Slow Fade may have been published in 1984, but this short, potent novel about death and the movie business has the atmosphere of the 1960s about it: eclectic locations (India to Newfoundland via New Mexico and California), anarchic characters and, overall, it's a bit cracked.
The linchpin is control freak, drug-addled Hollywood director Wesley Hardin, a maniac and egomaniac, apparently based on legendary western auteur Sam Peckinpah. Wurlitzer had first-hand experience of his style: according to director Alex Cox, author of the introduction, Peckinpah "gutted" Wurlitzer's script of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
The book begins by following the eventful adventures of opportunistic roadie AD Ballou — who, in the first chapter, gets his eye shot through by a crossbow-wielding Native American when he strays on to the set of one of Hardin's films. However, the kernel of the story is Hardin's relationship with his children. His daughter Clementine, spirituality-seeking in India, got lost somewhere along the way, and Hardin has sent his drifting, trustafarian son Walker (and wife) to find her. Of the three, only Walker returns, too traumatised and too angry with his father to explain where his wife and sister are, or what happened.
To get to the bottom of the mystery, Hardin commissions a script from his son, hoping to get the story this way; he's unable to communicate through any other medium. As insurance, Hardin makes a deal with AD to babysit Walker: an eye, as it were, for an eye. As a setup, it's a promising one, and the book moves briskly between the script of Walker's disjointed memories of India and Hardin's battles with studios (and, indeed, everyone around him) to the ageing director's final acceptance of the slow fade.
It's not easy making such bombastic and extreme characters sympathetic, and Wurlitzer – perhaps to his credit – doesn't try. However, if, as Cox suggests, this is an axe-grinding pen portrait of a famous Hollywood director then Wurlitzer may have been a little ungracious in his choice of target. For looking at his backlist, the most recognisable and successful title is Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: the one that Peckinpah, for all his faults, made famous.
