The Devil May Dance: A Review

Dartmouth alumnus Jake Tapper ‘91 is known mainly for his work as an anchor on CNN. His earlier career as an author tended to focus on political non-fiction, including a book in 2001 which weighed theories and evidence of how George W. Bush ‘stole’ the 2000 election. Recently, however, Tapper has seemed to take an interest in historical fiction. His first novel, The Hellfire Club, was published in 2018 and centered around 1950s Washington, D.C. His newest book, The Devil May Dance, takes the protagonists from Hellfire Club and places them at the center of a covert operation in 1960s Hollywood.

To understand this book, it is important to examine the social landscape of Hollywood in the 1960s. Yes, there shone the familiar (though characteristically different) glitz and glamour we associate with those Californian hills. However, the 1960s was also a transformative time for Hollywood. Newly freed from the specter of McCarthyism, an influx of young producers and directors produced content that was more violent, sexually explicit, and cynical than anything ever before seen in American cinema. In music, the Rat Pack was at a peak of popularity, and mobsters’ ties to the entertainment industry were thinly veiled. In this context, it is believable that Robert Kennedy would have sent people like the protagonists of The Devil May Dance to follow the Rat Pack and keep tabs on them and their possible criminal activities. This is one of the strengths of the book as a work of historical fiction. Tapper uses a believable historical scenario and allows your mind to run with the nostalgia and overall immersion in a foreign time period. While reading, I did have to look up multiple events to separate fact from fiction.

However, just as Tapper writes a believable plot, he writes unbelievable characters who are wooden and caricature-based. If the scenery makes this book, the characters break it. Tapper tiptoes around race relations. He attempts to talk about this issue through comments made to Sammy Davis Jr., the only African-American member of the Rat Pack. But the racially charged dialogue between him and the other Rat Pack members feels like a poor substitute for actual racial tension and detracts from the book’s realism. The book left a lot to be desired here.

In addition, Tapper’s book spread itself a bit thin at times. In one part, the author gets too involved in the era and decides to include a Church of Scientology sub-plot which left me feeling really confused. One of the more useless moments in the book is when one of the protagonists Margaret gets invited to the set of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” and watches the famous scene when Tippi Hedren was attacked by real birds instead of mechanical ones. Such moments make it seem as if Jake Tapper had taken inventory of all the things he loved about the 1960s (an era which he never lived through) and then forced them into the book, as if checking them off a list.

Another portion of the book that had room to be impactful but fell short was its flirtations with a feminist critique. Characters like Frank Sinatra use terms like “doll” and “girlie” often. This is an honest depiction of attitudes towards women in the 1960s, but Tapper does not build on this in any substantive or nuanced way. The writing is lazy.

Tapper attempts to thicken the plot by writing a plotline where the other protagonist Charlie suffers from a clear case of PTSD that he copes with through alcoholism and chasing infidelity. In an easily foreshadowed turn of events, he is wooed and seduced. Nothing much is said of the PTSD after. In this plotline and many others, Tapper plays lip service to social commentary but does nothing particularly fascinating.

Perhaps the book would make more sense if I had read Hellfire Club, but as a standalone work The Devil May Dance attempts to entertain and inform while doing neither particularly well, and ultimately fails to address its own themes.