Will Tripp Goes Hollywood, by Harry Stein (Calamo Press: 2021), 224 pages.

There was an old joke in the Soviet Union: “The future is already written. It’s the past that keeps changing.” A consciousness that this was not entirely a jest animates Harry Stein’s new novel, Will Tripp Goes Hollywood.

Of course, this phenomenon of olden days being artfully if implausibly reimagined is one we’ve been seeing quite a lot of recently here in America. Most notably, there was Nikole Hannah-Jones’s “1619 Project.” Now being taught to hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren, it focuses upon the claim that the purpose of the American Revolution was to preserve slavery within a supposed American “slavocracy.” Last spring this work of fiction was given a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. That is a category of writing which is supposed to be reserved for non-fiction.

Stein is less than amused.

Once a prominent liberal journalist, the author became a conservative around the time Ronald Reagan became president. His move to the right cost him friends, but it has earned him a measure of honor. At the same time it sharpened his already mordant wit. This has been expressed in his frequent takedowns of liberalism’s wackier happenings in New York’s City Journal. It has also prompted his occasional flights of fancy in the form of satirical detective fiction, and this is his second novel to feature a doggedly un-P.C. “little person,” a flamboyant litigator named Will Tripp. The first of these yarns, which came out in 2013, targeted radicals in academia.

His newest slim volume is a fast-paced, cleverly plotted takedown of the cultural mandarins of present-day La-La-Land. In setting up this tale, Stein goes in for a bit of hyperbole. A Hollywood supporting player winds up being cancelled for saying “God Bless America.” If this is slightly farfetched—at the moment anyway—much of the rest of his story shows a picture perfect awareness for the phoniness of Los Angeles agent and producer talk and for the routine double-crosses and hypocrisy that managers and studios are fond of. Thus, someone dead is politely referred to as “unavailable,” but the business’s apex predators are only too happy to bury their friends, whether or not they’ve stopped breathing.

A New Yorker, Tripp heads to Hollywood accompanied by three assistants: a Hispanic private detective, a black attorney, and a disabled secretary. The team hopes to assist Michael Sawyer, their cancelled actor-client, who had wished to co-star in an action film about the Battle of New Orleans. They soon learn that the lead of the proposed film, slated to play the buccaneer Jean Lafitte, is a Cajun good old boy with an ego only exceeded in size by his monumental insecurities. However, they also discover that reaching him is not so easy. For, like nearly all celebrities nowadays, he stands behind layers of handlers, aides, and hangers-on who serve to act as barriers. This makes up part of Stein’s plot.

The greater portion, though, focuses on a well-constructed mystery involving a long-ago Bayou carjacking, blackmail, and multiple murders. Stein adds to this gumbo with amusing scenes in which Tripp meets up with a hack journalist and a conniving Hollywood wife while his detective sidekick tours through the Louisiana backwaters hunting for clues.

In the process Stein exposes a few of the entertainment industry’s smellier truths. One is the color that’s causing Hollywood to kowtow to China. (Hint: it rhymes with mean. And unclean.) The other is the irony in the rise of the Me-Too movement. Many of those now declaring their allegiance and support have been notorious in their past behavior. This not only includes men who have casually pressured young actresses, publicists, and script girls into serving as instruments for their pleasure. It also describes more than a few actresses who have cynically employed their feminist credentials after they used their feminine credentials to shinny up the greasy pole. Some of those most inclined to engage in this act are beloved by the public for the seeming innocence that they project on the screen. (As Oscar Levant put it, “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.”)

In Hollywood and the motion picture business, Stein has a fertile subject, and he makes good use of it. Those looking for a brief, well-told story that has plenty of laughs and unabashed Conservative politics would do well to pick it up.

Jonathan Leaf is a playwright and critic living in New York.