I defy you to find a writer, a good writer, living or dead, who has talked about money as incessantly and with as much impenitent relish as John Gregory Dunne. He lived, it seems, for the grubby little details: flip through his interviews and you’ll discover a recitation of dollar figures, buyout clauses, basis points. The man rattles off contract terms as a priest recalls the catechism. Here are some snippets from a 1996 interview ostensibly on the “art of screenwriting”:

He paid off our contract at forty cents on the dollar…. To our amazement it sold to some studio, I think it was CBS, which paid us fifty thousand dollars…. We’ve written twenty-three books between us and movies financed nineteen out of the twenty-three…. Six figures a week if you’re any good, hundred grand at the minimum…. Look. It pays a lot and it’s fun.

It does sound like fun.

In Dunne’s actual work—that is, the novels, memoirs, and reported yarns he “financed” by writing movies with his wife, Joan Didion—a great deal of the fun has to do with his exquisite sensitivity to such base particulars. He was a writer of high taste who delighted in the distasteful, an arch and erudite stylist with the gutter-bound soul of a tabloid hack. Reading him is a bit like walking into a mahogany-paneled library only to find smut on the shelves and shag carpet under your feet. Like any worthy gossip he was known to launch into conversations with the phrase “This you will not believe.” And it wasn’t just about money: as a reporter, his other most abiding subjects were the murky, byzantine maneuvers by which people go about getting famous, getting laid, and getting arrested. “I am drawn to the Santa Monica Courthouse,” he confessed, “the way some people are drawn to church.”

Sometimes, if the fates and the whims of magazine editors aligned, he got to cover all those subjects at once—as when, in 1994, he wrote in these pages about the case of O.J. Simpson. He seems to have been less interested in the murders themselves than in what people said about them, in “the facts, the factoids, the allegations, the half-truths, the untruths, the leaks, the smears.” He wanted the jokes, especially the bad ones: “Did you hear that O.J.’s signed a new contract with Hertz… he’s going to be making license plates for them…. The bad news is O.J.’s going to prison, the good news is that Michael Jackson’s taking the kids.” Most of all, he wanted to know who was getting in on the action, and how. Whatever happened inside the courtroom was less revealing, and less delicious, than the fact that a recent girlfriend of O.J.’s had “parlayed her affair with Simpson into a photo feature in the October Playboy,” or that executives at Universal Pictures had plastered an eighteen-wheeler truck with an ad for their latest superhero flick, The Shadow, and parked it outside the courthouse, where it would be sure to appear in the background of all the news coverage. As one executive put it, “What’s a studio to do when they’ve got close to 100 million viewers watching?”

It’s an odd, at times disturbing piece of writing. Dunne has little sympathy for the victims; his fascination with all manner of sleaziness was so totalizing that it could come at the expense of simple decency. But the essay’s failings are revealing in their own way: in Dunne’s telling, the O.J. story was less a tragedy than a farce, and its central, bumbling villains were not the murderer and his entourage but the reporters—himself included—who descended to get it all in print. He found their instincts dubious, to say nothing of their intentions. Before the night of June 12, 1994, he observed, Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown had been “characters of considerable and ambiguous particularity.” That is, they had not spent their painful, messy lives trying to make their deaths an intelligible event. But when one of the most famous men in America was arrested in connection with their murders, “all three lost whatever identity they had in the frantic search to find some larger meaning that would explain the crime,” Dunne wrote. “The story demanded a moral: youth wasted, promise denied, spousal abuse, domestic violence, the race card,” and this the reporters were happy to provide. The story and its moral came together not in the courtroom but in the conversations they had with one another, or with their editors, in bars or restaurants or on the phone after the workday was over, when they could spend their time “refining and polishing a story by accretion, a narrative that may or may not tell the story of what actually happened.”

It’s an idea that shows up often in Dunne’s work and that, in previous decades, had animated some of the best of it: the suspicion that, if you were to examine the soul of a reporter—even one less partial to prurient fare than Dunne—you would find that telling “the story of what actually happened” did not quite number among his highest priorities. The trueborn reporter will keep a little side action going. His darker purpose could be financial, as in most professions; it could be aesthetic; it could be ideological, as Dunne discovered during the five years he spent in the early 1960s working at Time, a magazine he later described as lacking any “pretense to objectivity,” particularly on the subject of Vietnam. Or it could be personal—as I suspect it was for Dunne in the early 1970s, when he traveled to Las Vegas with a plan to spend the summer slumming among its seedier denizens and writing a portrait of the city. He came back instead with Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, which in his typical furtive fashion reads more like a portrait of himself.

Dunne was born in 1932, the fifth of six children, in Hartford, Connecticut. The family was Irish Catholic—not “lace-curtain Irish,” as Dunne was apparently quick to remind people, but “boarding-school Irish.” There’s a whole world in that bit of hairsplitting. The smirkingly vague term upper-middle-class, which is usually just an uptown way of saying pretty rich, was for the Dunnes precisely fitting: “upper” because they were snobs, “middle” because they were strivers, all too aware of their place a rung or two below the country’s true aristocrats, the WASPs. The dream of upward mobility is like a gold thread glinting through their family line, starting with the immigrant grandfather—who, Dunne wrote, arrived as “an unlettered child of twelve out from belowdecks and the ould sod” and “died seventy years later, rich and revered”—and running through to Dunne and his siblings, a brood he succinctly describes as “Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Williams, Republican, Cotillion, Junior League and Bachelors’ Club.” (For such a family, even religion was just another prudent investment, a form of “making time payments on a special-fare ticket to the Big Vacation in the Sky.”) Dunne evidently strolled his way into Princeton; in answer to an application question asking why he wished to attend, he wrote, with patrician brevity, “To make contacts for later life.” After graduating in 1954, he served two years in the US Army, stationed in Germany. This, too, was an education. “It was in the army that I learned to appreciate whores,” he later reflected to an interviewer. “You didn’t meet many Vassar girls.”

But there were plenty of Vassar girls back in New York, which is how Dunne eventually landed at Time. In his account of this little conspiracy you can practically hear the chorus of “Old Nassau” trumpeting faintly in the background:

I got my job because a woman I was seeing on the sly, Vassar ’57, was also seeing George J.W. Goodman, Harvard ’52, a writer in Time’s business section…. Goodman, I was informed by Vassar ’57, was leaving Time for Fortune, which meant that if I moved fast there was probably a job open. I applied to Time’s personnel man, a friend, Yale ’49, and was in due course interviewed by Otto Fuerbringer, Harvard ’32.

After five years he quit the magazine and married Joan Didion, which was possibly the best decision an ambitious young writer and high-society aspirant could have made in the year 1964.

Some six years later, though, he entered the “dark season” of Vegas’s subtitle. It was “the summer of my nervous breakdown,” he writes in the book’s opening lines. He was thirty-seven and had published two books, one on a California grape farmers’ strike and another on the corporate machinations of 20th Century Fox. That summer, he found himself overtaken by a creeping, directionless despair. His marriage was fraying, his career had stalled. Death obsessed him. He’d grown “atavistic” and “clinically detached,” Didion informed him, which seems an accurate description if also surely an instance of the pot diagnosing the kettle. Household relations had been reduced to the bloodless exchange of petty barbs: “I said that living with her was like living with one piranha fish. She said dealings with women aged people.” Dunne took to spending his days driving aimlessly, adrift along the California freeways. On one such drive he passed a billboard that (with a “Delphic absence of apostrophe”) read “VISIT LAS VEGAS BEFORE YOUR NUMBERS UP,” and decided to do just that.

Strictly speaking, Vegas is—or rather, when first published in 1974, it was marketed as—a novel. That doesn’t mean the details above aren’t true. The book perches uneasily somewhere between fiction and fact, and with greater ambiguity than what we now refer to as autofiction; the presence of the word “memoir” on the cover gives a sense of how hard Dunne is straining to have it both ways. Itbegins with a twisty disclaimer to this effect—“This is a fiction which recalls a time both real and imagined…. I am more or less ‘I,’ he and she less than more he and she”—and closes with one, too: “What you have read is a myelogram of six months of my life. I can offer no guarantee that everything you read actually happened, only that insofar as it was perceived by my fractured sensors it was true.” You could interpret this as Dunne’s attempt at a cute metafictional stunt or a sure way to dispense with pesky concerns like fact-checking and libel law. Or, if you’re feeling indulgent: he’s asking for the same license you might grant a friend with a funny story—license to pad it out with a touch of bullshit.

Las Vegas runs on bullshit, so there’s something fitting in this approach. Shortly after arriving, Dunne holes up in a shabby apartment off the Strip and sets about looking for “local color.” This mostly involves trolling the phone book in the middle of the night in search of conversation. The nice thing about reporting is that, as long as you take notes, almost anything counts: “I talked for hours on the telephone, mainly to kill time, but also to encourage the self-delusion that I was working, that I was getting a feel of the community.” As the weeks wear uneventfully on, it becomes clear that by “the community” he means just about anybody with something on their mind.

What’s on their mind turns out to be pretty consistent. Dice salesmen, exterminators, contraceptive wholesalers, bail bondsmen, toupee stylists, bookies, bellhops, pimps: they all want to talk about money, who has it and who doesn’t, and what you can buy with it, and how to get more of it right now. Dunne haunts the city’s health clubs and steam rooms, eavesdropping on “the dialogue of the used-car tycoon and the parking-lot mogul.”

Vegas is not a book with anything at all resembling a plot; he’s less interested in narrative or a grand thesis than he is in easygoing conversations, passing remarks, stray glimpses of ordinary lives, which gives the book a sort of charmingly unkempt quality. Not much happens, but that may be because, unlike most visitors to Las Vegas, Dunne doesn’t gamble and isn’t interested in the mob. As ever, though, he displays an unfailing ear for how people talk about the mob, how it seeps into their talk about money:

“He had once run some parking lots in Cleveland and was very well connected.”

“What do you mean ‘well connected’?”

“He knows some people.”

“What people?”

“Guessssss,” was the irritated reply, the all-purpose Vegas reply when someone wished to imply a connection with the People.

What this all adds up to, apparently, is “the genuine Vegas,” according to one reviewer. I’m not qualified to weigh in on that, but I can say that Dunne succeeds in conveying the uncanny beauty and desolation of the place, as well as its prevailing atmosphere of sexual conspiracy and dread. The Strip seems to him an “idiot Disneyland,” and this suits his purposes just fine; he’s there to capture “the mosaic of petty treasons that decorate small lives,” largely by listening to men “who looked like sun-tanned liver marks, all cardigan sweaters and pinky rings,” and jotting down quotes about how they cheat on their wives. In the midst of all of this, it seems that Dunne found something about the city strangely soothing—its transience and uniformity, the feeling that people there were living not in the moment but in the long aftermath of whatever the moment had been. Which is another way of saying: they were living in the Seventies.

Dunne’s focus eventually settles on a few figures. There’s Buster Mano, a private detective whose favored topics of conversation include his ongoing case of constipation and the life of Martin Luther, the latter because he’s learned that Luther, too, was constipated; a sex worker named, implausibly, Artha Ging, whose friendship Dunne enjoys in part “out of some residual Catholic impression that as long as one did not handle the merchandise, one was committing only a venial and not a mortal sin”; and Jackie Kasey, a hapless, quick-talking, lizardy lounge comic with a casino contract, as Dunne repeatedly notes, for $10,000 a week. Each has a distinct appeal. Buster lets Dunne ride along on his investigations into unpaid gambling debts. Artha satisfies, by way of hard numbers, this married man’s curiosity about “what else was on tap”:

She had turned 1,203 tricks with 1,076 different johns…. She had been whipped professionally eleven times and in turn had strapped tricks with a belt twenty-three times and with a horsewhip once. The masochists generally had preferred to get whipped around the genitals, the sadists to whip her buttocks. One client had paid her three hundred dollars to clip off her pubic hair, which he then put in a Mason jar; she never saw him again.

But it’s with Jackie that Dunne spends the bulk of his time. The two seem genuinely to like each other’s company. Together they take some steam, flirt with waitresses, workshop Jackie’s new act—and it’s through these scenes that we come to understand the shadier side of what Dunne is up to. Jackie’s an awful comic, Dunne knows, and that $10,000 a week will surely dry up soon. But it’s this sad fact that also makes him “a great character, a character to be cultivated like a rare orchid,” he writes. “And so I nurtured him, exchanging confidences, opening doors into the darkest alcoves of my life, creating in him a trust I knew I would ultimately violate. He became expansive, opened up; I took notes and felt badly about it.”

Maybe he really does feel badly, but the feeling doesn’t last very long. I get the sense that, for Dunne, the point of doing this work is precisely the opposite. The point is to feel better. “There is a therapeutic aspect to reporting that few like to admit,” he writes. “Reporting anesthetizes one’s own problems.” By the time he’s been in Vegas for a few months, it’s become clear that hanging out with Jackie and Artha and Buster is not so much a respectable professional undertaking as a sort of errant compulsion, a vice not unlike gambling or placing obscene phone calls to strangers.

And it’s this, I think, that Dunneis really after in the book, and what finally makes it more than just another plotless novel or confessional memoir: the notion that a reporter like him should be thought of not as a detached observer, or as a civic-minded truth teller, or even as an extractive careerist, but as a shambling, superfluous figure who goes “scavenging through the bureau drawers of men’s lives, searching for the minor vice, the half-forgotten lapse.” Here is a way, Dunne seems to think, of fending off the clamor and threat of real life, real intimacies. There’s something of the garden-variety New Journalist in this, to be sure, but unlike his more gonzo contemporaries Dunne is not so bent on getting where the action is or even on filing a good story. He has come to town for his own gratification. What he wants is “absolution through voyeurism.”

Though he doesn’t quite find absolution in Las Vegas, he does claim to arrive, in the end, at “a kind of peace”: “There in that Genet vision of hell my own version seemed tolerable.” In any case, he runs out of excuses for being there—he has a life to get back to, scripts to doctor, parties to attend. A wife, a child. Most importantly, he’s got plenty of material to work with. “The pieces were back together,” he writes in the book’s final line, “and in the fall I went home.” Translation: in the fall he went home, wrote a book, and sold it to Random House. They paid him $30,000.