Crookedville
by Gary Phillips
I drove over to Glendale to put three new truck drivers on a brewery company bond, and then I remembered this renewal over in Hollywoodland. I decided to run over there. That was how I came to this House of Death, that you’ve been reading about in the papers. It didn’t look like a House of Death when I saw it. It was just a Spanish house, like the rest of them in California, with white walls, red tile roof, and a patio off to one side.
So begins the first-person point-of-view of murderous insurance man Walter Neff in James M. Cain’s 1936 novella, Double Indemnity, first serialized in Liberty Magazine. L.A. has always been a great place for crime fiction writers. Something about the sunshine and date palms dotting our landscape contrasted with the dark corruption eating at the characters going about their wrongdoings beneath those trees.
Beginning in the thirties with the Great Depression, Los Angeles, and by extension the Southland, was the place you came to from somewhere else to start over; change your luck; reinvent yourself. It was Hollywoodland. Where better to reach for a dream if you’d gone bust as a feed salesman in Duluth or bar soap packer from Racine? The newsreels and papers were full of stories about singing waiters being discovered by a studio head or the secretary plucked from the pool to replace the ailing actress she just happens to look like. Such pap was the subject of some of those films the rubes were praying to break into.
Raymond Chandler, considered one of the architects of the modern detective novel, also made a nice living for a while as a screenwriter in Hollywood. One of his most successful films was an adaptation of Double Indemnity. Later in his life, in 1957, Chandler noted about Los Angeles, which had always been part of his novels and screenplays, “... the war has made it an industrial city, and the climate has been ruined partly by this and too much vegetation, too many lawns to be watered, and in a place that nature intended to be a semi-desert.”
He went on to write (from The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Non-Fiction, 1909-1959, edited by Tom Hinley and Frank MacShane):
Now it is humid, hot, sticky, and when the smog comes down into the bowl between mountains, which is Los Angeles, it is damn near intolerable. So naturally I look around for something else to write about. I can’t write about England [born in Chicago, he attended school in London and even worked for the British Admiralty’s Office of Munitions as a young man] until I feel England in my bones. Love is not enough.
While Chandler may have tired of Los Angeles, the city continues to be interpreted through different eyes and experiences.
“It was one of the mixed blocks over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all Negro.” So observed Chandler’s private eye Philip Marlowe in 1940’s Farewell, My Lovely. Marlowe as outsider to a portion of the city. But in Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, published in 1990, it’s told from the first person account of a black WWII vet, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins. He’s recently been let go from the aircraft factory he worked at. The story begins in 1948, with him sitting in a black watering hole on 103rd Street near Central Avenue in Watts. “I was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy’s bar.”
There’s a rich swath between Chandler’s farewell letter to L.A. and Mosley’s take on the city where the black migration had increased its African American population—refugees from hard times in the fields moving into those industries Chandler lamented from such places as Texas and Louisiana. For Easy Rawlins, unlike Marlowe, making his way across the post-war segregated city has the double danger of the reveals of his case and just being a black man in white areas.
Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels, occurring in that in-between time, were mostly set in a tony Santa Theresa, a stand-in for Santa Barbara, yet Archer lived in West L.A. in a utilitarian apartment he pretty much described as only a place to change his shirts. But some of the early and later Archer novels are set in and around Los Angeles. For instance 1951’s The Way Some People Die. “The house was in Santa Monica on a cross street between the boulevards, within earshot of the coast highway and rifleshot of the sea. The street was the kind that people had once been proud to live on, but in the last few years it had lost its claim to pride.”
There was the Japanese-American L.A. of Dale Furutani’s 1990s amateur sleuth Ken Tanaka, introduced in Death in Little Tokyo. Like Rawlins, Tanaka is newly unemployed, as he sets up fake PI office to solve a fake murder as part of the mystery club he belongs to. But his reflections have a ring of reality: “I’m forty-two, Mariko is in her mid-thirties, and like me she’s had a failed marriage Also like me, her first marriage was to a Caucasian. That’s a topic we’ve talked about many times with no good resolution.”
Like Macdonald’s novels, in which history is a fatal progenitor of current events, Lucha Gorpi’s Eulogy for a Brown Angel flashes back to a murder during East L.A.’s 1970 Chicano Moratorium march. Arthur Lyons’s overlooked Jacob Asch novels chronicled a bleached out La-La Land of junkies and pretenders, as in False Pretenses, where Asch is initially hunting down the missing doing conservatorships for the Superior Court. “I found the fugitive John McBride, in a Yum Yum Donuts on Vermont, consuming a glazed twist and coffee with what seemed to be great relish.”
Joseph Hansen, beginning in the ’70s, wrote the David Brandstetter books that revealed gay L.A. through the first person narration of its gay insurance claims investigator protagonist. The upright Brandstetter arrives full circle from the heterosexual and corruptible Walter Neff of several decades before.
John Shannon, Paula L. Woods, Gar Anthony Haywood (whose 1988 first novel, the award-wining Fear of the Dark, begins in South Central, “The white boy with the funny eye walked into the Acey Deuce on a Monday Night Football night.”), Naomi Hirahara, Denise Hamilton, Patricia Smiley, and on and on continue to depict their characters and situations set against the many neighborhoods and byways of the city, as Joan Didion commented, in denial of its own instability.
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