Contemporary Authors

• The Glamorous Dead ( novel) Kensington Books (New York, NY), 2017

• Suzanne Gates - http://suzannegates.com/aboutme/

  About me

  My interest in historical crime fiction began with family stories of my great-uncle, a Headshotgangster in 1930s Los Angeles. My novel The Glamorous Dead will be released by Kensington Books on October 31, 2017. I received my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of California, Irvine, and I live in Southern California.

  You can contact me at suzannedgates then the “at” sign, then gmail.com.

Quoted in SidelightsL “a treasure trove of movie lore” and Penny “the perfect leading lady for this entertaining mystery.”
The Glamorous Dead
Karen Keefe
Booklist.
114.3 (Oct. 1, 2017): p31. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Glamorous Dead. By Suzanne Gates. Nov. 2017. Kensington, paper, $15 (9781496708120); e-book, $9.99 (9781496708137).
Weary of the limited prospects awaiting them in 1940s Buena Park, California, Penny Harp and her best friend, Rosemary, head to Hollywood and find jobs as extras at Paramount Studios. Penny befriends Barbara Stanwyck, and Rosemary starts getting some featured screen time. But their luck runs out there. Rosemary is murdered, and an assumed-jealous Penny is the prime suspect. BFF "Stany" runs hot and cold during the investigation, forcing Penny to fend for herself in the City of Angels. Gates' first novel is full of the cameos and factoids that fans of Hollywood's Golden Age will enjoy. From the girlie reviews at the Florentine Gardens to a rumored tunnel that married producers would use to visit their ingenue mistresses, the book is a treasure trove of movie lore. Full of moxie, Penny is the perfect leading lady for this entertaining mystery.--Karen Keefe
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Keefe, Karen. "The Glamorous Dead." Booklist, 1 Oct. 2017, p. 31. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A510653764/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=2f04bc4d. Accessed 20 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A510653764
1 of 2 4/19/18, 11:12 PM

Quoted in Sidelights: “well-wrought mystery” in which “glamour takes a back seat to lust, lies, and greed.”
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
The Glamorous Dead
Publishers Weekly.
264.37 (Sept. 11, 2017): p42+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Glamorous Dead
Suzanne Gates. Kensington, $15 trade paper (336p) ISBN 978-1-4967-0812-0
Early in Gates's impressive first novel, set in pre-WWII Hollywood, a police detective questions wannabe starlet Penny Harp and real-life film star Barbara "Stany" Stanwyck, who has befriended Penny, outside the Florentine Gardens, "the town's best revue." The nude body of Penny's roommate and best friend, fellow wannabe starlet Rosemary Brown, has been found buried in a passageway behind the Florentine Gardens, minus a thumb. When Penny becomes a suspect in Rosemary's murder, she turns sleuth to clear her name. Stany lends support as Penny starts sneaking into studio offices and lurking around back lots. When a second actress winds up dead, Penny knows she's next unless she can uncover the motive behind the murders. Gates skillfully evokes a Hollywood era when the studio chiefs wielded enormous power over the lives of everyone in their orbits and would go to any length to protect their stars and big-budget movies. Glamour takes a back seat to lust, lies, and greed in this well-wrought mystery. Agent: Jennifer Udden, Barry GoldblattLiterary. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Glamorous Dead." Publishers Weekly, 11 Sept. 2017, p. 42+. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505634875/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=e5482119. Accessed 20 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A505634875
2 of 2 4/19/18, 11:12 PM

• Reviewing the Evidence
  http://www.reviewingtheevidence.com/review.html?id=10994
  Word count: 770

  Quoted in Sidelights: “She draws so many parallels between Buena Park and Hollywood that she risks minimizing her convincing portrait of the latter as a unique universe,” Nixon observed. “But Gates gets enough right, especially around the studio bottom feeders, to pique and reward our interest.”

  THE GLAMOROUS DEAD
  by Suzanne Gates
  Kensington, November 2017
  303 pages
  $16.95
  ISBN: 1496708121

  Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

  Suzanne Gates's debut novel, THE GLAMOROUS DEAD, is a compelling mix of contradictions. It masquerades as a whodunit, but is so attentive to the various forms of corruption and graft that pervade Los Angeles and to the back stories of the central characters that the final revelation of the murderer seems more tacked on than punchily essential. It has an unlikely detective, who is a haplessly lame investigator at the best of times; but because she has trouble keeping her thoughts to herself, mostly in the presence of all the wrong people, she nevertheless manages (barely) to work out the identity of the killer. And it has a potentially glamourous setting—the Hollywood Golden Age of the 1940s' Paramount Studios, complete with guest appearances by Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, who are working on the set of Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve—but presents that glamour through the perspective of the nameless, generic extras and wannabes who populate the studio lots. Gates emphasizes the prosaic, day-in-day-out grind of those so far below stardom that they are careful, in their open competition with one another, to acknowledge each other only by their roles: "Career Girl" and "Wallflower," by film-shooting days; and "Cree," Cherokee," and "Apache," by dancers working nights as the dinner entertainment at the Zanzibar, both jobs enabling them to scrape together just enough to pay for their crowded rooms at the studio-owned Florentine Gardens dormitory.

  What Gates captures is, consequently, not the LA noir of Chandler or Ellroy, the latter of whose The Black Dhalia traces similar tropes of starlets and studio power. Instead, she imagines forms of namelessness and powerlessness in the unsung sub-culture of the always-replaceable hopefuls. The unearthed body of budding starlet, Rosemary Brown, the protagonist Penny Harp's best friend, causes barely a ripple in the smooth anonymity of Paramount's stockade of extras. Penny, who is first accused of the murder, then determined to ask awkward questions, because no one else seems remotely interested in Rosemary's death, learns just how much the police, coroners, abortion doctors, lawyers, and screen stars themselves are in bed with the studios, complicit with whatever self-serving spin they give to unwelcome events. What she knows to be murder becomes, with a sprinkle of Hollywood magic and a heavy wallop of studio muscle, an official suicide in one case and an accidental fall in another.

  Despite her lack of the wits (or snarky offensiveness) of the conventional noir detective, Penny is nevertheless beaten, harassed imprisoned, and offerred bribes laced with threats. All of which are ironic overkill, because Penny is no investigator. Short on rudimentary sleuthing skills and long on intuition, she only gains an insight into the crime by imagining—as it turns out, reasonably accurately—what her friend Rosemary might have done in a given situation. Unlike Rosemary or Madge, her fellow extra friend, Penny is not even a plucky heroine: her moxy, when it appears, is limp and anxiety-filled, and her hysterical and indiscreet accusations are unerringly aimed at the wrong people.

  Oddly, and despite all those apparent strikes against it, THE GLAMOROUS DEAD is still an absorbing novel. Gates is clearly more interested in gradually revealing the small-town crimes and transgressions—what poignantly haunts Penny and Rosemary, and what drives them to come to Hollywood from rural Buena Park in the first place—than she is in exposing the blunt economic imperative that propels Hollywood (to murder, rob, cover over, and falsely accuse in order to climb, or stay on top of, the food chain). Gates doesn't quite get the balance right between Penny and Rosemary's traumatic motives for escaping their "Farm Girl" (a film-extra role they play that is almost laughably divergent from their actual experience) lives and the plot of Rosemary's murder; and she draws so many parallels between Buena Park and Hollywood that she risks minimizing her convincing portrait of the latter as a unique universe. But Gates gets enough right, especially around the studio bottom feeders, to pique and reward our interest.

  § Nicola Nixon is Associate Professor of English at Concordia University, Montreal.

  Reviewed by Nicola Nixon, November 2017

• Historical Novel Society
  https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/the-glamorous-dead/
  Word count: 284

  Quoted in Sidelights: “is a bit confusing and jarring,” she commented, while Stanwyck “never seems to have a true role”
  The Glamorous Dead

  By Suzanne Gates
  Find & buy on

  Penny and Rosemary, childhood best friends, decide to try their luck as actresses in Hollywood. While they don’t find instant stardom, they are fortunate enough to get jobs as dancers in a nightclub and as extras at Paramount Studios. Things are really looking up when they get to be background players in Barbara Stanwyck’s film, The Lady Eve, and Rosemary proves she has star potential. Then the dream turns into a nightmare when Rosemary’s nude body is found buried in a shallow grave and the police name Penny as the prime murder suspect. Suddenly it is Penny who is thrust into the limelight as she fights to prove her innocence and discover Rosemary’s real killer. Penny finds unlikely help in her new self-proclaimed friend, Barbara Stanwyck, who jumps to Penny’s defense and uses all her resources and connections to help solve the mystery.

  The novel is told from Penny’s point of view in a stream-of-consciousness, staccato style that is a bit confusing and jarring. It is no doubt used to convey the main character’s shock and state of mind, but it is difficult for the reader to discern what is going on. The glamorous, old Hollywood backdrop is eschewed for the seedier side of the city in the 1940s. And Barbara Stanwyck feels like an afterthought; drifting in and out of the story at random, she never seems to have a true role.https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/the-glamorous-dead/

• Shelf Awareness
  http://www.shelf-awareness.com/readers-issue.html?issue=668#m11691
  Word count: 358

  Quoted in Sidelights: “The Glamorous Dead will remind genre lovers of Dorothy B. Hughes’s darker noir crime fiction, especially the fever dream atmosphere and unreliable narrator in her 1947 classic, In a Lonely Place,” related Kevin Howell, writing online at Shelf Awareness. He added: “This moody and retro noir mystery pulls readers along with carefully revealed twists, complex characters and unnerving apprehension.”
  The Glamorous Dead
  by Suzanne Gates

  Most of the action in Suzanne Gates's debut mystery, The Glamorous Dead, takes place in 1940, on a Hollywood movie set while Preston Sturges films his classic screwball comedy, The Lady Eve. Between takes and after hours, the film's leading lady, Barbara Stanwyck, plays amateur sleuth to solve the murder of one of the film's extras.

  While the premise sounds like it will be a lightweight comedic mystery--along the lines of Stuart M. Kaminsky's Toby Peters series or George Baxt's novels featuring real celebrities solving fictional murders--Gates's mystery is deadly serious. The Glamorous Dead will remind genre lovers of Dorothy B. Hughes's darker noir crime fiction, especially the fever dream atmosphere and unreliable narrator in her 1947 classic, In a Lonely Place.

  When her beautiful roommate disappears on Halloween and is later found buried in a shallow grave, film extra Penny Harp becomes the LAPD's top murder suspect. It doesn't help matters that Penny (the narrator) has a lot of secrets and seems to alienate everyone around her, with the exception of the film's star. Why is Stanwyck suddenly best buddies with this background performer? Was Stanwyck's husband, dashing actor Robert Taylor, having an affair with the murdered girl?

  The Glamorous Dead alternates between chapters of the two women trying to solve the murder with flashback chapters that begin to explain why neither woman is being completely honest with the other. This moody and retro noir mystery pulls readers along with carefully revealed twists, complex characters and unnerving apprehension. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

  Discover: In this dark and moody retro murder mystery, actress Barbara Stanwyck turns amateur detective when a beautiful film extra is murdered.

• The Union
  https://eccunion.com/features/2017/10/25/english-professor-prepares-to-debut-her-first-novel/
  Word count: 904

  Quoted in Sidelights: “I started thinking about the relationship that these girls had with the movies and with movie stars in the 1940s, and the more I researched, the more I found that a lot of women came to Los Angeles, My book became partly a research project into what happened to those women and partly just getting to know my mom and what she was like.” “blends history and fiction. The murder is fiction, but the movie and most of the actors in the movie, like Barbara Stanwyck, are historical.”

  English professor prepares to debut her first novel

  By Joseph Sanker • October 25, 2017
  Photo+credit%3A+Jorge+Villa

  Photo credit: Jorge Villa

  Dr. Suzanne Gates is lecturing on Marilyn Monroe. She mentions that Monroe had several abortions during one of her relationships. A student comments out loud, “That is sad.”

  Dr. Gates agrees and then transitions into Monroe’s relationship with former President John F. Kennedy. After playing a YouTube video of Monroe singing to the president, she then explains the significance of that relationship in American history and Monroe’s life.

  Dr. Gates then comments that is it time to take a break and that class will resume in ten minutes.

  As a professor, this is what the process of teaching is like. However, as a writer, Dr. Gates has another, dissimilar process.

  Gates typically writes her book during the summer, four to five hours a day, and the rest of the day is filled with research.

  “I love to research little nitpicky questions like ‘What did people in Los Angeles eat for breakfast in 1940?’ I search newspapers and magazines from back in the day, mostly advertisements, to see what kinds of breakfast foods were advertised,” Gates said. “That’s just one example of the details that have to be historically accurate when placing a story in a particular place and time.”

  The story that Gates is referring to is “The Glamorous Dead,” a historical mystery novel set in 1940s Hollywood, California that follows a young woman who is accused of her best friend’s murder.

  Both the young woman and her best friend were female extras on the set of a historically real movie: Preston Sturges’s “The Lady Eve.”

  “(The) story blends history and fiction,” Gates said. “The murder is fiction, but the movie and most of the actors in the movie, like Barbara Stanwyck, are historical.”

  Gates found inspiration for the book from looking through her mother’s scrapbook, which she kept in the 1940s. Gates’s mother had cut out pictures of movie stars and pasted them together in this scrapbook.

  “I started thinking about the relationship that these girls had with the movies and with movie stars in the 1940s, and the more I researched, the more I found that a lot of women came to Los Angeles,” Gates said. “My book became partly a research project into what happened to those women and partly just getting to know my mom and what she was like.”

  As far as balancing being a professor at EC with being novelist, Gates thinks that the balance is very hard to maintain.

  “It is difficult being a writer and professor. When I think about my two jobs—writer and teacher—they seem similar, because I teach writing. Yet, I teach a kind of writing that is very, very different from what I write,” Gates said.

  Due to being a full-time EC professor as well as a novelist, her time and energy is often focused on one endeavor instead of two or more.

  “It took me six years to write ‘The Glamorous Dead,’ because my schedule only gives me time to write during summers. I don’t balance aspects of my life very well. I’m more the kind of person who goes all out on one thing, then all out on another,” Gates said.
  Suzanne_Gates_Teaching.jpg

  EC Professor and author Suzanne Gates in the middle of lecturing about Marilyn Monroe’s relationship with former President John F. Kennedy. Photo credit: Joseph Sanker

  However, colleagues of Gates, like EC English professor Inna Newbury, seem to think the opposite and are very awestruck at her ability to be both a professor and a writer.

  “I find it amazing that she has always been so productive since coming to EC,” Newbury said. “Now her latest book is published. I honestly don’t know how she does it, because teaching, grading students’ papers, (and) responding to so many students in her online classes is enough to swamp the average professor. But not Suzanne.”

  EC English Instructor, Tiffany Huynh, also shares similar sentiments and looks forward to reading the novel herself.

  “I’d love this novel to be my first experience to noir literature,” Huynh said “I imagine reading the novel would be like sitting in one of her classes and experiencing the fascinations noir has to offer.”

  “The Glamorous Dead” by Suzanne Gates comes out on Tuesday, Oct. 31.

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• RT Book Reviews
  https://www.rtbookreviews.com/book-review/glamorous-dead
  Word count: 231

  Quoted in Sidelights: “will keep readers engaged until the end.”

  Surrounded by the rich and famous, this mystery is never cut and dry. There are no clear villains, but the mood and ambiance of the era are front and center. Recognizable names are dropped with glee throughout. While the motive for the crime(s) takes time to develop, this is an entertaining piece of work that will keep readers engaged until the end.

  Penny Harp has dreams of Hollywood, but like so many others, she’s stuck in the background, just one of the many day players. When she draws the attention and friendship of Barbara “Stany” Stanwyck, she goes with the flow and counts her blessings. But when her best friend, Rosemary, turns up dead, she becomes the prime suspect. But there’s much more to the life that Rosemary has been living, and the mystery of why Stany would befriend Penny paints a picture of just how shallow some people can be. When a second friend of Penny’s dies, the story takes an even darker turn. She begins piecing together the mystery when she is suddenly offered a contract with a major studio. If she continues digging, she may just be risking it all. But what is the studio trying to hide? (KENSINGTON, Nov., 336 pp., $15.00)

  Reviewed by:
  Jacqui McGugins

• Library Journal Web site
  https://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2017/09/books/genre-fiction/mystery/brooks-pick-of-the-month-notable-series-launches-from-indridason-massey-debuters-gates-lackey-mystery-reviews/
  Word count: 251

  Quoted in Sidelights: “gritty, noir debut that vividly captures the atmosphere of glamorous parties, movie stars, and influential studios.”
  Brook’s Pick of the Month, Notable Series Launches from Indridason, Massey, Debuters Gates, Lackey | Mystery Reviews
  BY LESA HOLSTINE & ANN CHAMBERS THEIS ON SEPTEMBER 6, 2017
  Gates, Suzanne. The Glamorous Dead. Kensington. Oct. 2017. 336p. ISBN 9781496708120. pap. $15.00; ebk. ISBN 9781496708137. M

  DEBUT When two friends leave their small town for the glamour of Hollywood in 1940, one ends up dead and the other is the primary suspect in her murder. It’s the golden age of Hollywood, and Penny Harp and Rosemary Brown are extras in Preston Sturges’s comedy, The Lady Eve. Rosemary disappears on Halloween, only to be discovered later buried behind the Florentine Gardens nightclub. Penny, who knows Rosemary’s secrets, won’t reveal any information, even when the film’s star. Barbara Stanwyck “Stany,” offers to help Penny solve the mystery. Stany has the power of Paramount behind her, but that won’t stop the police from arresting Penny. It’s a high-stakes world in which the studios have unbelievable influence and use it to protect their stars; extras are disposable. VERDICT Quotes from the magazine Photoplay begin each chapter in this gritty, noir debut that vividly captures the atmosphere of glamorous parties, movie stars, and influential studios. Readers of Kelli Stanley’s “Miranda Corbie” mysteries or Linda L. Richards’s “Kitty Pangborn” crime novels will appreciate the celebrity and culture of the period.—LH