BOOKS: L.A. CONFIDENTIAL

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Why didn't the prosecution introduce the freeway chase! Why didn't the prosecution introduce the freeway chase!" Dominick Dunne pounds the arm of a green damask sofa in his Manhattan apartment. It is the morning of what happens to be his 72nd birthday, and Dunne is talking about the O.J. Simpson trial with as much anger as if the verdict had been announced that day, not 2 1/2 years earlier. He goes on: "How could Marcia have been flirting with Cochran? What kind of message does that send to the jury?"

Imagine the best O.J. conversation you've ever had--and since you've probably had several thousand of them, this is saying something--and you'll have an idea what it's like talking to Dunne. The author of best-selling romans a clef about murder like The Two Mrs. Grenvilles and An Inconvenient Woman, Dunne became renowned for his coverage of the Claus von Bulow, William Kennedy Smith and Menendez brothers trials. He sat in the Simpson courtroom from the first day to the last, and each month produced a savvy, pungent report for Vanity Fair. Appearing endlessly on TV, he became an O.J. celebrity himself. Now, trailing even Simpson's niece, Dunne has finally produced his own O.J. book, Another City, Not My Own. Coyly subtitled A Novel in the Form of a Memoir, it is an almost entirely factual account of Dunne's experience covering the trial.

Using real names for everyone but himself, his family and a few others, Dunne brings on the familiar cast--Clark, Cochran, Bailey, Ito. Yet we also meet another set of characters--the rich and the celebrated with whom he socialized during the trial. On and on, the names pulse through the book: the Princess of Wales, Elizabeth Taylor, Nancy Reagan, Warren Beatty--each one desperate for Dunne to tell him or her the latest news from the courthouse. Part O.J. reportage and part gossip column, Another City, Not My Own also tells the story of Dunne's personal tragedies and redemption. Los Angeles was the scene of the strangulation of his 22-year-old daughter Dominique at the hands of an abusive boyfriend in 1982. It was also the city that he left years ago, a failed producer, an alcoholic and broke.

"I tried to write the book five different ways," Dunne says. "That's why it's so late. Then when I would talk about it, I would say, 'I was having dinner with Marcia Clark...' and people responded. I got the idea of telling my story." Excitable, charming, with a voice like Jack Benny's, Dunne sometimes sits on the sofa's edge as he talks. His pied-a-terre (he mostly lives in Connecticut) is decorated in the conventional style of an East Side gentleman, complete with bird prints on the wall. Asked why he called the hero Gus Bailey, Dunne says, "Gus is me, but I needed to get one step away. I tried using my name, and it inhibited me." The only important fabrications are appearances by Gianni Versace's murderer-to-be, Andrew Cunanan.