Scene of the crime

A director, shot dead in his own apartment. Three actresses linked to him romantically -- one by a monogrammed silk nightie she'd left in his closet. Studio thugs trying to cover up the details of a life that turned out, to everyone's surprise, to have largely been an invention. These are the stories told about the notorious murder of silent film director William Desmond Taylor; his 1922 death remains unsolved.

It is revisited in Nina Revoyr's new novel, "The Age of Dreaming." The links between her characters and the historical figures are clear -- her Ashley Bennett Tyler is William Desmond Taylor, Nora Minton Niles is movie star Mary Miles Minter, and so on. The case, despite being anchored in a kind of Hollywood prehistory, remains a fascination, in part because it, combined with the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, brought censorship to Hollywood. The Taylor case got paperback treatment in "A Cast of Killers" (1986) by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick and was rechronicled in "A Deed of Death" (1990) by publishing lion Robert Giroux. For a novelist, taking on such a notorious murder case presents a challenge: to keep the facts in line while bringing something fresh and exciting to the story.

Revoyr makes her most interesting departure in the main character, Jun Nakayama. He's loosely based on Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, who became a sex-idol sensation after branding -- with an iron -- his lady love in Cecil B. DeMille's "The Cheat" (1915). Jun becomes a much different man than his real-life counterpart. While Hayakawa was married, returned to Japan and continued to act -- he was even nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role in 1957's "The Bridge on the River Kwai" -- Jun retires early from acting and remains an expatriate bachelor, very much alone. He lives off his real estate investments, entirely removed from his earlier life in the 1910s and '20s. The narrative evolves on dual tracks: with Jun as a young man and as an old man, in 1964.

When we meet him, in his 70s, Jun is almost dormant, a study in quiet isolation. An acquaintance learns of his past and spreads the news -- to the local vendors, a librarian -- and his onetime fame is met with laughs of disbelief. Jun takes umbrage; he begins to think about, relive his past. In remembering it, he begins to reinhabit it, to step back into a version of himself that had long been abandoned.