Entertainment journalist and longtime Variety contributor Scott Huver takes a racy look at celebrity vice in his first book, “Beverly Hills Noir: Crime, Sin and Scandal in 90210.” Published by Simon and Schuster on Oct. 1, the true crime exposé serves as both a deep dive into the fledgling years of the 90210 and a guide to Hollywood’s most extraordinary criminal cases.
Huver, who has worked in journalism for over three decades, inherited his love of procedural dramas from his mother and stepfather, who raised him on a diet of “Adam-12,” “Hill Street Blues” and “Dragnet.” His love of writing was intrinsic from a young age and led him from the newsroom at Central Michigan University to running a crime beat at a Beverly Hills newspaper.
Coincidentally, Huver’s first week in Los Angeles brought him face-to-face with one of the city’s most infamous crimes in recent memory.
“I literally witnessed the OJ Simpson Bronco chase within days of moving to L.A. and two weeks after that I got that job at the newspaper,” Huver said. “I’d only written commentary on pop culture, movie reviews and theater reviews. Getting a crime beat was freaking me out, so I was careful about how I went about it. Fortunately, that worked out well in proving me to the police department because there was a little bit of that schism.”
Although Huver moved on to covering entertainment full-time, he began to amass an “elaborate personal library” dedicated to the early days of crime in Beverly Hills. Comprised of books, newspaper clippings and hard copies of his own work, this archive eventually became the foundation of “Beverly Hills Noir.”
The idea for the book started as a history of the Beverly Hills Police Department, but as Huver stumbled across more and more details, he felt the need to “luxuriate” as he wrote. He then shifted his focus to a few major stories rather than “squeezing everything” he knew into one book in “little nugget form.”
Converting his research into a non-fiction book had been brewing in his mind for a while, but it wasn’t until the pandemic that his wife, in an attempt to cure her husband’s restlessness, pushed him to finally do it.
“She said, ‘Why don’t you sit down and really focus on the book?’ And I said, ‘That sounds like a great idea.’ Because I’d been obsessing over things like my parents’ health and the election and stuff. It was a great escape,” said Huver. “I worked on the proposal and started putting more sample chapters together, and luckily very quickly got an agent, and pretty quickly got a publishing deal. So it was all kind of a whirlwind once I actually set my mind to it.”
The first chapter chronicles the construction of the Greystone Mansion and the double murder of Ned Doheny and his assistant Hugh Plunkett that took place in its South guest room. Other subjects tackled in the book include Hollywood’s gentleman jewel thief Gerard Graham Dennis, Walter Wanger’s crime of passion against Jennings Lang and even Winona Ryder’s early aughts shoplifting scandal.
With “Beverly Hills Noir” released, Huver plans to write many more books with stories that did not make it in his first release. He also hopes to find luck pitching the stories for possible television and film adaptations.
“I’m hoping that’s maybe the next step,” Huver said. “Either a documentary or a limited series, like the way Ryan Murphy does it.”
