Reading Dominick Dunne is such a guilty pleasure, if pleasure be the word. The Vanity Fair columnist, social-observer and international gadfly defies parody. Better writers than I have tried and failed to capture the circular essence of his column but it is as difficult to get a hold of as the worm Ouroboros. In the beginning is his end, and vice versa.

It could be Dunne’s proximity to the world he covers that makes his prose so Escher-like. “I met Phil at a party given by Ahmet Ertegun,” is a typical pullquote in his August column covering the trial of Phil Spector, accused of murdering a Hollywood hostess named Lana Clarkson, and that is just a small sample of the name-dropping for which the author is famous. Sprinkled throughout his trial dispatch are first-hand encounters with Yoko Ono, Mick Jagger, Bruce Cutler and a host of lesser lights.

But it is those lesser lights who really distinguish his reporting. Take this not atypical encounter: “One night during the trial I had dinner at a popular restaurant on Sunset Strip,” he writes. “A very pretty waitress named Crystal Angel took me to my table. A few minutes later, during a lull in her duties, she came and sat down with me. She told me she had been a friend of Lana Clarkson’s…”

It is that upstairs-downstairs stuff that really sets Dunne apart. Waiters, bell hops and chauffeurs are always taking him aside to tell him the dish. This one, at least, had a name — though Crystal Angel is probably as common in West LA as Marty Kaplan is in New York, and not just among transvestites. (It is redundant to add that waitresses such as Angel are also actresses, as was Clarkson, and doubly redundant to say they changed their names.) No one doubts these encounters really happened — though I’m sure his off-the-record, gossip-laden style gives the fact-checkers at VF fits — which is a testament to the profile of the man himself.

What makes the pleasure of reading him so maddening is the absence of context, and sometimes even judgment. Dunne’s daughter was murdered by a stalker ex-boyfriend, and in writiing about his trial he found his metier. He later burnished his skills covering the endless OJ trial and even hosts a slightly lame celebrity injustice show on Court TV. He calls himself a defender of victim’s rights and comes by the stance naturally.

But by the end of the Spector column, the best he can muster is “I have never believed the defense’s story that Lana Clarkson committed suicide on the night she went to Phil’s castle.” This may have had something to do with the chauffeur in the driveway who heard the gunshot and saw Spector stagger out carrying a bloody pistol to announce, “I think I killed somebody.” Of course Dunne has to muster some objectivity and he has seen worse men than Spector walk away scot free. But in downplaying the story of the producer pulling a gun on John Lennon (Yoko tells Dunne, “Oh, that story has been exaggerated” and speaks of Phil with fondness) he neglects to mention the other people he famously frightened with firearms: Leonard Cohen, the Ramones, not to mention his much-abused ex-wife Ronnie Spector. Sometimes a little distance is needed to see things clearly, or at least tell which end is up.