Dreamland

by Newton Thornburg

“A commanding writer of unusual delicacy and power.” —THE NEW YORKERTwo apparent suicides and a pair of brutal sex murders plunge would-be starlet Foxy Reno and ex-hippie drifter Crow into the dark underbelly of Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. As Crow and Reno embark on a manhunt, they discover the dark side of desire in white-hot California.

Genres: Fiction, Crime

320 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Born in Harvey, Illinois, Thornburg graduated from the University of Iowa with a Fine Arts degree. He worked in a variety of jobs before devoting himself to writing full-time (or at least in tandem with his cattle farm in the Ozarks) in 1973.
His 1976 novel Cutter and Bone was filmed in 1981 as Cutter's Way. The New York Times called Cutter and Bone "the best novel of its kind for ten years." Another novel-to film Beautiful Kate was filmed in Australia in 2009 and starred Bryan Brown and Ben Mendelsohn. It was directed by Rachel Ward, who is Bryan Brown's real-life wife.
Thornburg died on May 9, 2011, a few days shy of his 82nd birthday.

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hitchhiking runaways, thirty-five year olds who are drifting from job to job, a three-way romance with a blonde heiress and a Lolita-type sixteen-year old, a retired police detective, CIA hit squads, Hollywood strip clubs, weekends in Mazatlan.... Thornburg throws a lot of
different stuff into this mystery gumbo and, at times, such as the opening, he succeeds in creating a mood and a vibe of the late sixties/ early seventies. Other times, the story is a mishmash of different
ideas.

A staple of mystery fiction is the advent of a rank amateur into an investigation. Frustrated that the police won't believe all the fantastic connections, the amateur sets out to get answers on his own. Much of the storyline here is of this basic framework outlined above with Crow being that amateur.

Juxtaposed against Crow's investigation are his relationships with young Reno and heiress Jennifer which serve to bring life and lightness into this story.

The secret conspiracy portions of the storyline are by far the weakest and don't feel altogether genuine. Overall, it's worth reading.

[Jordan West · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5; easily the weakest of Thornburg's California trilogy, this was the first novel written after the filming of Cutter's Way, and lacks the gravitas of his 70's work, feeling much more like a conventional action-packed thriller produced with an eye on another movie deal - complete with creepy henchmen who would be right at home in The Last Boy Scout or The Nice Guys, it reads not unlike Altman's Long Goodbye written by Shane Black. Even if it pales in comparison to Cutter and Bone and To Die in California, a thriller by Thornburg is leagues beyond your standard potboiler, and the final reveal and his closing summation of America as dreamland (which eerily prefigures our era of 'fake news' and the alt-right) reveal the true depth and power Thornburg was capable of, and amply show why he was one of the greats of hardboiled fiction.

[Brian Fagan · Rating 3 out of 5]

It all starts with a flash photograph taken on a random street in L. A. When a copy of the photo is found by a powerful group that uses terrorist methods from an apolitical, anti-everything position, people die. The photographer dies. People caught in the photograph die. They include two hookers and a gay man standing in the background across the street. Many more will die in a chain of violence all linked to others in the photograph.

Dreamland was written in 1983 by Newton Thornburg. I gather from other reviews on Goodreads that many felt this was far from his best book. If that's the case, Man, I am in for some treats, because I loved this book. The personalities of Thornburg's well-developed central characters grabbed me right away. Crow (Orville W. Crow) is a 32 year-old single guy who decides to drive down to L. A. from Seattle to see his semi-estranged father. On the way, he gives a ride to Reno, a 16 year-old runaway. With Crow's help, she dumps her abusive boyfriend and decides to stay with him for the time being. Soon after they arrive at his father's home, his father is killed when he apparently drives off Mulholland Drive and into a canyon. The death is ruled accidental, but Crow can't buy it. When he and Reno start their own investigation, they learn of the deaths of the people in the photograph at nearly the same time, and realize that they are onto something very odd. Despite the ever-increasing danger to themselves, they plunge ahead.

Strangely, Thornburg visited a number of today's rights and activism topics when he wrote this almost 40 years ago. We have abused women, gays, alternate lifestyles, and a sexual identity struggle. Crow himself is a grown hippie-type, who, while college-educated, spurns corporate life and prefers moving from one small entrepreneur gig to another, and definitely has a fear of romantic commitment. Thornburg captures the immaturity, angst and defiance of a teenage girl very well.

I always love L. A. settings, especially when the writer goes the extra mile to pepper in locale references. Here are Topanga Canyon, Griffith Park, Mulholland Drive, Laurel Canyon and others. The plot follows several groups of people at the same time, solidly locking in my interest. Finally, I appreciated that Thornburg didn't go overboard with the complexity of the story and the number of characters to keep track of. I'll be reading more of him.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Second year in a row that I've brought a Newton Thornburg novel on a cross-country flight. Hey- if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The first 150 pages I got through on the flight itself, watched most of the time from under the seats by a couple of cats in duffel bags belonging to the people sitting next to me. The next 60 or so I read in a Seattle bar somewhere near Pike Street, where every other song seemed to be Fleetwood Mac (not a complaint, by the way- included was a live version of "Rhiannon", a new one on me), at a round table whose surface featured a large map of Washington state. The last 10 or 20 of those aforementioned 60 pages are especially hazy in my memory, which might be connected to both the good music and to the fact that I had two local IPAs, ~9% alcohol rather than the 4-5% you get with a typical beer. I meant to finish the novel on the Greyhound a few days later but felt sick every time I tried to look at a page, so I settled for watching the landscape from I-5, as we passed through Tacoma, Olympia and something called Kelso. Soon enough we got to Portland, where the driver left us on the side of the road because apparently there's no longer (or never has been?) a Greyhound station in the city, and I finished the book a couple of nights later in the same place I'd finished Cutter and Bone the year before. None of which tells you much about the novel, granted. But maybe I can justify this subjective approach if only because parts of Dreamland reminded me of how subjective my reactions to books can be. I mean for example that the presentation of an underachieving male in his mid-30s (this would be the main character, Crow) who's worried about getting older and struggling to find a meaningful path forward in life is just going to hit me, right now, in a way that it might not others, regardless of the quality of the rest of the story. Which is not to say that I had a bad time with this. Like Cutter and Bone, it's another California yarn about an ambiguous event, a possible crime, that leads up to a climactic assault on the estate of a sketchy rich person, where the truth may or may not be revealed. In contrast to Cutter and Bone, however- which, to invoke Donald Rumsfeld (sorry), dealt with a known-unknown (whether or not JJ Wolfe is actually a murderer) and maintained that tantalizing ambiguity throughout- the event here is less ambiguous, but also more convoluted and implausible. We know more-or-less what happened, it's just very complicated and a bit tedious to explain. Thornburg also, as in Cutter and Bone, tries to make Crow's quest about something much larger than solving the mystery itself. But Cutter was a truly inspired character, and his anger had a brutal reality to it, tied to what was then recent history. Someone like him almost had to exist in that time and place. Thornburg is trying to tread similar ground here, but it's not nearly as powerful. Still, even in what I would think has got to be one of his weaker efforts, there are good moments throughout, and I liked the closing reverie about the nature of "dreamland." It's not Cutter and Bone, but what is?

[Tom Vater · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sipping hot black coffee, Crow watched the two of them from a window booth in the drive-in. Chicks out of the nest, he had thought at first, a pair of lorn adolescent lovers thumbing at the cars hurtling past them on the late-afternoon freeway. Then he saw the boy snarl something at the girl and roughly jerk her arm up into a hitchhiking stance more to his liking, and the gesture aged him, pushing him on into his twenties, already an executive type, despite his long hair and scraggly beard and garish cowboy get-up. The girl remained very much a kid, though, fifteen or sixteen at the most, all gangling jeans and long coppery hair. And it nettled Crow to see how she accepted her boyfriend’s peevish discipline, with such a practiced resignation, as if it were already an old routine in her young life.

The opening paragraph of Dreamland (1983) by Newton Thornburg, is almost the best thing going in this California set crime novel that wears its shades of Noir semi-comfortably.

Meet Crow, a hapless 30 something drifter on the way to see his aging father, an ex cop and member of America’s intelligence community. On the way, Crow picks up the couple in the above quoted bit of text, but soon gets rid of the boy only to fall for the girl, who is sixteen. The unlikely couple are soon sucked into a private investigation of sorts, trying to solve the mystery of the deadly car accident of the old man, whom Crow never had much time for. Soon our protagonist and his underage friend encounter dead hookers, psychopathic murderers and more intelligence people – some of whom seem to be barely aware nor deserving of such a description. Thornburg does some great character set-ups and the narrative bubbles along from gruesome killing to sex-addled clue, involving fabulously rich homosexuals, retarded killers and government agents in search of a moral compass. What’s new, you might ask. It’s an all too familiar America that is wheeled out onto the literary porch for our perusal, corrupt and seedy but many steps away from a Jim Thompson of David Goodis Type crisis of humanity. No, Dreamland is Noir lite, a good beach read, fluently written, with a mostly predictable plot and charcaters we occasionally care for.

Crow’s daily indecision of whether to bed the 16 year of sidekick or a fabulously wealthy woman his own age is the key to the novel, the energy that drives the narrative forward and the only genuinely unique and interesting aspect of Dreamland. Without wanting to spoil anything, Crow gets his cakes and eats them and this throws some moral ambiguity and sordid fun into an otherwise run of the mill story of murder and misunderstanding in cruel America.

If you enjoyed this review, read on on my Noir and Pulp blog The Devil's Road my link text

[Jim Thomsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dour, sour and disillusioned, DREAMLAND is nowhere near Newton Thornburg's best. But given that Newton Thornburg's worst is better than the best of most authors, that's damning with moderate praise. This LA noir novel was published in 1983, long after Thornburg decamped from Southern California in favor of comparatively damp, dreary and dreamland-like Seattle, after his best-received novel, CUTTER AND BONE, became CUTTER'S WAY, a major motion picture Thornburg didn't much care for.

The difference between the two novels couldn't be more clear: CUTTER AND BONE is the optimistic story of a collection of cynics; DREAMLAND is the pessimistic story of a trio of optimists in cynic's clothing. CUTTER AND BONE ends on the darkest possible note; DREAMLANd ends on a rather upbeat one. But disblief in dreams dampens every page of DREAMLAND, and given what happened to Thornburg between 1976, when CUTTER AND BONE was published, and 1983 — three failed novels and a film that was kicked around a good long while before being made into something that disembowled Thornburg's story, you can see how Thornburg got there. Think about how dead your nerve ends must feel after a tumble-dry in the California DReam Machine to write a passage like this:

"Even as his skin tanned, his spirit seemed to grow paler and weaker, especially as he sat there watching the Southern California passing parade: the golden girls in string bikinis and the musclemen in leopard briefs, the bikers in Wehrmacht helmets and chainmail and the laidback blacks in cornrows and Day-Glo, the dopers in their sad rags leaning against the wind of their habits and the old folks too, hiding under muu-muus and pink cotton-candy hair. They came on skateboards and roller skates and on foot, wearing stereo headphones and holding transistor radios to their ears and sometimes listening to nothing in particular. And almost all had a certain glazed look in their eyes, a kind of private rapture, as if they were dreaming even now in the brilliant noon sunshine."

That said, DREAMLAND works pretty well as a snapshot of its time, a crime novel and a meditation of the murder of the American Dream and seen through Southern California sunglasses. A number of people are killed, or marked for death, and it seems these things came to be because somebody might have seen or known something that a powerful someone wants to keep secret, even though it's not clear for most of the novel that the secret is one worth keeping to the point of piling up a body count. It's more a story of unintended consequences once bent people are turned loose to further bend a thing beyond all proportion or recognition, to create a funhouse mirror of reality in a manner Thornburg seems to be all too familiar with: "Beyond the palm-lined greensward a light surf pawed at the beach, which like the oceanwalk itself was crowded with the detritus of a continent: the flamboyant and the crazy, the lost and the beautiful. In bikinis and uniforms and junk-shop costumery they floated by on roller skates and dope and dreams."

Out of all that, three people fumble their way into pushing back against evil. Two are the close relatives of two of the murdered: Orville Crow, Jr., an aimless drifter in his mid-thirties from Seattle, and Jennifer Kellogg, professional ex-wife and niece of a powerful and wealth ex-government spook who's still got his fingers in plenty of dark pies. The third is Reno, a teenage hitchhiker who attaches herself to Crow, who can't decide whether he wants to fornicate with her or father her. The trio piece together what they know and launch a semi-organized and semi-effective investigation on their own after failing to convince the police that there's a link to the deaths, or that the deaths are more than the car accident and apparent suicide they appear to be. Along the way, Crow and Jennifer are drawn to one another, while Reno dances in and out of their periphery with equal parts passion and petulance.

Not everything they do, or somehow survive through, is believable. But the story is never less than absorbing, and Thornburg is never less than insightful about the people and the darkly sunny paradise they stagger around in like drunk naifs. Some of his best observations:

"Crow had little doubt that if any accidents occurred, any spinouts or other minor mishaps, the players would quickly be spilling out of their stalled cars with pistols blazing. Or at least so he perceived the general level of civility among his countrymen, especially here in California, in the aching eighties. The public’s potential for violence seemed almost like some universal new source of energy, an electricity one could feel in the air, much as if he were standing under a Bonneville power line."

"He had not had sex since the night before he left Seattle, a kind of bon voyage from one of three women he saw with some regularity, all fairly typical Seattle divorcees, bright, attractive career women who used him as a kind of comfort station between their various marriages and affairs, knowing that he was not exactly the marrying kind."

"He found out that his father’s cases were largely referrals from other private investigation agencies, and that most were what the old man liked to describe as the 'dingleberry beat'—divorce or other domestic affairs cases involving long hours of surveillance, sitting in a parked car."

“'Like my uncle, he seemed to feel that it was almost a homosexual’s duty to kill himself. So why question whether or not he had?' Crow told Jennifer then how close the sergeant’s mind-set was to that of his father’s old buddies in the L.A.P.D., who seemed to feel that a retired cop had almost no choice except suicide."

"Anybody can be a success in business. I think it’s mostly a matter of luck and having a high boredom threshold.”

"True to her word, she didn’t lock the door. But as far as Crow was concerned, it might as well have been chained shut. No matter how much he wanted her, he wanted even more not to be rejected by her. That, he knew, would have put quick death to whatever was growing between them. He didn’t mind an old lover handing him his dick—women after all occasionally did have actual headaches—but he definitely disliked having the poor thing handed to him by someone new. From that point on, for him, the relationship was subtly altered, and not for the better."

"The earth may not have moved and there may have been no tears, but it had been good. After all, they were not children. Sex was not some new and marvelous country to explore so much as an old neighborhood to wander in—but the best of all neighborhoods, the one you never tired of."

"Like any normal man, he’d never found it hard to fall in love, especially when he was in the arms of a lovely woman. Unfortunately those 'loves' had never seemed quite so strong as his aversion to committing himself to a lifetime of breadwinning in order to support the woman and their issue. Certainly he wanted no part of a working-wife family, with its concomitant neglected children and exhausted bed-partner and all the rest. He had too many friends, male and female, caught in that vicious treadmill for him to want to give it a try. But now if the woman in question happened to be a Santa Barbara heiress—he had to admit that might put things in a different light."

[Patrick James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another one out of the ball park from Thornburg. Really takes something out of you, I found, however. It was a lot heavier than Cutter and Bone and To Die In California, or perhaps it was my emotional state when I read it. No matter, by the end you just want to read it all over again.

[John Marr · Rating 2 out of 5]

Big disappointment after the spot-on Cutter & Bone. Although set in the '80s, the book still feels like the early-to-mid '70s, and the "dirty tricks" plot is just plain silly.

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5) For as often as I listen to it, I’m not much of a fan of Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald, co-hosts of The Watch podcast. They both come off as smug and insufferable. But they have excellent taste in books, particularly crime fiction. Their suggestions have opened some new doors in a genre I thought I was familiar enough with. So they’re not THAT bad I guess; I just don’t listen to them talk about anything else besides books.

Anyway, Newton Thornburg is probably the most obscure writer they brought to my attention. I had never heard of him before perusing their Snitch Butlers tumblr. Thornburg’s books have been mostly out of print for awhile and he didn’t even seem to get second life from Black Lizard in the way many formerly forgotten greats had. I picked this one up on Kindle and let it sit until I needed to read a good LA tale.

It mostly satisfied. Is it a hidden gem? No but it’s a perfectly fine crime novel that centers around a guy unwittingly drawn into a murder/conspiracy. There’s a touch of Ross Thomas to this. Those are usually my thing and Thornburg does a good job with his perspective. I was intrigued by the mystery itself and how he lines the pieces up for the reader.

The book has several problems, the biggest is how it begins with several character perspectives, few of which feel fleshed out before they are discarded as the narrative dictates. Eventually, we’re just left with the main guy. It doesn’t work. Also, Thornburg is not great at building suspense. Moments that are supposed to be gripping left me with a feeling of mostly indifference, like they’re contrived to keep the story moving.

But it’s the main character’s relationship with a 16-year old girl that…yeah no. No. No explaining is gonna get me past that one.

It’s a good book that made me want to read more Newton Thornburg because it did entertain. Perhaps he should be known more but I don’t think we missed out on another Chandler here. Still, there’s something to be said for competent writing.

[Allen Berry · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Crime Story That Could Only Take Place in California

Crow, a sometime musician, with a rescuer complex finds himself and the teenage hitchhiker he rescued from an abusive boyfriend drawn into a dark web of conspiracy, murder, and revenge after his estranged father dies under suspicious circumstances.

Set against the background of the California coast and luxurious Santa Barbara, this is a gritty, complex tale of violence and revenge. Couldn’t put it down.

[Paige Newman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book more than 3 stars, but it has one hell of a Woody Allen problem that I just can't get past. To call it "problematic" would be a kindness. I guess 1983 is 35 years ago, but still. Great little thriller with a hard to swallow central relationship.

[Ben Brackett · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was OK enough

[Bob Box · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read in 1984. This California thriller packs a powerful punch.

[David Phillips · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great story from Thornburg! This would make a great film

[Pam]

12/03 purchase from serpent's tail

[Phox]

greenwald

[Justin Sanders · Rating 2 out of 5]

Couldn't finish.