BOOK REVIEW - Four Coins, a Yoyo, and a Gun

FOUR COINS, A YO-YO, AND A GUN

David Garber

Linzack Publications, 421pp.

“Four Coins, a Yoyo, and a Gun” is the latest novel from best-selling author David Garber. Garber is a veteran writer of film and television, and his mastery of storytelling is evident from the first chapter. I have known David for nearly thirty years. We have occasionally worked together and also played golf together.

The story is a historical fiction. In it, we find 79-year-old Wyatt Earp working as a Western consultant for the movies, particularly for John Ford. He parlays his lived experience and reputation as a frontier lawman into a job offering professional advice on what things were really like in the wild west, a mere forty years earlier.

Wyatt and his wife, Sadie, live in one of those quintessentially Hollywood bungalow courts. Our mystery begins when a neighbor is found murdered, and her thirteen-year-old son approaches Wyatt to ask for his help in finding the murderer. He offers thirty-two cents and his yoyo as payment. Wyatt, a man with a soft soul hiding under the grizzled armor he wears in public, accepts. The murder investigation quickly spirals into a labyrinth of corporate skullduggery as the film studios battle for supremacy in the advent of the talkies. While the investigation is fictional, the setting, 1927 Hollywood, is very real, and Garber trots out a variety of real personages, Joseph Kennedy, Sam Warner, Billy Haines, Marion Morrison (John Wayne), and others.

The pacing is fast, and the plot ever-twisting, leaving the reader guessing at the outcome until the very last. Garber sketches memorable characters as he sets each scene with colorful wordcraft and witty dialogue. It’s a fun read that takes you back to one of the more romantic eras in Los Angeles history.