Even as a novice crime writer, I probably ought to have discovered the killing that took place in my own front room sooner than I did. After all, the coroner declared it “the most brutal murder that has ever come under my notice” and the Los Angeles Times labelled my home the “Hollywood House of Death”.

Or perhaps I have that the wrong way round, and it was living here that turned me into a crime writer. Certainly, I had no such ambitions or qualifying expertise when I moved in: my previous book was a sci-fi comedy, and the protagonist of my crime novel is not a detective but an NHS junior doctor, the job I was doing when a screenplay I wrote first landed me some writing work in Los Angeles.

The neighbourhood I live in, Beachwood Canyon, leads up to the Hollywood sign, and so driving home invariably involves running a gauntlet of tourists throwing themselves into the street in pursuit of the perfect selfie. I can hardly blame them, for the sign holds no less power over me: its looming presence is a constant reminder of why I moved to Los Angeles, and that I really should work a little harder while I am here.

Originally reading “Hollywoodland”, the sign was erected in 1923 to attract movie people to an estate in the upper part of the canyon. The homes there were built in the storybook style, meaning they look like Walt Disney designed them to house his seven dwarves. Even today, cartoonishly pompous stone gates halfway up Beachwood Drive mark the entrance to Hollywoodland. People say you have made it once you live above these gates, but each time I see them I expect a pair of anthropomorphised foxes to emerge and play a fanfare on flag-draped bugles.

The house I live in on Cheremoya Avenue sits barely a third of the way to those gates. Built in the more sedate Craftsman style, it stands on a steeply sloping lot halfway along a potholed dead-end street. Tall pines overhang the house and garden, and from the safety of their shade overweight fox squirrels occasionally emerge to scamper along sagging telephone wires. The street and lot, then, are little changed since the 1920s. The same goes for the house itself, a single-storey white clapboard cottage that stands just about as straight as can reasonably be expected after enduring a century of minor earthquakes.

One afternoon, after I’d lived here for six months, a neighbour introduced me to a passing dog walker who excitedly exclaimed something about me living in a “murder house”. Before I had finished telling her that it was not true and anyway she could not prove a thing, my neighbour interrupted.

“We just didn’t want to scare you,” she said, by way of apology.

The internet quickly gave me the headlines: in 1927, an actor had killed another over the affections of an actress. A sensational trial had ensued, and the story had ultimately played out in a way so absurd it could only have occurred in Hollywood.

In the weeks that followed, I told everybody I could about my very own Golden Age of Hollywood murder. On Zooms, I’d ask the other person where they were, then interrupt them to explain that I was coming to them directly from a legendary Hollywood House of Death.

This real-life murder at home captivated me more than anything I could make up. The more I talked about it, the more I needed to know its every detail. I found myself subscribing to newspaper archive sites, watching silent movies and even calling up bemused courthouse clerks. At night, I dreamed about it, and when I awoke I would recall fragmented scenes, cut together like the strangest of trailers. Sometimes these snippets seemed to come from a black and white movie, sometimes from a Technicolor musical, and sometimes even from stage plays filmed beneath a proscenium arch. The only thing consistent across them was the three lead actors, and they quickly grew so familiar that I soon came to think of them only by their first names: Dorothy, Ray, and Paul.

Act One

A card on a screen, white type on black: Moline, Illinois, 1910

Fade-up on the auditorium of a theatre where an 11-year-old girl is playing Mary Jane in a touring production of Mary Jane’s Pa. The child’s name is Dorothy Mackaye, and the entire audience can see she is destined for stardom. After she receives tonight’s ovation, Dorothy will inform a reporter from the Rock Island Argus that she began her acting career as a six-month-old baby, when she was carried on stage in a Moses basket. This may or may not be true, for Dorothy will also claim to be from Scotland, despite having been born in Denver.

Roll titles, and then pick up six years later. Now 17 and living alone in New York City, Dorothy has begun to make a name for herself booking minor roles in farces. In photographs from the period, she combines the wide comedic eyes of the ingenue with the wry smile of one who is in on the joke. A line in an early review confirms both her talents and the limitations of the available roles. “Dorothy Mackaye,” it says, “was exceedingly attractive as the little wife who knew little about cocktails.”

But Dorothy has far more to offer than a feigned ignorance of cocktails. She has an ineffable charisma and a vivacity that her future husband will later describe thus: “Dorothy can steal almost any show … in The Flame there were 165 people in the cast, with spectacular costumes and great talent. And then in walked Dorothy with a bun on her head, singing a song about vodka, and the show was hers.”

It is this same chutzpah that lands Dorothy her big break. The lead part in new Broadway musical See-Saw should be a role for an established star, but in 1918 no A-list actress is willing to play a woman who oscillates between two lovers. Dorothy has no such qualms. “To her,” the New York Tribune will soon gush in a review, “a capricious young woman is as natural as life – or herself.”

At some point during these early Broadway years, Dorothy befriends a young Irish-American actor called Paul Kelly. Paul is tall, handsome, and possesses a legitimate claim to have been the world’s first famous child actor. He began working at the Vitagraph silent film studios at the age of eight and quickly became beloved to audiences as “the Vitagraph Boy”.

Dorothy may have some catching up to do, but her own star is also now firmly in the ascendant. In 1919, her leading roles earn her a full-page spread in Cosmopolitan, a sepia-toned triptych in which she looks coquettishly into one mirror, gazes contemplatively out of another, and wears a kimono in a third. Two years later, her performance in Getting Gertie’s Garter merits the supreme honour of an acerbic takedown by Dorothy Parker. “Miss Mackaye’s best moments,” quips the legendary critic, “were those when she was off stage.”

Still, Dorothy may have had good reason to be distracted: Ray Raymond. Born Ray Cedarbloom, Ray is 12 years older than Dorothy and a touring vaudeville star. Dorothy has been smitten with the old-fashioned song-and-dance man since their first rehearsal together for The Rose Girl, and the pair have lately become inseparable. Cut, then, to another card on a screen:

Gretna Green, Maryland, 1921

Dorothy and Ray marry in the town of Gretna Green, Maryland, a fitting location for a woman who likes to claim she was born in Scotland. Their daughter, Valerie, is born in 1923 and three years later the Mackaye-Raymonds join the great creative migration west and settle here on Cheremoya Avenue. Dorothy says she cannot think of anything worse than “having to emote at 8am” and so continues to work only on the stage. In keeping with the cultural insensitivity of the time, she performs well-reviewed lead roles as a Chinese maiden in The Son-Daughter and a Mexican dancer in The Dove.

Act Two

The Vitagraph boy has also come west, moving into a bungalow on nearby North Gower at around the same time the Raymonds arrived in Los Angeles. Ray and Paul are themselves friendly through their membership of the same New York club, and it must feel like kismet when they run into one another on Beachwood Drive. Ray immediately brings Paul to Cheremoya Avenue to visit Dorothy, and the Raymonds pledge they will help their single friend find his feet in Los Angeles.

Exactly why the Raymonds believe Paul needs their help is unclear. On arriving in Los Angeles, he had booked a part in The New Klondike, and swiftly followed this with a supporting role in an MGM biopic about a baseball player. Paul’s headshots from the time show why he has no trouble landing such gigs: his darkly hooded eyes are tough and mysterious, his expression is unreadable, and he has the strong jawline of the matinee idol.

The contrast with Ray’s pictures from the time could not be more striking: Ray’s face is powdered white, the lips through which he forces a grin bear more than a trace of lipstick and his eyes seem achingly sad. Ray, then, already looks like a man out of time: an ageing made-up clown in a world that now wants only brooding, silent types.

Sure enough, in Los Angeles Ray cannot find work in the movies and so continues to do what he had always done: he tours the US in vaudeville, spending weeks and sometimes months on the road. It is during these periods that Dorothy begins to spend increasing amounts of time with Paul.

On Good Friday 1927, Ray returns home from a theatrical engagement in San Francisco. He spends much of that Easter Saturday playing with Valerie, while Dorothy ostensibly shops for Easter eggs. At 7pm, Ray receives a call from a heavily inebriated Paul who accuses Ray of spreading scurrilous rumours about what he claims is his entirely platonic friendship with Dorothy. Ray retorts that he wishes Paul was standing in front of him now, so he could give him what he deserves.

Five minutes later, Paul arrives at the Raymonds’ front door. Their housekeeper, Ethel Lee, will later state that she let Paul inside only because she believed the presence of Valerie would prevent the two men fighting. Ethel Lee was at least correct in one way, for what transpires that night is not a fight in any conventional sense of the word. It is a straightforward beating that the Pacific Coast News Bureau’s wire reporter will later describe as a “one-sided fistic encounter”.

In Ethel Lee’s telling, Ray asks Paul to sit down with him on the couch. Paul obliges, but then immediately hits Ray. After a brief interlude to smoke a cigarette, Paul then proceeds to beat Ray in the living room, kitchen and dining area, at one point even putting Ray in a headlock to pummel him more efficiently.

An hour after Paul departs, Dorothy returns home to find Ray wearing dark glasses but still very much alive. The Raymonds retire to bed and at seven o’clock the next morning – Easter Sunday – Dorothy discovers Ray unconscious on the floor of the room that is now my bedroom. Dorothy summons a Dr Sullivan, who has Ray admitted to hospital. On his third day there, Ray does not rise but instead dies.

Sullivan’s death certificate lists Ray’s death as being due to a complication of kidney disease, a diagnosis that makes sense only when you also know that Paul gave Dorothy $500 to pay Sullivan for his medical services. The gambit initially seems to work: Sullivan’s death certificate clears the way for Ray’s body to be transferred to a funeral parlour and prepared for cremation.

Still, this is Hollywood, where fooling the authorities is one thing, but outsmarting the tabloids quite another. Acting on a tip-off from a hospital source, reporters begin to call the coroner asking if it is true that a vaudeville star has been beaten to death. The coroner voids Sullivan’s death certificate and impanels a grand jury.

Ray’s funeral takes place at Forest Lawn, Los Angeles’ original celebrity cemetery. The press reports make it sound as if Ray’s mother and Dorothy take turns competitively swooning during the service. Dorothy’s efforts may not have been entirely in vain, because the police wait another week before finally interviewing her about the events of Easter Saturday.

A black and white photograph exists of Dorothy’s interrogation. A particular style of shiplap cladding visible in the background tells me it took place not in a downtown Los Angeles police station, but in the small sunroom at Cheremoya Avenue. A stern, plainclothes detective, Lieutenant Frank Condaffer, looms over Dorothy, who here looks utterly different from every other photograph of her that exists. Gone is the coquettish smile and immaculate coiffure: with wide eyes and electric-shock hair, Dorothy looks distraught, perhaps terrified, as she huddles under a blanket in a room that is hot year-round. Dorothy’s appearance is so shocking that I must have looked at this photograph a dozen times before I noticed the third person in it. Tucked under the blanket beside Dorothy, the top of a curly haired child’s head is just visible. It can only be Valerie.

Two weeks after Ray’s death, the grand jury indicts Paul for murder. The next day, Dorothy and Sullivan are indicted as accessories after the fact. Dorothy appears for her arraignment in full mourning dress, including veil. She and Sullivan are both bailed, but the LAPD make a point of informing the press they believe Dorothy was drinking gin fizzes at Paul’s house while he beat her husband to death.

Paul’s murder trial opens in early May 1927 with a sense of theatre that extends even to its metaphors. The deputy DA predicts the trial will “play to a good house” whereas Paul himself compares it to the “unfolding of a new play”.

The first day is given over to jury selection, the defence using its challenges to stack it with women. Perhaps not unrelatedly, the Los Angeles Times notes that the defendant represented “the perfect picture of what the well-dressed man should wear”. For her part, the leading lady arrives having undergone a Cinderella-like transformation from the broken woman pictured in my sunroom into the most fashionable of flappers. When Dorothy passes Paul’s chair, she grazes her hand across his back, and it is this tiny gesture that will fill the next day’s headlines.

The trial proper commences with the testimony of the Los Angeles county coroner. Dr Wagner attests to having found multiple contusions on Ray’s body, a black eye, fractured ribs and a large subdural haemorrhage, a collection of blood between the brain and the skull. This subdural haemorrhage, Wagner states, was the direct cause of Ray’s death, but the jury must decide what caused the haemorrhage itself. Wagner notes that the most common cause of subdural haemorrhage is blunt head trauma, but acknowledges that it may rarely occur for other reasons, too.

The trial’s third day falls on Friday 13 May and is as bad for Paul as the date portends, for the prosecution now reveals its trump card: letters and telegrams exchanged between Dorothy and Paul. The prosecution makes Dorothy read aloud from these telegrams, as if she is a 13-year-old caught passing notes in class. At first, Dorothy is reluctant but, seemingly recalling that an actor’s first duty is always to her audience, she soon warms to her task. “I love you,” finishes one telegram from Paul to Dorothy; “Love and everything that goes with it,” she replies to him, signing it “E Mrs K”. Asked by the prosecution what this phrase means, Dorothy explains it is their private code for “Elegant Mrs Kelly”.

Paul seems headed straight for the hangman’s noose when the defence calls two final experts: Drs Anton and Boheme. These doctors argue that Wagner’s autopsy had revealed signs of chronic alcoholism and, as the liver manufactures proteins essential to blood clotting, alcoholics tend to bleed easily. Anton and Boheme suggest that, even if the bleeding around Ray’s brain had been precipitated by Paul’s fists, it persisted only because the damage Ray had himself done to his liver meant his blood could no longer properly clot.

After 10 days of evidence, the jury retires to consider its verdict. Paul is returned to the county jail where he has spent the past weeks, but Dorothy returns to Cheremoya Avenue to await news.

The jury is deadlocked. Six want to send Paul to the hangman, two want to acquit him, and the other four would vote for limbo if they could. Eventually, the jury asks to review Wagner’s testimony. His acknowledgment that subdural haemorrhage can have causes other than trauma seems to save Paul’s life: after reviewing Wagner’s evidence, the jury finds Paul guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter. Judge Bunnell sentences Paul to one to five years in state prison, with the added stipulation that he may not marry for 18 months after his release.

A few weeks later, Dorothy’s own trial commences. In the interim, Dorothy and her lawyers have rewritten her lines and now use her testimony to paint a picture of a bohemian yet blissful married life. Under cross-examination, she claims that on the night of the assault she and Ray stayed up until 3am, putting everything right between the two of them. She then boldly attempts to convince the court that, even if she had been having an affair with Paul, Ray would not have minded: “Hollywood is different,” she says to them. “We accept violations of convention because it is all right for us – that is, professional people are less conventional, more sophisticated.”

If informing your jury they are conventional rubes who simply cannot fathom your incredible sophistication seems a bad idea, the routine misogyny of the day may have anyway already doomed Dorothy. As if keen to make this point himself, district attorney George Kemp finishes his closing speech by declaring: “This woman has no conscience. She has wrecked the lives of three men, Ray Raymond, who is in the grave, Paul Kelly, who faces a penitentiary term, and Dr Walter Sullivan, whose professional career has been ruined.”

According to the prosecuting DA, the true villain was not the man who had struck the fatal blow, nor the man who had drunk enough to destroy his own liver, nor the man who had abused his professional position to cover up a murder. No, the real culprit was the woman who had loved both men, had not been present at the fight, and had been at most a conduit in the bribery scheme. Apparently in agreement, the jury convicts Dorothy of being an accessory to murder, and Judge Bunnell sentences her to one to three years. The case against Sullivan is later quietly dropped.

On 29 February 1928, Dorothy is escorted to Union Station to begin her journey north to San Quentin. “No more pictures,” she sighs to the waiting photographers. “I’ve had enough of publicity, and I’d like to take this last journey without advertising the fact of my destination.”

But Dorothy Mackaye is incapable of staying maudlin or even out of sight for long. A headline on the next day’s Los Angeles Times runs “Actress Enters San Quentin With Smile” and the accompanying article recounts how Dorothy spent the ferry ride from Richmond to San Quentin dancing the foxtrot with journalists to the music from a nickel piano in the ferry’s bar. Alighting on the San Quentin prison dock, Dorothy then turned and called out to the press pack a phrase that might have been her mantra, “Leave ’em smiling!”

Act Three

At San Quentin, Dorothy and Paul serve their sentences without ever seeing one another, but their enforced separation does not dim their mutual affection. On her release on New Year’s Day 1929, Dorothy gives an interview in which she proclaims not only her own innocence, but also Paul’s. Incarceration has clearly not cramped her style, for the journalist notes in his write-up that Dorothy was “driven away in a roadster by a dapper youth”.

Six short weeks later, Dorothy is back where she belongs: on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. Under the headline “Actress Wants New Cue”, Dorothy announces that she will be reprising her role in The Dove and earnestly pledges that from now on she will live only for her stage career, and also her daughter, Valerie.

Paul is released from San Quentin eight months after Dorothy. Soon it is his turn to be back on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, with an announcement that he has landed the leading man’s role in The Nine-Fifteen Revue on Broadway. A parole condition means that he will be the lowest-paid leading man in Broadway history, but Paul has other things on his mind: 10 days after the judge’s injunction on him marrying expires, he and Dorothy are married in New York City.

A year later, Paul even adopts Valerie, the little girl who witnessed him beat her father to death. When I tell people this part of the story, they often ask if Valerie could have been Paul’s daughter all along, but I do not think so. Valerie herself grew up to be a musical theatre actor, even appearing in the original Broadway production of South Pacific, so she seems to have inherited Ray’s song-and-dance genes.

The 1930s prove a golden decade for the Kellys. Paul lands a leading-man contract at Universal, and Dorothy sells a play based on her prison experiences that is swiftly filmed as the movie Ladies They Talk About. Now when the Kellys appear in the papers, it is for spending New Year’s Day at Ginger Rogers’ party.

In 1936, the elegant Mr and Mrs Kelly purchase a farm in Santa Clarita, at that time a rural town 30 miles from Los Angeles. They raise horses, chickens, alfalfa and Valerie. They even sponsor a nationwide contest to name Paul’s favourite horse. The shortlisted names are attached to sugar cubes, and placed in a sombrero. The winner, picked out by the horse itself, is “Miss Mackaye”.

Dorothy, Paul and Valerie living out their days with a horse named “Miss Mackaye” should be our happily-ever-after ending. In the Technicolor movie of these events, the orchestral music would swirl here, and then the credits would roll. But life is not the movies, and the real version of the story has a disquieting coda.

Dorothy, now 40, is driving home to the farm on a foggy evening in early January when she flips her car in a single vehicle accident. She appears unscathed, but her doctor insists on admitting her to hospital for observation. There, on the third day – coincidentally the same interval after which Ray succumbed to his injuries – Dorothy abruptly dies of a ruptured bladder.

Paul never speaks publicly about Dorothy’s death, but in the US census taken later that year, he lists his profession not as “Actor” but “Alfalfa Farmer”. I read this as a quiet protest not so much against his profession but rather the neverending drama of his own life. Alfalfa farmers, after all, rarely go to jail and their wives generally do not die in newsworthy accidents.

A year later, Paul marries again. His new bride, Claire Owen, is a bit-part player he met on the set of one of the films he has in fact continued to work on. Nonetheless, when Paul fills out his draft registration card two years later, he does not list Claire’s name under “Next of Kin”, nor even Valerie’s. Instead he puts his agent. Maybe this is pragmatism or even a joke: actors are forever complaining about their agents failing to return their calls, so setting them up for the one call they could not possibly avoid returning would not be without humour.

Or perhaps Paul truly means it, for with Dorothy dead, his work has indeed become his only lifelong companion. He began acting as an eight-year-old, won the Tony award in 1948 despite a manslaughter conviction, and will still have his boots on when he dies of a heart attack in Beverly Hills at the age of 57.

Epilogue

People often tell me it must be creepy to live where an infamous murder took place, but I find the opposite to be true. My trio of benign ghosts do not haunt me but keep me company, and each time I look up from my work, I see them. I mean that literally, for I keep their photographs pinned above my desk: the pale, sad Ray, the broodingly handsome Paul, and Dorothy, 19 years old and dressed in a kimono for Cosmopolitan magazine.

Working in writerly solitude and seeing their faces dozens of times a day, I begin to wonder what their voices sound like and, later, what they might use those voices to say. Perhaps inevitably, at some point I imagine I begin to hear them, too.

Mostly, my ghosts do not like to talk about the long-ago events of 1927. If the subject comes up, Paul mumbles an apology and Ray reassures him it was all a long time ago now. After that, a silence falls and then, in a surprisingly convincing Scottish accent, Dorothy declares that “today’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappers”.

What they do very much like to talk about is the industry. Little has changed in Hollywood in a century, and each time I am short-changed, badly rewritten or cheated out of a credit, they rally round to remind me that nobody ever called it “showfriends”. More than anything, though, like everyone else here in Hollywood, my ghosts love to give me notes on my work.

Ray, generally, believes everything can and should be livened up by the addition of a musical number. Each time I tell him that not every story can be a musical, Ray responds that is exactly what they said about Hamilton. For his part, Paul thinks the reason the movies are currently struggling is because these days they contain too many sensitive men. Of course, forever talking over them both, is Dorothy. She likes to tell me that the rights to remake her play are available, and wouldn’t today’s audiences just be fascinated to learn what goes on inside a women’s prison? When I inform her about the existence of Orange Is the New Black, she pretends not to hear.

Still, Dorothy has other, more important advice to give. Maybe we have come a long way from little wives who know little about cocktails, but she believes there are still nowhere near enough parts for strong, complicated women. Right as she is, Dorothy also believes the only way to truly address this shortfall is with a Dorothy Mackaye biopic, and perhaps even a series of them. She would ideally prefer Emma Stone play her, or perhaps Lady Gaga if Ms Stone is indisposed. It would, Dorothy says, have it all: love, fame, tragedy, entirely accidental homicide, yuks-a-plenty, and even a few song-and-dance numbers. Such a film, she tells me, would make the audience laugh and clap and weep, but better even than that, it would leave ’em smiling, and who would not wish to be remembered like that?