Historical Fiction if You Love Old Hollywood

In Emma Straub’s first novel, we meet Elsa Emerson, a young girl born to owners of a playhouse in Door County, Wisconsin. Elsa loves being onstage, but when tragedy strikes her family, her acting becomes more than a child’s game of pretend. While still in her teens, Elsa marries and flees to LA. There she is discovered by Hollywood, who refashions her as Laura Lamont. But fame has its costs, and while Laura tries to balance career, family, and personal happiness, she realizes that Elsa Emerson might not be gone completely. Ambitious and richly imagined, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures is as intimate–and as bigger-than-life–as the great films of the golden age of Hollywood.

This novel follows the lives of three extraordinary women in the late 1920s. One is up-and-coming German actress Marlene Dietrich, one is Anna May Wong, the world’s first Chinese American star, and the third is Leni Riefenstahl, whose work as a director of propaganda art films would first make her famous–then, infamous. On the surface it seems that these women have nothing in common with each other, other than their connection to Hollywood, but below the surface there are more things that bind these women together than they would have ever thought possible.

Vivian Brazier never thought life as an art photographer would include nightly wake-up calls to snap photos of grisly crime scenes. It isn’t the career she planned for herself, but she knows it pays the bills. When she is asked to take crime scene photos of a famous actress, the latest victim of the “Dagger Killer” murderer, Vivian notices eerie similarities to the crime scenes of previous victims–details that put Vivian at the top of the killer’s target list.

Jessica Malloy is the daughter of Ingrid Berman’s Hollywood publicist. Jesse absolutely adores Bergman, thinking her the epitome of elegance and integrity as well as the paragon of motherhood, an area in which her own difficult mother falls short. But when the truth comes out that Bergman had a baby out of wedlock with her Italian lover, film director Roberto Rossellini, Jesse has to reconsider everything she was raised to believe. The Hollywood Daughter is an intimate novel of self-discovery that evokes a Hollywood sparkling with glamour and vivid drama.

London, 1936. Lena Aldridge wonders if life has passed her by. The dazzling theater career she hoped for hasn’t worked out. She’s feeling utterly hopeless until a stranger offers her the chance of a lifetime: a starring role on Broadway and a first-class ticket on the Queen Mary bound for New York. But when an obscenely wealthy family draws her into their fold just as one among them is killed, Lena realizes that her greatest performance won’t be for an audience, but for her life. With seductive glamor, simmering family drama, and dizzying twists, Louise Hare makes her beguiling US debut.

In the 1950s, movie star Louise Wilde receives an out-of-the-blue phone call: she has inherited the estate of Florence Daniels, a Hollywood screenwriter she barely recalls meeting. Curious to find the truth, and take a break from a shaky marriage, Louise sets out on a cross-country road trip to her father’s house on the East Coast. Little does she know that Florence and her mother Ethel took the exact same trip in reverse thirty years earlier. In parallel tales, the three women–Louise, Florence, Ethel–discover that not all journeys follow a map.

In 1945, Velva Jean Hart is a bona fide war heroine as a WWII pilot. After a newsreel films her triumphant return to America, MGM promises to make her a star. Soon she is navigating movie sets, parties, staged romances, and the occasional backstabbing that accompanies her new fame. But when one of her best friends dies mysteriously and the most powerful studio in the world launches a cover-up, Velva Jean goes in search of the truth–risking her own life, as well as her heart, in the process.

This is Los Angeles, James Ellroy style. His LA is filled with corrupt cops, goons with guns, and rattling roadsters. Told in his signature staccato rhythm of the streets, Hollywood Nocturnes shows us the seedy side of glamorous Hollywood, laid out like a corpse in the morgue.

In 1938, Violet Mayfield set out to reinvent herself in Hollywood after her dream of becoming a wife and mother falls apart, and lands a job on the film-set of Gone With the Wind. There, she meets enigmatic Audrey Duvall. What Audrey and Violet are willing to risk, for themselves and for each other, to ensure their own happy endings will shape their friendship, and their lives. But, when an unexpected gift from the past reemerges, they may have a chance to reshape their futures.