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Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition

John Gregory Dunne

by Carl Rollyson

Other literary forms

In addition to his novels, John Gregory Dunne produced a distinguished body of nonfiction, including a memoir, Harp (1989), and other personal and autobiographical essays. One of his primary subjects was Hollywood, the focus of both The Studio (1969) and Monster: Living off the Big Screen (1997). His first book, Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike (1967, revised 1971), reflects his early career in journalism. He combined his talents as autobiographer and reporter in Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season (1974), which recounts a time of crisis in his marriage and in his writing career, set in the milieu of a stunning cast of characters who thrive in the mecca of legal gambling. Dunne’s travel writing is featured in Crooning (1990), a collection of essays that also contains a number of his reflections on Hollywood, the American West, and politics. Quintana and Friends (1978), another collection of essays, is autobiographical (Quintana is the name of his adopted daughter) and focuses on his personal account of moving from his roots in the eastern United States to a career as a Hollywood screenwriter. Uniting much of Dunne’s fiction and nonfiction are his concerns with his Irish background and sensibility as well as the world of urban crime and scandal and the role of institutions such as the family, the Roman Catholic Church, politics, and the entertainment industry. Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne (2006) includes several essays published in the last fifteen years of his life and previously uncollected in book form, as well as his 1996 Paris Review interview.

John Gregory Dunne.

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(Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Achievements

John Gregory Dunne’s fiction falls within the tradition of the crime novel as developed by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Like Hammett’s, Dunne’s novels feature a gritty realism, although his detectives tend to be less hard-boiled and romanticized than those of his predecessors. Dunne shares much of Chandler’s fascination with Los Angeles. In other words, Dunne’s obsession with crime and detection reveals a profound concern with the corruption of urban society. Also like Hammett and Chandler, Dunne is an elegant stylist. Although his sense of plot construction is not as acute as that of the greatest detective novelists, his probing of characters and milieu is reminiscent of writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West. Like Fitzgerald and West, Dunne sets some of his fiction in Hollywood, where Americans seem particularly free to invent themselves.

Dunne’s fiction recalls Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon (1941) and The Great Gatsby (1925), for it takes up the theme of the easterner who moves West to find his fortune and a new identity. Dunne, however, adds a keen concern with ethnicity and religion that earlier crime and mystery writers confront only fleetingly and with embarrassing stereotypes. Dunne’s Irish men and women, for example, are not only sophisticated and working class, white and blue collar, powerful politicians and churchmen, but also immigrants and criminals. Dunne’s unique contribution to the crime novel was to give it a sociological context and a depth of background without sacrificing the drama and intense curiosity about events and people that are requisite in mystery fiction. Dunne’s final novel, published in 2004 shortly after his death, exploits his deft understanding of politics and the legal system and shows no diminution of his narrative powers or of his ability to create memorable characters.

Biography

John Gregory Dunne, born on May 25, 1932, in Hartford, Connecticut, was the fifth of six children born to Richard Edward and Dorothy Burns Dunne. In many ways, Dunne’s family enjoyed the typical immigrant success story. His maternal grandfather arrived in the United States from Ireland shortly after the American Civil War, an uneducated boy who could not read. He became a grocer and then a banker in Frog Hollow, Hartford’s Irish ghetto. Dunne grew up with stories about his Irish ancestors’ assimilation in America and with a sense of being a “harp,” a derogatory term for the Irish, who were considered inferior by the city’s Anglo-Saxon establishment.

An indifferent student, Dunne nevertheless managed to complete four years at Princeton University and earn an undergraduate degree. Not knowing what to do after graduation, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, a decision he credits in Harp, his autobiography, with helping to ground him with a sense not only of society’s complexity but also of its very rich resources in humanity. Had he remained in the elitist milieu of Princeton, Dunne suggests, his career as a writer would have been seriously limited, if not entirely vitiated, by the lack of worldly experience he deemed necessary for a writer.

Dunne’s development as a novelist proceeded slowly. He began writing short pieces for newspapers before landing a job on the staff of Time magazine. There he labored for six years in New York City, meeting writer Joan Didion, whom he married on January 30, 1964. Although she was already an accomplished journalist and novelist, Didion found herself undergoing a creative crisis, and the couple decided to move to California, where Didion had grown up and where Dunne hoped to find the material to begin writing both fiction and nonfiction. Husband and wife also began collaborating on screenplays as a way of supporting themselves while they worked on longer fiction and nonfiction projects. After two decades of residence in California, Dunne and Didion moved back to New York City, continuing to collaborate on screenplays as well as working separately on their fiction and nonfiction. Dunne continued to write essays for The New York Review of Books. He suffered from a heart condition that worsened during the last decade of his life, and he died of a heart attack at his Manhattan home on December 30, 2003.

Analysis

All of John Gregory Dunne’s novels are about power and personal integrity. The power is exercised by Roman Catholic prelates, the police, criminals, studio bosses and producers, quasi-legitimate businessmen, and politicians. The person of integrity is often the estranged member of a family, such as Jack Broderick in The Red White and Blue and Playland or Tom Spellacy in Dunne’s brilliant debut novel, True Confessions. The head of the family—Jack’s father, Hugh Broderick, or Tom Spellacy’s brother, Des (Desmond), for example—stands for the patriarchal and corrupt aspects of society. Tom Spellacy may have spurned his brother Des’s ambitious careerism in the Church, but he has also been a bagman for a local crime king. Jack Broderick has not followed his father into the world of high-stakes politics and business, yet he writes screenplays for craven Hollywood producers. In other words, even Dunne’s moral characters are compromised. They come by their moral code precisely because they are flawed figures. Dunne’s early exposure to Roman Catholicism is most telling in his awareness of how virtue and vice coincide.

True Confessions

True Confessions begins and ends in the 1970’s, when Tom Spellacy has retired from the police department and his brother Des, an ambitious Catholic clergyman, is spending the last of his thirty years of exile in a small, neglected parish. Somehow Tom’s actions have led to his brother’s downfall, and the heart of the novel, “Then” (set in the 1940’s), tells the story that leads to “Now,” the first and last chapters.

The first “Now” section centers on Des’s call to his brother Tom. Why, Tom wonders, has Des summoned him to his parish in the desert? The brothers have been intensely preoccupied with each other and yet estranged. Although one has chosen a career in the police department and the other the Church, they are both worldly men. Tom cannot seem to live down his corrupt period on the vice squad, when he was “on the take,” a bagman for Jack Amsterdam, a supposedly legitimate contractor and a pillar of the Church, but in fact a thug with numerous illicit enterprises. Amsterdam is the link between the careers of the two brothers, since Des has relied on Amsterdam to construct many of his parish’s impressive church buildings, even though Des knows that Amsterdam has padded his payroll and physically intimidated other contractors so that they have not put in bids for the construction projects. Des has also functioned as a kind of enforcer for Cardinal Danaher, who is trying to centralize power by depriving parish priests of their autonomy.

When the two brothers meet in the opening section of the novel, Des tells Tom that he is dying. It is this announcement that precipitates the action of the novel, as Tom remembers the events that have led to his brother’s dramatic announcement.

“Then” begins as a traditional murder mystery. A woman is found with her body hacked in two. There is no blood, which suggests the body has been moved from another location. The cut is clean, indicating that a very sharp instrument was used.

Tom Spellacy is goaded into action by his boss, Fred Fuqua, who is yearning to become chief of police. Fuqua is a systems man. He claims to be able to find patterns in crime, though he has little sense of street life or of how crimes are committed. What also goads Tom, however, is his intuition that larger forces—namely, Jack Amsterdam—are somehow connected to the mutilated body. Tom’s search for the murderer and his gunning for Amsterdam also set in motion the forces that expose Des’s complicity in evil and lead to his banishment from the center of power.

Dutch Shea, Jr.

Dutch Shea, Jr. is one of Dunne’s darkest novels. It includes an epigraph by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, “I awake and feel the fell of dark, not day.” Its second epigraph provides a hint of understanding, if not redemption: “for we possess nothing certainly except the past”—a line from novelist Evelyn Waugh. Significantly, both Hopkins and Waugh were Catholics who found in their religion a way of analyzing and coping with the world’s corruption and blindness. This novel of occluded vision is reminiscent of Saint Paul’s admonition that “we see as through a glass darkly.”

Dutch Shea’s father was sent to prison for embezzlement, and attorney Dutch is well on the way to committing a similar crime, having held back money owed to one of his clients, now in a nursing home. Dutch’s demons also drive him, however, to defend criminal suspects that other attorneys spurn. His wife has left him, and he is carrying on a covert relationship with a female judge. He mourns his adopted daughter, who was blown up in an Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombing in London, but he has also seduced his surrogate father’s Irish immigrant servant. He suspects that his surrogate father was somehow involved in the crime that put his father in prison, and much of the novel deals with Dutch’s conflicted feelings: He is at once burning to know exactly how and why his father turned to crime and terribly afraid of knowing the worst. What Dutch never sees, however, is that the story he is investigating—his attempt to find the Irish immigrant girl he seduced—will lead him to a confrontation not only with the mystery of why his father sinned and committed suicide in prison but also with his own failings as husband and lover.

Like True Confessions, Dutch Shea, Jr. thrives on lively dialogue and shrewd character assessments. It lacks the drive of Dunne’s first novel, however, perhaps because it does not have a tightly constructed plot and its themes seem not only derivative of True Confessions but also devoid of fresh treatment.

The Red White and Blue

Whereas True Confessions centers on Los Angeles and is tightly woven around the tensions between Tom and Des, and Dutch Shea, Jr. explores the career of a disaffected and down-and-out lawyer trying to regain a coherent life for himself and a tolerable vision of the world, The Red White and Blue functions on a broader canvas, as an ambitious novel that represents Dunne’s bid to encompass the epic sweep of contemporary American history. The Broderick family of the novel vaguely resembles the Kennedy family of American politics. Again there is a struggle between two brothers, Bro (another ambitious churchman) and Jack (the less determined screenwriter). Both brothers, however, disappoint their father, Hugh, a kind of Joseph Kennedy figure, the confidant of presidents and other power brokers, an amoral man who finds Bro’s talents wasted on the Church and Jack’s lack of drive pathetic and almost beneath his notice.

As the novel’s narrator, Jack resembles Tom Spellacy, for, as is true of Tom, it is Jack’s nearness to power coupled with his distaste for it that makes him both keen observer and critic. Each of the male Brodericks focuses, in turn, on Leah Kaye, a radical attorney whose moral and political principles are opposed to the Brodericks’. Leah becomes sexually involved with all three of the Broderick men, and her personal and political entanglements are further examples of the difficulty of separating the worlds of virtue and vice in Dunne’s fiction.

Like Dutch Shea, Jr., The Red White and Blue seems a falling off from True Confessions. All three novels are immensely polished performances, yet only the first seems original in its intensity and language, while the second seems repetitive and the third too diffuse. The machinations of the Brodericks are less intricate and tawdry than those of their real-life models, the Kennedys.

Playland

Dunne’s fourth novel represents a recovery of the author’s full novelistic powers. It not only has the intensity of True Confessions but also manages to incorporate the broader canvas that seems too thin in The Red White and Blue. Jack Broderick is the narrator, and Dunne puts his own experience as a Hollywood screenwriter into full play, as Jack sets off on a quest to find the reclusive Blue Tyler, a child star of the 1930’s rumored to be living in a trailer park in Hamtramck, Michigan.

As Jack is researching Tyler’s life and interviewing her, he is negotiating with Hollywood producer Marty Magnin to turn the project into a film. Bits of screenplay are interwoven throughout thenarrative, as Broderick writes and rewrites Tyler’s life, realizing that he is often speculating, turning guesses into narrative even as he tries to resist the Hollywood touches on which his producer insists.

Playland’s gangster character, Jacob King, is reminiscent of Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, and Jack’s quest to understand the King-Tyler love affair by interviewing various witnesses also calls to mind the 1941 film Citizen Kane. The humor, sex, and violence are as crude as in the cheapest crime novels, but Jack’s desire to get the story right, even as he realizes there cannot be a single authentic version, elevates Playland to the ranks of the most distinguished works about Hollywood, including Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon and Norman Mailer’s play The Deer Park (pb. 1967). Playland also includes stunning settings in Las Vegas and Detroit, giving the novel the all-encompassing geographic and historical reach that Dunne had been working toward since the brilliant success of True Confessions.

Nothing Lost

Dunne’s last novel is set in the small town of Regent, South Midland—apparently a fictional version of South Dakota. At any rate, this heartland setting is the locus for a brutal murder: A well-liked African American man is bludgeoned to death and then stripped of his flesh. Although this would seem an obvious case of a racially motivated crime, in fact the story of Edgar Parlance’s gruesome death is far more elusive and ambiguous than either the court system or the press can fathom. The novel’s narrator, Max Cline, a prosecutor turned defense attorney, gradually pieces together part of what happened to Parlance, assembling testimony from a cast of characters with varying degrees of reliability. In the end, vital aspects of the Parlance case remain unresolved in favor of a nuanced and sharply observant portrayal of a people and a place reminiscent of William Faulkner’s best work, such as Absalom, Absalom! (1936), or of the greatest nonfiction as exemplified in Rebecca West’s classic essay “Mr. Setty and Mr. Hume” in A Train of Powder (1955).

Cline is a superb choice for a narrator because he has worked for the establishment and yet is an outsider. Jewish and gay, he had only a short-lived career in the attorney general’s office, and his switch to defense work makes him a pariah among law-enforcement types and in his community, since he is regarded as protecting the very kinds of criminals he used to incarcerate. Cline sports his outsider credentials wryly, so that while he may irritate the establishment, nothing in his behavior actually can be charged with causing offense. He thus insinuates himself into the action, so to speak, avoiding confrontations but picking up bits of evidence overlooked by the police. In the Parlance case, he has a cocounsel, Teresa Kean, whose own story and affair with J. J. McClure, the prosecutor and ostensibly her adversary, complicates Cline’s work but also leads him closer to the reality of what happened to Parlance.

Cline works with the sensibility of a novelist. Indeed, it has been noted that Cline’s voice resembles the one Dunne employed in his nonfiction. Perhaps because Cline has been the object of hate and ridicule, he is slow to sit in judgment of McClure’s and Kean’s unethical behavior and Kean’s efforts to hide her affair from Cline. Kean, like Duane Lajoie, the man she is defending, is the product of a fraught background and of forces she ultimately finds it impossible to control.

Not much more can be said of the plot of Nothing Lost without giving away the secrets Cline so assiduously explores. Suffice it to say that a number of critics have asserted that Nothing Lost is Dunne’s finest novel. It has been compared to the best work of John D. MacDonald and John O’Hara because of Dunne’s sure handling of both the novel’s mystery elements and its social observations.

Bibliography

1 

Dunne, John Gregory. Harp. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. Dunne’s memoir is one of the best sources available for both biographical information on the author and insight into the sources and themes of his fiction.

2 

Edwards, Thomas R. “The Awful Truth.” The New York Review of Books, June 24, 2004. Long, thoughtful review of Nothing Lost takes into account the entire trajectory of Dunne’s career. Provides especially perceptive discussion of the connections between Dunne’s fiction and his nonfiction.

3 

Fanning, Charles. The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish-American Fiction. 2d ed. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. Comprehensive scholarly work includes discussion of Dunne as an Irish American writer.

4 

Keane, James. T. “Savagery in South Midland.” America, February 21, 2005. Review of Nothing Lost commends Dunne for creating a notable cast of characters and for his satiric portrayal of the American media as well as of the conniving practices of both local, state, and national politicians.

5 

Thomson, David. “Playland.” The New Republic, August 22, 1994. Highly critical review of the novel includes an astute assessment of Dunne’s style and his handling of Hollywood themes.

6 

Winchell, Mark Roydon. Joan Didion. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Includes brief discussion of Dunne’s work and the Dunne-Didion marriage. Chapter 1 provides a good overview of Dunne’s and Didion’s reactions to the American East and West Coasts in their writing.

7 

_______. John Gregory Dunne. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1986. Brief work provides a solid introduction to Dunne’s biography and to the backgrounds of his fiction. Discusses only the first two novels and Dunne’s early nonfiction. Includes a useful bibliography.

Citation Types

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Format
MLA 9th
Rollyson, Carl. "John Gregory Dunne." Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSLF_11930140000130.
APA 7th
Rollyson, C. (2010). John Gregory Dunne. In C. Rollyson (Ed.), Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Rollyson, Carl. "John Gregory Dunne." Edited by Carl Rollyson. Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.