Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [1]
Roger Crumbler Considered His Shave
PART IV: THE GOLD COAST
SCOTT PHILLIPS Pacific Palisades
The Girl Who Kissed Barnaby Jones
BRIAN ASCALON ROLEY Mar Vista
Kinship
ROBERT FERRIGNO Belmont Shore
The Hour When the Ship Comes In
DIANA WAGMAN Westchester
What You See
About the Contributors
INTRODUCTION
CITY OF ANGELS & DEMONS
I write crime novels now, but for a decade before that I was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Although I’m a native, there are still places I don’t know and the landscape changes at such warp speed that it’s impossible to keep up. Journalism gave me a passport to excavate the city’s layers, nose behind the scenes, and interview everyone who wanted to talk and many who didn’t.
Walking into the newsroom each morning, I never knew whether I’d face a triple homicide at South Pasadena High, a celebrity stalking in Malibu, or a brown bear that lumbered down from the San Gabriel Mountains to splash in someone’s pool. The city was mythic and alive, pulsing with a thousand short stories unfolding all at once, tales of heartbreak and triumph, survival despite incredible odds and tragedy so horrifying it could have come straight from the ancient Greeks.
Each night when I got home, the voices of Los Angeles played like a broken tape loop in my brain. As time passed, I began to yearn to tell these stories unfettered by the constraints of journalism. Eventually I left the paper and started writing fiction. And if my books have a noir sensibility, well, it’s a long and hallowed tradition among the city’s writers. L.A.’s just a noir place.
So when Akashic Books publisher Johnny Temple asked if I’d be willing to edit an anthology of new fiction called Los Angeles Noir as part of the Akashic Noir Series, my first thought was that it was a great idea but surely someone had already done it. To my surprise, no one had. There’s a tabloid photo book with that title and a noir cinema book. But what you hold in your hands is the first collection of Los Angeles noir fiction that we know of.
I think you’ll agree that it’s about time. Los Angeles is the birthplace of all things noir, starting with the Depression and World War II—era films that oozed an edgy fatalism and sexy recklessness mirroring the social anxiety of the times. Many of film noir’s architects were refugees from Hitler’s Europe, steeped in Expressionism and existential despair, and they brought that sensibility to the shadows, silhouettes, urban labyrinths, and hard-boiled plots of their movies. Over time, this narrative style infiltrated our waking lives and even our dreams, helping to define how we see the city and to shape the stories we tell about ourselves.
More than a half-century later, Hollywood continues to cast a giant shadow. Maybe it’s the seductive blur of artifice and reality, the possibility of shucking off the past like last year’s frock and reinventing yourself beyond your wildest dreams. Maybe it’s the desperation that descends when the dream goes sour, the duplicity that lurks behind the beauty, the rot of the jungle flowers, the riptides off the sugar sand beaches that carry away the unwary.
Writers like James Cain, Dorothy B. Hughes, Nathanael West, Chester Himes, and Raymond Chandler understood both the hope and the terror that Los Angeles inspires, and they harnessed this duality to create their masterpieces. Hollywood, always a dowsing rod of the culture, reflected it back to the world through film. Even essayists from Carey McWilliams to Joan Didion to Mike Davis gave us prose about Los Angeles that’s shot through with noir imagery. When you consider the earthquakes, the fires, the mud slides, the riots, the poverty, the glamour, the wealth, the crime, the crackpots, the cults, the gangs, the scandals, perhaps it’s inevitable.
Of course, Los Angeles has changed beyond recognition since Philip Marlowe stalked the mean streets. Today’s suburbs were orange groves in Chandler’s day, and many of the ethnic enclaves that make the city such a vibrant Pacific Rim megalopolis hadn’t yet taken root. But the noir essence