by Michael Mallory
Los Angeles has long emitted a siren song for writers of all stripes, particularly mystery authors and anyone concerned with the disparities of haves and have-nots, stars and nobodies, and the powerful and downtrodden. Given such a vast, contradictory, multi-tentacled megalopolis as L.A., and taking into account all of the writers who have attempted to plumb her depths, one has to ask: Is there such a thing as the Great Los Angeles Novel?
In short, no, there isn’t.
There are instead three Great Los Angeles Novels, all of them published within months of each other in 1939, and all written by transplanted Angelenos: Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep; Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, and John Fante’s Ask the Dust. At the age of 85, none of them has lost their power over readers as great stories or as depictions of a city like no other. And so many decades worth of evolution, the City of Angels is still eminently recognizable in all three. (Whether that’s a good or bad thing is open for debate.)
Of the three, The Big Sleep has ascended to the status of L.A.’s unofficial pre-war biography. Raymond Chandler’s version of Los Angeles is the real Los Angeles of that time, the one built up and out from oil fields. Any references to Hollywood in the book refer to the actual, physical place, not the metonymic movie capital. Through his narrator, private eye Philip Marlowe, Chandler provides a Google Earth image of the city without seeming to do so. Rather than writing paragraphs of descriptive prose, Chandler offers snippets of the city’s characteristics such through off-handed remarks as one character’s “[having] a smile as wide as Wilshire Boulevard.”
The notoriously convoluted plot (which inspired an even more convoluted film in 1946) was the combination of two of Chandler’s previously published short stories, “Killer in the Rain” (source of the A.G. Geiger blackmail subplot) and “Curtain” (the disappearance of Rusty Reagan). Both had appeared in Black Mask and featured powerful fathers struggling to control rebellious daughters. The L.A. of The Big Sleep is inhabited by the one percent: the wealthy, the powerful, the string-pullers, and the too-rich-to-jail class, who in turn are preyed upon by the city’s infrastructure of corruption, ranging from big-time racketeers to small-time blackmailers. At its core, The Big Sleep isn’t about power or ever murder, it’s about money.
Standing in stark contrast to that is Ask the Dusk, which is about the lack of money. The book’s narrator is Arturo Bandini, an alter ego for author John Fante himself, who comes to Los Angeles with nothing but his dreams of being a great writer. He can only afford to live in a run-down apartment on Bunker Hill while he pursues both his dreams of fame and a beautiful, but emotionally unstable Latina waitress.
Both The Big Sleep and Ask the Dust present the real Los Angeles; taken together, they span the city’s socio-economic range. The Day of the Locust, however, compensates for that by presenting a Los Angeles that is as genuinely real as a painted backdrop behind a Busby Berkeley musical number.
Nathanael West’s short novel is almost exclusively concerned with Tinseltown in its Golden Age, and tells a story that could not possibly be set anywhere else. The picture of Hollywood it offers is not that of a puffed-up article in a movie magazine. Instead it’s a snapshot of fake imagery taken through a smudged and broken lens by a novelist who had already slogged through the trenches of Hollywood screenwriting.
The book’s protagonist Tod Hackett represents the kind of artist who lemming-rushed to Hollywood on the promise of fame and fortune, while striving to convince themselves that they will be the one who survives the seduction of the industry without selling out. (Todd’s very surname cynically indicates how that particular struggle will end.)
Much of the story takes place within the confines of the studio, which allows the real L.A. to be seen only through windows, and even the scenes depicting Hackett’s life outside of work are influenced by the shadow of the Hollywood Sign. Virtually every character in the book is a Hollywood hanger-on, struggling to find the dream before it turns into a nightmare. A quarter-century later, a shot in the classic film Chinatown perfectly recaptured the host/parasite nature of Los Angeles/Hollywood, or Hollywood/Los Angeles that Nathanael West presented so well. It’s the scene where detective Jake Gittes is searching the court apartment of the murdered Ida Sessions, and while looking through her wallet, the tiniest glimpse of a Screen Actors Guild card can be seen. Poor Ida was one of the many hopefuls who straddled the fake and the real halves of the city, and lost in both.
The Day of the Locust entwines reality, cinematic artifice, and surreal fantasizing into one troubling rope, and while not a mystery per se, the brutal murder of a child (by a character named Homer Simpson!) causes a mob to rise and incite a riot at a movie premiere, though it is hard to tell what version of reality is actually being described.
Taken independent of one another, each book delineates a different societal, economic, and industrial facet of the City of Angels, with its own rules, prejudices, and beliefs. But when read as a triptych, The Big Sleep, Ask the Dust and The Day of the Locust reveal the picture of L.A. in all its sprawling and contradictory glory, laying bare the beating heart and corruptible soul of a unique conurbation.
