Art by Sean Phillips and Elizabeth Breitweiser

One fascinating thing about The Fade Out and that period is how it depicts the way Old Hollywood was constructed to maintain this illusion of wholesomeness and purity, but whitewashed so much of the terrible things that were done to create this illusion.

Yeah. To a large degree. There are actors who are still in the closet because middle America won't accept that it’s okay for a gay man to be an action star, or a gay woman to be a leading lady. One of the most tragic stories and one of the inspirations for the book, besides my uncle’s life and his friends, is the Rita Hayworth story. Rita Hayworth was a Mexican girl, and nobody knew that, really. It’s openly known at this point, but when she was a movie star, that was not in the papers. They made her look like the whitest girl of all time. She changed her name from Margarita to Rita and becomes a white girl.

To me, that story was so tragic—especially with everything that happened to her, with the various marriages and Alzheimer’s. But I just thought that was such a poignant tragedy in there, and I wanted to write about it. That’s one of the stories in The Fade Out, which is sort of a noir; I consider it more of a historical epic, in a way. It’s definitely a crime story. One thing I tried really hard in The Fade Out was that the stories would be intertwining, where you have the mystery story—which runs through everything and brings everything together—but if you’ve read it a few times now, you can see that everybody has their own story. Even Dotty has a story, and she’s not in the book that much. Her friend, Maya, is sort of a mixture between Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe. I felt her story really needed to be touched on, and, in some ways, I wish I had a couple of hundred other pages to get into other aspects of the world at that time.

How do you choose which stories and characters to settle on? Charlie, the protagonist, is a tragic figure, but kind of a huge dick.

[Laughs] Yeah. Charlie and Gil are basically professional alcoholics who also write. Honestly, I feel like so much of writing is a gut instinct. I knew, from the beginning, when I started thinking of the story, the initial idea I got, about ten years ago, was that a movie star gets murdered and a writer is the only person who can help solve the crime—but he can’t, because he’s actually not able to write anymore from being damaged by the war and fronting for his best friend, who’s been blacklisted for being a commie. If the police find out he was a witness or near the murder, it could ruin everyone’s lives, so he has to go on with this cover-up. And that was where the whole story began, and I started building out, “Who are these guys?” It all fell into place from then, and I just started populating the world around them. Obviously, Dotty was loosely inspired by my aunt, Sarah Jane, because she was a PR girl. Charlie is, in no way, inspired by my uncle; I had no knowledge of what he was actually like back in the ‘40s. I only knew him as a nice old man who didn’t want to talk about Hollywood much. He wanted to be an architect and ended up being a writer because he fell into that as a career. But he always adapted books, and things like that; he never wrote, like, an original story, so I don’t know if he considered himself a writer.