Book Review: Last Night At The Hollywood Canteen by Sarah James

Annie Laurence arrives in 1943 Hollywood still hurting from a devastating break-up. A playwright with an acclaimed Broadway murder mystery under her belt, she comes expecting to write similar scripts for Pacific Pictures, and perhaps to show the people who crushed her how much they lost by leaving her behind. Her new bosses, of course, have other plans, assigning her to dream up a script for a musical with an inane title instead.

Less mortifyingly, Pacific Pictures also expects her to volunteer at the Hollywood Canteen, the movie industry’s glamorous contribution to the war effort. Open to only servicemen – so no officers and no civilians – the Canteen offers free entertainment, dancing and food to the thousands who come through its doors before being shipped off to fight. 

It’s while navigating the Canteen that Annie falls in with the members of the Ambassador’s Club, as they call themselves. The club is more or less headed by Fiona Farris, the acerbic film and stage critic who’s destroyed hundreds of careers. She’d actually given Annie’s play a decent review, even if she’d inserted an insinuation as to the scandalous truth about Annie’s last relationship. Wouldn’t it catch the eye of the people who hurt her, Annie thinks, if she’s seen being chummy with Fiona now?

Fiona turns out to be less horrifying in person than she is as a critic, though her inner circle definitely shares her enthusiasm for barbed wit and selective secret-keeping. To her own surprise, heartsick, intelligent, lonely Annie finds herself fitting in perfectly with her new friends. So when Fiona drops dead one night while at the Canteen, Annie feels genuinely motivated to find out who killed her. After the police rule Fiona’s death a suicide, at least half of the Ambassador’s Club angrily agree with Annie, though the others just as bitterly demand that they let it go:

It was all escalating like this, I realized, because Fiona wasn’t here. Fiona would say something so perfect, so devastating, so mean it would shut everyone up. Then Terry could change the subject, and we’d all move on. But Fiona wasn’t there, so the only way I could see to get this group to function again was to be her myself.

 

“Look, folks, I’ve only spent a few evenings with the Ambassador’s Club, and that’s been enough to make me want to kill myself,” I said. “The point isn’t if Fiona could have [committed suicide]; it’s if she did. Don’t you want to know for sure? Because I do.”

Getting everyone onboard is the easy part. Things get tricky when their investigation into Fiona’s death puts a target on all their backs. Soon enough, Annie is accused of Fiona’s murder herself. Will Annie be able to emerge unscathed from the seedy underbelly of Hollywood, a hotbed of corruption dedicated to preserving a wholesome image at all costs in order to keep the profits coming in, or will she become just another victim of a devious killer protected by the system?

As charming and clever as its protagonist, this murder mystery had me completely hooked, even as its emotional impact destroyed me utterly. While the particulars were quite different, it felt very much as if Sarah James had ripped my heart out of my chest and squeezed the contents out across these pages, exposing my pain for all the world to see in the form of Annie’s grief. Ms James pointedly talks about the hypocrisy of conservative morality in order to drive home the point that secrecy and intolerance have always made things worse, not better, benefiting only the cowardly and the selfish. Here, for example, the female members of the club are lamenting the choices of their friend Victor:

“He’s never going to get over the man if he keeps going home with him,” said June.

 

“He doesn’t want to get over him,” Terry said. “He knows he should want that, so he acts like he does want that, but what he really wants is for Henry to leave his wife and come back to him and they’ll be just like it was.”

 

“That’s pathetic,” I said, perhaps to cover the part of me that wanted the exact same thing from my exes. “Henry’s never going to do that. Why would he? He’s getting everything he wants right now: the respectable married life and Victor at his beck and call.”

Last Night At The Hollywood Canteen is smart, sensitive and historically accurate, with humor that is right up my alley but might possibly veer too esoteric for others (as it winningly points out about itself in at least one self-deprecating passage.) One Haydn joke in particular had me laughing like a classical-music-loving hyena. I rather wish that this novel was only the first in an ongoing series of the Ambassador Club’s adventures, but it ends perfectly as is, and is one of my favorite books of the year so far.