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A Flawed Obsessive
Bad Actor follows a washed-up TV writer turned private investigator who is investigating the death of a high-profile agent while struggling with his own personal issues. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
As always, I set out to place my work in the lineage of L.A. noir—from James M. Cain to Joseph Schneider; Sunset Boulevard to Mulholland Drive—with its damaged characters on the razor’s edge of glamor and desperation. While I was outlining the book, I saw something on TV about the Beltway Sniper, and it changed the direction of what I was writing. That was when Bad Actor took shape.
What was the inspiration for Ellis Dunaway’s character traits and dialogue?
Like most–if not all–detectives in hardboiled crime fiction, Ellis Dunaway is a flawed obsessive. His voice reveals his unique sentimentality and sense of the absurd, filtered through Gen-X media literacy (reruns) and lots of weed.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
All the characters struggle with problems resulting from a combination of family dysfunction, identity crisis, and malignant ambition.
Can you tell us more about what’s in store for Ellis Dunaway and the direction of the next book?
The log line is Terms of Endearment meets I Wake Up Screaming, plus weed.
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Bad Actor
Bad Actor is a gritty and sharply observed noir that follows Ellis Dunaway, a washed-up TV writer turned private investigator, as he’s pulled back toward the fringes of Hollywood. The book blends a murder mystery involving the death of a high-profile agent, the troubles of fallen actor Urs Schreiber, and Ellis’s own struggles with sobriety, fading relevance, and financial strain. Vaughn sets the action against a vividly sketched Los Angeles, equal parts glitz, decay, and absurdity, while drawing the reader deep into Ellis’s sardonic inner world.
The writing had me hooked from page one. Vaughn’s voice is lean, smart, and sly, with a knack for tossing in lines that sting as much as they amuse. The dialogue crackles, bouncing between bone-dry humor and tense undercurrents. I loved how Ellis is flawed without being a cliché. He’s self-aware enough to see his own failings, but still likely to trip over them anyway. The mix of PI procedural detail, showbiz satire, and personal confessions makes the book feel like it’s living in multiple genres at once. And somehow, Vaughn keeps the balance.
Beneath the twists and snappy banter, there’s a steady hum of commentary on reinvention, ego, and the way Los Angeles eats its own. Vaughn doesn’t preach; he just lets his characters prove the point. I found myself laughing in one paragraph and then unexpectedly feeling the weight of Ellis’s loneliness in the next. The city in this book isn’t just a backdrop, it’s a character with its own moods, grudges, and jokes. It reminded me of walking through Hollywood after midnight: the beauty, the weirdness, the sense that anything could happen, good or bad.
Bad Actor delivers as both a mystery and a character study. It’s for readers who like their noir with bite, their comedy tinged with sadness, and their protagonists both frustrating and impossible to abandon. If you’re into Michael Connelly but wish Harry Bosch swore more, smoked more weed, and wandered into surreal Hollywood detours, this is your book. I’d hand it to anyone who loves a crime story that doesn’t just solve a case but also lays bare the person doing the solving.
Pages: 245 | ISBN: 979-8-9865319-3-9
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