix of drugs or sex.

Learning how to navigate his way around this treacherous turf is Mark Hayes, a “creative executive” (a.k.a. development boy, or “D-boy”) working for Dexter Morton, an unabashedly loathsome producer. Hayes grits his teeth and endures Morton’s excessive demands, hoping to be rewarded with an eventual producer credit of his own. Meanwhile, he is not above skimming 10 grand from an under-the-table fee Morton has given to an “aging” (over 40) screenwriter for a non-Guild script-doctoring job.

“Earthquake Weather,” the third book by Lankford, a Southern California author who’s also a filmmaker, is full of such knowledgeably scummy touches and dismaying insider lore. Hayes’ first-person narration of this tale set in the earthshaking L.A. year of 1994 is shot through with nasty on-the-money asides. Of a B-movie starlet and Morton’s girlfriend, he says: “Charity James was exactly the kind of woman I had sworn off long ago: ... a woman who would do her best to drag you down to her level, then trade up the moment something better ... came along.” Of an obnoxious young screenwriter: “He had bad skin and an attitude to match.” Of a fete given by his boss for “160 of his closest friends and their insignificant others”: “Dexter had gathered together just about everyone he had ever crushed under his heel. This was a gloating party. He was rubbing their noses in it.”

The gloat-fest morphs into a last hurrah when the body is discovered the morning after, “doing a William Holden in the middle of the pool.” Hayes is the one who finds him, noting: “The story editor in me subconsciously assumed it was a murder.” That same inner story editor ought to know what’s coming next: The cops cast Mark Hayes as this script’s prime suspect.

Hayes makes some moves to find out what happened and clear his name, but though he is a fan of Raymond Chandler’s work, he is no Philip Marlowe. The D-boy proves a halfhearted sleuth, his detecting efforts diverted by having to fend off attacks from an unknown assailant and by the need to cover up his own ethical misdeeds. Still, he turns, or trips, over a number of promising rocks on his odyssey.

Where Hayes (or Lankford, really) does earn his stripes is as a noteworthy guide -- in the insider-outsider Southern California tradition of many writers, from Nathanael West through Chandler to Michael Connelly -- to the dark side of a city he loves to hate and can’t help being a part of.

“It’s funny,” Hayes says to one of his pseudo-friends, “I’ve been in L.A. for fifteen years, but I still feel like a stranger. I don’t feel like I fit in very well at all.”

“Oh, you fit,” the other fellow sets him straight. “Don’t kid yourself.” *