Synopsis/blurb….
Sammy Glick is a
winner. Aggressive, ruthless, belligerently self-centred, “sprinting out of his
mother’s womb, turning life into a race in which the only rules are fight for
the rail and elbow on the turns.” Sammy storms his way out of the New York
slums to reach the top of the Hollywood film world in the 1930s.
Sammy is a way of
life, a way that was paying dividends in America’s Depression era and is paying
dividends today. For the “Sammy-drive” is still to be found everywhere and will
survive as long as money, prestige and power are ends in themselves.
Witty, clever,
action-packed and acutely observed, this classic of American literature, which
has sold over a million copies, is as compelling and revealing now as it was
when first published in this country in 1941.
“The tone is akin to
Raymond Chandler.” WALL STREET JOURNAL
A 1941 novel for Past Offences December meme and fair
to say it’s a novel as opposed to a crime novel. (Click here to see what others
have read.)
We observe Sammy Glicks’ rabid ambition and ruthlessness as he
rises from copy boy to Hollywood big-shot, trampling over all in his path,
through the eyes of his “friend” Al Manheim. Sammy doesn’t do friendship, but
if he ever did Al’s the only one.
An interesting observation on Hollywood and the American dream
played out to the nth degree. Probably the closest modern comparison, I could
make would be Gordon Gekko in Wall Street.
Naked feral ambition, lack of a social conscience and lacking
totally in any empathy, compassion or consideration for his fellow man – what’s
not to like about Sammy? Haha…. you don’t ever totally abhor him, in fact a
sneaking admiration for his particular skill-set lingers.
Manheim banished from Hollywood after Sammy double-crosses
the fledgling writer’s guild eventually discovers the roots of Sammy’s raison d’etre
and “what makes him run” in an uncovering of a poverty stricken childhood in a
Jewish slum in New York.
Eventually Sammy meets his match, when he encounters someone
who can run faster than himself.
I thought
unconsciously, I had been waiting for justice suddenly to rise up and smite him
in all its vengeance, secretly hoping to be around when Sammy got what was
coming to him; only I had expected something conclusive and fatal and now I
realised what was coming to him was not a sudden pay-off but a process, a
disease he had caught in the epidemic that swept over his birthplace like
plague; a cancer that was slowly eating him away, the symptoms developing and
intensifying: success, loneliness, fear. Fear of all the bright young men, the
newer, fresher Sammy Glick’s that would spring up to harass him, to threaten
him and finally to overtake him..........
