Los Angeles. The late 1940s. A young woman is brutally murdered and cruelly bisected, the two halves left out on wasteground like so much garbage. Investigating officer Tom Spellacy is slightly bent, has a wife in a mental hospital, a priest brother on the Catholic fast track, and a case which will have serious repercussions for them all.

John Gregory Dunne’s 1977 classic is long overdue the reissue treatment, not least for the strapped generation brought-up on nothing more than the 1981 Ulu Grosbard movie.

Scripted by Dunne and wife Joan Didion, it’s a good-looking but pedantic and bloodless piece, and returning to source we can see now just how much texture was sacrificed. (Spellacy’s wife is a critical loss.) What we have on screen is more straight murder mystery than Dunne’s epic, melancholic odyssey. There the flashback structure is lazy and contrived, here it broods with a terrible sense of doomed inevitability.

The novel also restores the humanity that the film so fatally jettisoned. Only on the page is the so-called Virgin Tramp given much more than just a name, allowed to be much more than just a McGuffin.

True Confessions is a rich, sad novel about looking back, about church duplicity, ambition and yes, ultimately, confession. The film found juicy parts for the Roberts Duvall and De Niro but didn’t know what to do with them. Dunne’s book seldom puts a foot wrong.