ANOTHER book about Frank Sinatra? Given his fame and his age, that's hardly surprising. At 82, he's past the September of his years; the end, presumably, is reasonably nigh and he faces the final curtain; the ambulance-chasing has probably already begun.
However, this contribution to the premature wake has at least one major virtue. Despite the mordant promise of the title, which suggests another Kitty Kelley-esque rummage through the flotsam and jetsam of his ultimately depressing private life, it is likely to please those who believe that the most important thing about Sinatra is the fact that he sang - not that he bedded Ava Gardner or was caught rubbing Romanesque noses with the Mafia.
This is because Clarke is a music business aficionado; he knows the art of the business and the business of the art, in much the same way that a Manchester United fanatic can recount, in great detail, the difference between Eric Cantona and a kung fu artist. In other words, he can savour the genius and relegate the rest to where, for the fans, it really belongs.
Not that Clarke is entirely immune to Sinatra's lifelong penchant for mixing generosity with, to quote Charles Lamb, "a bitterness beyond aloes". There's some redundant psychobabble about the Voice's humble origins in Hoboken, New Jersey, the influence of his unscrupulous mother and her emotional gelding of his father, as well as often fatuous generalisations about American society. As a social commentator, Clarke isn't on a par with, say, Otto Friedrich, whose City of Nets, a history of Hollywood from 1940 to 1950, is also a marvellously detailed history of life in America during the same decade.
The point is important. Sinatra was, as Clarke realises, as much a product of his time as anything that came out of Hollywood. His emergence, in the late 1930s, with the big bands of firstly Harry James and then Tommy Dorsey, was both a social and an artistic phenomenon. And as teenaged girls rioted, screamed, wept and were bedded by the new idol, he saw that singers were replacing the big bands as pop stars and bought himself out of the contractual stranglehold Dorsey had on him.
For Sinatra it was a career move, not an artistic one. That came later, when - with the benefit of good arrangers like Axel Stordahl and George Siravo in the 1940s and, above all, Nelson Riddle in the 1950s - he had a better sense of what he was about as a singer. The recorded evidence is there for all to hear and Clarke is a knowledgeable guide through the best - and the worst - of it. He knows what Sinatra did to rewrite the book for popular singers and make himself one for the ages, and he knows the rubbish the great singer also chose to sing; for gems like One for My Baby, What's New? or In the Wee Small Hours, doing it his way also included such paste as The House We Live In, High Hopes, Strangers in the Night and the sublimely awful duets of recent years.
The mystery is how such artistic extremes could co-exist in one artist; how could he refine the art of singing popular song into something which, at its best, became a kind of transcendental urban poetry, yet also associate himself with musical effluent?
Partly it must have been chance. He was lucky in the songs he grew to maturity with, lucky in his arrangers. He was blessed in what he could do with the right material and he worked hard at his craft. Yet, as Clarke's solid accumulation of the facts of his recording career irrefutably demonstrates, he could be - and often was - embarrassingly innocent of taste, more frequently as he grew older and the quality of new material declined.
That penchant for undiscriminating choice was mirrored in his private life, which embraced both the Mafia and the Murphyia, the Gambinis and the Kennedys, the Wasps and the immigrant parvenus, the Nixons and the Spiro Agnews, the Democrats and the Republicans. Sinatra, as man and artist, is a mass of contradictions impossible to reconcile.
Clarke doesn't provide a decent attempt at an answer. What he does offer is something much more important - a reliable, well-informed Baedeker's guide to the music. His assessments are soundly based; if there are no fresh insights into either the man, his art or the milieu from which it developed and flourished, Sinatra. fans should nevertheless find it a solid basis for what really matters - the singer and the song.