As many of you may know, pioneering hardboiled detective writer Dashiell Hammet, creator of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, paid his dues as a real-life detective, an operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency.

Ace Atkins, author of Devil’s Garden, discovered a fascinating fact about Hammet’s detective career—that he actually worked for the defense in one of the big court cases of the 1920s—the trial of movie comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle for manslaughter.

(Even though not well known today, Arbuckle was a superstar in his time. He rivaled Chaplin and Keaton as the most popular silent comedian. That all ended when a young actress died during a party he hosted in San Francisco in 1921. Lurid rumors about her death spread [and were printed in newspapers], with the result that, though he was eventually acquitted, Arbuckle’s movie career died.)

This novel employs multiple viewpoints, but we see the action mainly through Hammet’s and Arbuckle’s eyes. Their vantage points are very different. Hammet is a poor man, suffering with tuberculosis and alcoholism, barely managing to support a wife and baby. Yet he has a future. Arbuckle lives like a king, eating at the best restaurants and riding around in a car with a built-in commode. But his good times are nearly done.

I’m coming to be rather leery of multiple-viewpoint books. Getting the reader to identify with characters is hard enough when there’s only one doing the talking. When it’s many—and each of them gets a relatively smaller time at the microphone—it’s exponentially harder. In my opinion Ace Atkins does not entirely succeed in this regard.

Maybe it’s because I’m a moral prig, but I had a hard time liking anybody in Devil’s Garden. Fatty Arbuckle is probably the most sympathetic character. He suffers from the insecurity so common among fat people. He copes by means of a compulsive need to always be “on,” to work the room, in order to be liked. If he lives too hard and throws parties where it’s inevitable that somebody will eventually get hurt, it’s because he’s trying to be everybody’s pal. To buy himself friends. The ordeal of going through a trial and being caricatured as a monster in the newspapers wounds him deeply. The betrayal of people he considered friends hurts even more.

Dashiell Hammet (called “Sam” in these pre-writing days) has some admirable qualities. He’s devoted, if not to his wife and child, at least to providing for them, in spite of painful ill-health. He has a certain integrity in his profession, although that gets stretched pretty far. He’s instinctively on the side of the little guy (I assume we’re supposed to see his Communist leanings as a positive trait).

But I (perhaps partly because I’m anti-Communist) had a hard time liking him. It was even the same with Arbuckle, although he’s someone I ought to identify with. I can only blame it on the author. Somehow all the research he’s done (and the research is very impressive in painting a detailed picture of a long-gone California) doesn’t work itself out into a vivid, human portrait.

The real villain of the book is William Randolph Hearst, and the central mystery is actually not what happened to the young woman, but why Hearst is so obsessed with Arbuckle’s destruction.

But even that wasn’t really very hard to guess.

If you want to read a well-researched narrative about one of the great scandals of the early 20th Century, you won’t do much better than Devil’s Garden.

If you’re looking for a gripping mystery, not so much.

Cautions for language and adult themes.