Dominick Dunne Books in Order

If you want the classic society scandal novel: The Two Mrs. Grenvilles → An Inconvenient Woman → People Like Us
If you want Gus Bailey's insider view: People Like Us → Another City, Not My Own → Too Much Money
If you want courtroom heat and family secrets: A Season in Purgatory → Justice
If you want Dunne's own story: The Way We Lived Then → Fatal Charms and Other Tales of Today → Mansions of Limbo

Dominick Dunne was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1925 and grew up in nearby West Hartford in a wealthy Irish Catholic family. He later wrote and spoke about feeling like an outsider there, even with money and social standing around him. That mix of access and distance stayed with him, and it helped shape the sharp, watchful way he wrote about class, power, and the people who think rules are for somebody else.

World War II came first. Dunne served in the Army, saw combat in Europe, and received a Bronze Star. After the war he graduated from Williams College, moved to New York, and found work in early television as a stage manager on shows like Howdy Doody and Robert Montgomery Presents. Live TV suited him. It was fast, messy, social, and full of nerves.

Hollywood followed.

In Los Angeles, Dunne worked in television and then film, producing projects such as The Boys in the Band, The Panic in Needle Park, and Play It as It Lays. He and his wife, Ellen Griffin, known as Lenny, raised their family in that world and became known for big parties and famous friends. For a while he seemed built for it, part host, part operator, part fascinated observer.

Then the life he had built started to come apart.

By the late 1970s, drinking and drug use had wrecked his career. Dunne left Hollywood, went to a cabin in Oregon, got sober, and began writing fiction in earnest. His first novel was The Winners, but the book that really announced him was The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, a rich-people murder story drawn from old American scandal. Readers who like Dunne tend to like the same thing he liked: beautiful rooms, ugly behavior, and the quiet knowledge that money can hide almost anything.

That became his territory. People Like Us and An Inconvenient Woman pick apart New York and Los Angeles society, where hostesses, lawyers, mistresses, fixers, and journalists all circle the same money. A Season in Purgatory goes darker, following a buried killing and a powerful family that assumes the past can be managed forever. Even when the plots are fictionalized, the pressure points are real: class anxiety, loyalty, humiliation, ambition, and the way a scandal moves from whispers at dinner to a courtroom.

Everything changed again in 1982, when his daughter Dominique was killed by her former boyfriend, John Sweeney. Dunne kept a journal during the trial, and that account became the piece that opened the door to his second career as a writer on crime and justice. From there he became a longtime special correspondent for Vanity Fair, covering the trials of Claus von Bulow, the Menendez brothers, O. J. Simpson, Michael Skakel, and others. The grief never left his work, but it gave it a harder moral edge.

He found a second act when most people would have folded.

Late in life, Dunne moved easily between genres. He wrote Another City, Not My Own, which uses his reporter's eye to turn the Simpson trial into a novel, and Justice, a collection of his true crime reporting. He also looked back in The Way We Lived Then, a memoir with photographs that is both gossipy and surprisingly frank about failure, addiction, and regret. In his last years he lived between Manhattan and Hadlyme, Connecticut, kept writing, and kept showing up for big trials. He died in 2009, not long after finishing Too Much Money, his final novel.