Cultures & Their Disconnects

I read a book this past week that my sister gave me, A Killer in King’s Cove, the first of a mystery series by Iona Whishaw, a Canadian writer new to me but maybe not to the rest of you – the first book came out in 2015, her most recent in 2024, eleven of them so far.  King’s Cove is set in 1946.  The heroine, Lane Winslow, an SOE courier and clandestine op in Occupied France during the war, and troubled with PTSD, has exfiltrated herself to the woods of British Columbia, wanting to leave her past behind.  Not, of course, to be.  Lane, much like her cousin in spirit  Maisie Dobbs, is fated by temperament, a sense of duty, and her fatal curiosity, to be drawn toward the flame.

I’m making it sound more melodramatic than it is.  The story-telling is relaxed and even a little shaggy-dog, not my usual preference for hard-boiled blunt force trauma.  It leans on charm - by which I don’t mean fey, or whimsical, or labored hillbilly slapstick.  Characters who present as genuine, not tics or tropes.  Round, in other words, in the use of the word E.M. Forster gives us, not flat.  There’s something, I may say, Canadian about this, as distinct from British, a very different kettle of fish. 

This is actually where I’m going, here.  Another book I read, recently – again, a gift, so not something I might necessarily have stumbled on, all by my lonesome – is The Lost Man, by the Aussie writer Jane Harper, known on these shores for The Dry.  And then there’s the thoroughly subversive In the Woods, an Irish procedural, Tana French’s debut novel, which I also picked up this year.

The mystery story is essentially conservative.  This isn’t an original observation, on my part.  It’s generally agreed to.  The social compact is broken, murder being the most grievous breach of the common good, and the cop, or the private dick, or the avenging angel, knits up the raveled sleeve, and repairs the damage.  This is the classic set-up of an Agatha Christie, or S.S. Van Dine; not that it isn’t corny, and readily parodied, but Christie, for all that she may be dated, still puts the bar pretty high.  And moving forward, to somebody like Ross Macdonald, even at his most anarchic, in The Chill, say, the larger purpose of a social good is served.

Having said that, I’ve noticed some things mysteries and police procedurals don’t have in common, when set in exotic locales: not Christie, in Death on the Nile, or Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko books, the visiting fireman, but homegrown.  We’re used to the attitudes and accents of an Inspector Morse, or an Inspector Lewis, because we’ve seen a lot of PBS Mystery, and we’ve accustomed ourselves to how the Brits present these kinds of stories.  Cable broadens the overview.  I’ve mentioned Dr. Blake (Australian), Brokenwood or My Life Is Murder (New Zealand), and Blue Lights (Irish).  I’ve also picked up on Candice Renoir, in French, and the German police series Tatort – in its many different local iterations, the Dresden version my personal favorite, the Berlin storyline disturbing and too deeply creepy, even for me.  Speaking of, I also happened on the Hindi cop show Dahaad, which I wrote about on this blog, in September of last year.  Creepy, yes, but compelling.

Here’s my point.  Watching this stuff, which can come from very different cultural biases, you can be thrown off.  The case of Tatort, for example.  The series will do half a dozen episodes per season in a particular German city, so each season you get a few in Berlin, a few in Hamburg, a few in Frankfurt, and so on.  I followed, specifically, the Dresden episodes, over three seasons.  One of the things I found fascinating about it was the hangover from the not so distant past, of East Germany.  This attitude – shame, in fact, with some of the older characters – is of course not even present when the setting is Hamburg or Frankfurt.  For a German audience, it’s a crucial subtext. 

Same thing with Dahaad, this dissimilarity, or cognitive dissonance.  If you’re used to the rhythms of Bosch, or The Wire, or Barney Miller, for that matter, watching the beleaguered but furiously obstinate Bhaati and Singh fight their corner against religious politics, misogyny, caste prejudice, and plain willful ignorance is really something to behold.  Any lesser person would cave.  And although you might harbor the suspicion that Bollywood is going to simply paper over these intransigent differences in favor of a happy ending, by the actual end, you’re pleased not to be drowned in cynicism, although the happy is ambiguous.

We find, maybe, that something’s gained in translation, rather than lost.  I know there are other examples of this phenomenon that don’t in fact work, because I’ve tried to watch them and given up, but that doesn’t signify.  What’s fascinating to me is how these shows manage as best as they do, to tell stories that only work in their own context.  It seems obvious, but it’s not, that the conventions of a narrative depend on the inner tension between discipline and chaos, and arbitrary social structures aren’t just good manners, but a survival mechanism.  In this particular narrative construct, the Western hero is often an avatar of indiscipline; that’s not the only model for a story. 

The Author Is Not The Protagonist. Until She Is.

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 On the scifi side, I once had a newsletter serialized novel beta read before putting it out as a book. I wrote the thing in pieces over two years, intending it to be a novella I could release as a PDF for that author name's newsletter. Now betas are the poor man's editor. Usually, as with the Holland Bay books, it's a writer who gets the type of story I'm writing. Once in a while, though, you get one with an axe to grind. Like one had a tantrum because a book had too much American stuff in it. Like tea bags. (I asked a British friend and a Japanese writer. They found this hilarious and asked who steeped their tea anymore in a pandemic-era world. Answer: Not many.) On this novel, though, I have one planet patterning itself after present-day China without the military pretensions. The note I got back: You shouldn't impose your politics on the reader.

I kindly sent back a note stating that was how one corner of my fictional world did things. Other areas did not. Then I mentioned another planet being a libertarian paradise. Same comment. I less politely said, "You can't call me both, especially in the same chapter." I suspect my beta reader suffered from a delusion many readers do: The attitudes and opinions of the characters are those of the author, not the author getting into the heads of his or her creations.

Theodore Sturgeon called these people morons. I'll be a little more charitable and call them lazy. 

But I'm thinking moron.

Put simply, a writer's job is to create characters who live and breathe. Some of them have vices. I've written alcoholics. You can't go through life without knowing a few addicts. I've written cheaters. I've written thieves. I don't do racists well because I have to dumb myself down for them. That does not mean I'm an addict, a thief, or a cheater. But I not only have to write these people, I have to believably write them. 

One reviewer pointed out the corruption in both Holland Bay and The Dogs of Beaumont Heights. but when I wrote them, I didn't think of it as that. Oh, Deputy Chief Roberts, Linc, and Ralph Smithers are corrupt as hell. I just didn't think about that. I wrote them as the heroes in their own dramas. Smithers's world is crumbling and rage eats him alive from inside. Linc thinks it's his turn to be on top. Roberts believes he's been passed over for chief too many times.

One thing the Holland Bay books don't feature that I can't say about Nick Kepler or my scifi is there is no "me" in the story. While I'm not really an ex-cop turned insurance investigator or a wealthy heiress's runaway son, Nick Kepler and JT Austin are my conduits into those series. But the closest would be Jessica Branson in the Holland Bay books. While hers is the easiest head for me to inhabit, she is most definitely not me.

"Wait a minute. Didn't you just do two articles about basing characters on real people being bad?"

Yep. And I stand by those articles. Conan Doyle is clearly Watson, whom Holmes finds smarter than

CC 2009 Mark Coggins

Doyle wrote him. Lew Archer is Ross MacDonald, such a thin version of the author that he disappears if he turns sideways. Then there's that other Santa Teresa detective, Kinsey Millhonne. Sue Grafton once said Kinsey is "moi had I not gotten married."

Of course, it's dangerous for an author to project oneself into a story. As I said before, the characters' opinions and attitudes are not those. Some, like Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, can turn into what's known as a Mary Sue, an idealized version of the author. 

So the protag is not the author. Until he or she says they are. 

Then it gets interesting.

Ross Macdonald - Connecting With The Past

Paul here. One of my favorite mystery authors is Ross Macdonald and one of my favorite characters is his Lew Archer. I like them for a variety of reasons, but I’ll leave those for another time. Today’s guest post is by Tom Bergin, who runs the The Name is Archer Facebook group. It was started in 2014 by John Aaron, and is currently run by Tom, Lila Havens and Mike Langston. With a name like that, it’s clear that the focus of the group is Lew Archer, but it’s expanded over the years to include many other crime writers and crime films.

Tom is a lifelong reader and has been reading mystery novels since he was in grammar school. Retired now, he’s able to devote more time to a life of crime—in books and films anyway. He grew up and still lives in San Francisco with his wife. They have five children, ranging in age from 28 to 42.

So, without further ado, Tom Bergin talks about Ross Macdonald and Lew Archer:

***

Ross Macdonald - Connecting With The Past

by

Tom Bergin

Ross Macdonald has been my favorite mystery writer for forty years. One day I walked into a bookstore and spotted a volume of Dashiell Hammett’s novels. I was living in San Francisco at the time so it seemed like a sign that I should buy the book. Hammett led me to Raymond Chandler and Chandler led me to Ross Macdonald. I liked Hammett and Chandler but I loved Ross Macdonald. His writing touched something in me and I’ve been reading him ever since.

Ross Macdonald was born Kenneth Millar on December 13, 1915 in Los Gatos, California. Although born in the United States, Ken’s parents were Canadian and Ken was raised in Canada. Ken Millar published his first novel, The Dark Tunnel in 1944. Millar went on to write twenty-three more novels. Eighteen of these were Archer novels. There was also a volume of Archer stories titled The Name is Archer published in 1955 and a more complete volume of Archer stories titled The Archer Files (2015).  Writing under the pseudonym John Macdonald, Millar’s Lew Archer made his debut in The Moving Target in 1949. He then published his next five novels with the pseudonym John Ross Macdonald before adopting Ross Macdonald when The Barbarous Coast was published (1956).

The first few Archer books were in the hard-boiled Chandler tradition. They were good books but Macdonald was eager to make his own mark on the genre. Macdonald wanted less violence in his books and more psychological insight into his characters. He wanted to write about families and family tragedies rather than gangsters and mobsters. Most critics contend that this change took place with the publication of The Galton Case in 1959. The Galton Case and the books that followed cemented Macdonald’s position next to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in the pantheon of hard-boiled writers. 

There are many things I love about Macdonald’s writing. The first book of his I read was The Galton Case. I was hooked and quickly read everything of his I could find. The first thing that struck me about Macdonald’s novels was the complexity and ingenuity of his plots. Plot was important to Macdonald. In his essay The Writer as Detective Hero Macdonald writes: “Chandler described a good plot as one that made for good scenes, as if the parts were greater than the whole. I see plot as a vehicle of meaning. It should be as complex as contemporary life, but balanced enough to say things about it.”

Along with complex plots Ross Macdonald’s books are full of ideas and themes. In an interview with Paul Nelson he said: “You really start with meaning before you have anything to structure.” There is plenty of meaning and many ideas in his books. I’m only going to mention a couple. Probably the most obvious theme that runs through Macdonald’s work is that of the past. The idea that what has happened in the past affects what happens in the present. This idea is prevalent in almost all the later books. In The Zebra-Striped Hearse Archer says: “The past is the key to the present.” In The Far Side of the Dollar Archer states: “I mean the deep connections you get in life, the coming together of the past and the present.” In many of the books the sins of the parents are visited upon their children. The children suffer from the bad deeds of their parents. An example of this would be Ralph Hillman’s affair in The Far Side of the Dollar. That was the start of the trouble for the Hillman family.

Another important theme of Ross Macdonald is that things are connected in life. People are connected, ideas are connected, the past and present are connected, what one person does directly affects other people. In The Far Side of the Dollar Lew Archer says: “Life hangs together in one piece. Everything is connected with everything else. The problem is to find the connections.” 

The thing I like best about the Archer books is the character of Archer himself. He’s a good man. He’s compassionate and empathetic. Archer cares about people. He has a connection with young people. Lew worries about Stella in The Far Side of the Dollar: “Generation after generation had to start from scratch and learn the world over again. It changed so rapidly that children couldn’t learn from their parents or parents from their children. The generations were like alien tribes islanded in time.” Archer’s empathy for people is one of the qualities that sets him apart from other private detectives. Even though Archer was a compassionate and caring man, he was also a realist. He knew life was hard. In The Far Side of the Dollar Stella tells him that she doesn’t see how she and Tommy are ever going to be happy. Lew replies: “Survival is the main thing.” It was a hard saying to offer a young girl. “Happiness comes in fits and snatches. I’m having more of it as I get older. The teens were my worst time.”

One of my favorite lines from all the books comes from The Far Side of the Dollar. Lew says: “Other people’s lives are my business.” The line has a dual meaning. The line is true in a literal sense. Archer’s a detective. It’s his job to investigate people’s lives but I prefer to think of the line in a different way. Other people’s lives are Lew’s business because he’s a human being. They are his business because he cares about people. Because he’s connected to them.

I’ll continue to read Ross Macdonald’s books because I’m still entertained by, and learn from, his books. In this crazy, angry, divided world we’re living in, it’s good to be reminded by a wise voice that we’re all connected and that other people’s lives are our business too.

***

Thank you, Tom. I really enjoyed that. And people can check out The Name is Archer at https://www.facebook.com/groups/1734000126825677

~.~.~

And now for the usual BSP:

A great review of Coast to Coast: Noir at Just Reviews:

Each story is filled with sadness, tragedy and each character experiences death in a different way. The titles alone are eerie and will give you the chills. A fabulous collection of well written noir short stories told in different settings with  characters that work in meat packing plants, feed companies, markets and not very lucrative jobs causing their downfalls and falling for the need to complete jobs that most would turn down. A superb collection for readers that want something odd, different and dangerous.

-- Fran Lewis, Just Reviews

And a very nice review of The Blues Don't Care at The Irresponsible Reader:

Marks hits the right notes with his prose and characters, creating a mystery that appeals on many levels. I recommend this for mystery readers looking for the kind of thing they haven’t read before.

--H.C. Newton, The Irresponsible Reader

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A California Crime Weekend

A double header today. First up are some thoughts on the California Crime Writers Conference that happened this past weekend. Next up will be my Father’s Day reading recommendations. And from the truth in advertising department, I posted this (the book list part) previously on another site, so I hope you don’t mind the rerun.

The CCWC is held every other year in the L.A. area, Culver City. It’s a joint effort by the LA chapters of Sisters in Crime and MWA. It’s not as big as some other conventions but it makes up in quality what it lacks in quantity. And since time and money for conferences is always finite and this one is local for me it’s one I always try to go to.

There were two guests of honor: Tess Gerritsen and Catriona McPherson. Tess was the keynote speaker for lunch on Saturday. Her speech was short but pithy and to the point. She spoke about something that writer’s rarely talk about: what not to do. Later in the afternoon, Catriona McPherson gave a workshop called “Deep in a Bowl of Porridge” about how to plant clues.

Panels ranged from “Demystifying the Hallmark Mystery” and “Marketing without a Budget” to “Indie Publishing: New Frontiers” and “Adapting Your Novel to the Screen.” There was some emphasis on Hollywood because of the close proximity.

I was on the “Bringing the Past to Life” panel with Anne Louise Bannon, Jennifer Berg, Rosemary Lord, and Bonnie MacBird, and moderated by Amanya (“A.E.”) Wasserman. We discussed writing mysteries set in the past and how we do our research for them. Our panel covered the 1870’s to the 1990’s.

Plus there were workshops on Forensics, Interrogation Techniques, Suicide Bomber Indicators, Compassion Fatigue and Weaponry (although not all at once….).

Audio of the panels are available from www.vwtapes.com and you can see a list of them at https://ccwconference.org/panels/.

But the main reason I go to these things is to “commune” with fellow writers and see people I might not have seen in some time.

It’s such a good conference that Walter Mosely showed up as a regular attendee, not even as a featured guest. And this isn’t the first time.

Unfortunately, I could only be at the conference a limited time this year due to personal reasons. But I enjoyed the time I had there and look forward to the next one. Only two years off. So, if you can swing it when it comes around again in a couple of years you might want to check out this two day conference in LA LA Land.

***

And some Father’s Day Reading Suggestions:

There’s so damn many good mystery-crime books out there. This list just covers crime novels, some of which I may have mentioned before. And maybe some time I’ll do a list of my five non-crime novels. Anyway, here goes:

The Poet: Michael Connelly is probably best known for the Bosch books. And I’m among Bosch’s fans. But I’d have to say my favorite Connelly book is the stand-alone The Poet (1996), though Jack McEvoy, the main character does appear in other books. The story follows reporter McEvoy as he investigates a string of cop suicides, including his own brother’s and ends up going down a hellish spiral into a world of pedophiles. It also introduces FBI agent Rachel Walling, who shows up in other Connelly novels. The Poet is dark and unsettling, but I think the reason I like it so much is that it is so well plotted, with a lot of twists and turns, and that it really keeps you on edge the whole time. I think this story is for anyone who likes a good crime yarn, but it’s not for the squeamish.

Tapping the Source: These days Kem Nunn is arguably better known as the co-creator of the TV series John from Cincinnati, as well as a writer on Sons of Anarchy and Deadwood. But he’s also the author of, I believe, six novels. Tapping the Source (1984) is his first and is something special. If it’s not the novel that invented the “surf noir” genre it’s certainly an early and foundational entry. This is not the Beach Boys’ version of sun, sand, surf and surfer girls, but a much darker vision of life on SoCal’s storied beaches. Ike Tucker, an aimless young man, treks to Huntington Beach (a.k.a. ‘Surf City’) to find his missing and possibly dead sister. There he gets hooked up with bikers, sex and drugs. No Gidgets or Moondoggie’s here. And Ike will be lucky if he gets out alive. I like this one so much that I looked into acquiring the film rights. Unfortunately they were already taken. Now, if whoever has them these days would just make the damn movie already. Tapping is good for anyone who loves surf, sun and murder.

Down There (a.k.a. Shoot the Piano Player): David Goodis has been called the “poet of the losers” and his stories of people on the skids certainly bear that out. I came to Goodis through the movies, which is how I’ve come to several writers and/or novels. I’m a fan of the Bogie-Bacall movie Dark Passage, so after having seen it a couple of times I decided to check out the David Goodis novel it was based on. I liked it enough that I began to read pretty much anything of Goodis I could get my hands on, but this was before he came into vogue again so mostly I had to pick up very scarred paperbacks (many, though not all of his books were only published in paperback), and I devoured his whole oeuvre. And, though I liked pretty much everything to one degree or another, Down There (1956) really stood out for me. It’s the story of a World War II vet, a former member the elite Merrill’s Marauders who, for a variety of reasons, is down on his luck – way down. Francois Truffaut made the book into a movie called Shoot the Piano Player which, to be honest, I don’t like very much, but that’s why the title of the book was changed from Down There and is probably better known today as Shoot the Piano Player. I think it would be good for fans of classic noir, old movie buffs, and others.

Mallory’s Oracle: NYPD detective Kathy Mallory is a hard-as-nails cop and not just because of her bright red nail polish. Even her creator, Carol O’Connell, describes Mallory as a “sociopath”. Mallory’s Oracle (1994) is the first in the Mallory series and probably the best place to start. I’ve talked with people about Mallory and recommended the Mallory books to several people over the years. And it seems people either love or hate Mallory. I’m in the former category. I love her no-nonsense, doesn’t suffer BS approach to her job. Nothing, including the law, will stand in her way. Not that I’d necessarily like to be friends with her if she suddenly came alive and jumped off the page. I think the Mallory books would be good for someone who likes solid crime stories, strong female characters and doesn’t mind one that’s a sociopath…

Devil in a Blue Dress: Pretty much anyone who knows me knows I have a thing for L.A., past and present. LA history. LA culture. And novels and movies set in the City of the Angels. Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), the first Easy Rawlins novel, hits all those bullet points. And, much as I Iike Easy, I really dig his psychopath friend, Mouse. Not someone you want to get on the wrong side of but certainly someone you’d want to have your back when the you-know-what hits the fan. (I wonder how Mouse and Mallory would hit it off?) Devil in a Blue Dress, and the other Easy novels, would be good for LA history buffs, noir fans, general mystery fans.



The Big Nowhere: James Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere (1988) is the second of his LA Quartet books [ the others are The Black Dahlia (1987), L.A. Confidential (1990) and White Jazz (1992) ]. All are good, but if I had to pick one as a fave it would be The Big Nowhere. To try to describe Ellroy’s fever dream style is an exercise in futility. The story is set in LA in the 50s right after WWII. In part, it follows Sheriff’s deputy Danny Upshaw through the investigation of a series of mutilation crimes and exposes corruption and hypocrisy amid the “red scare”. I used to go to many Ellroy book events and signings and he truly is the Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction. At one event he even had a band with him. He’s a trip. His writing is a trip. His books are a trip. They would be good for anyone who’s into new noir with a retro setting, LA history buffs and the usual suspects.

The Grifters: Jim Thompson’s The Grifters (1963) is a good book and an even better movie. If you like people living on the down low, if you like con artists, and if you like the grift, this is the book for you. It would be good for fans of Jim Thompson (how’s that for stating the obvious?), noir fans, hardboiled mystery readers.

Bonus Round #1: White Heat / Broken Windows / Vortex / L.A. Late @ Night (uh, all by me): Well, since I’m not above a little BSP I couldn’t very well leave out this trio. White Heat is a noir detective thriller set during the Rodney King riots. Broken Windows is the sequel to White Heat and follows P.I. Duke Rogers’ investigation of the death of an illegal immigrant in the turbulent 1990s L.A. Vortex is about a soldier returning from Afghanistan and finding more trouble in L.A. than in the war. LA Late @ Night is a collection of five of my previously published stories. And all four would be good for everyone! Well, anyone who likes hardboiled, noir and detective fiction.

Bonus Round #2: I didn’t mention Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald in my list above because to me they’re on a plane by themselves. And, as many of you know, I have a thing for both. I don’t think you could go wrong with any of Chandler’s or books – because he’s just such a damn good writer. And Macdonald blows me away with his explorations into the psychological aspects of crime and stories that boomerang back on the characters – the past always comes back to haunt them. I like pretty much everything by both of them, but if I had to pick I think I’d choose The Long Goodbye (1953) for Chandler and The Chill (1964 – a good year for the Beatles too!) or The Galton Case (1959) for Macdonald. These books would be good for pretty much anyone interested in mysteries and the crime fiction genre, but especially as an intro to a young or new reader of mysteries. And as an introduction to classic mystery and detective fiction.

What about you? What books would you recommend as gifts for the people in your life?

~.~.~

And now for the usual BSP:

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Adventures in La La Land

Introducing Paul D Marks:

Today I have the honor of introducing our newest SleuthSayer.  Usually when there is an opening Leigh and I join forces to come up with suitable candidates.  This time it so happened we each came up with the same name: Paul D. Marks.  And to our delight, he said yes.

I had met him in November when we served on a panel on Bouchercon.  He was funny, thoughtful, generous, and he cleans up nice.

So, who is this dude?  Only a Shamus-Award winner for the novel White Heat, which received praise from Publisher's Weekly and made some best of the year lists.  It was set in southern California, as is, not surprisingly, Paul D. Marks.

Paul has had more than thirty stories published, including "Howling at the Moon," in EQMM last year.  He has been published and praised in literary journals as well.  You can find several of his stories in his collection  L.A. Late @ Night.

According to Steven Bingen, author of MGM: Hollywood's Greatest Backlot, Paul also has the distinction, dubious though it might be, of having been the last person to shoot on the fabled MGM backlot before it bit the dust to make way for housing.

You can read more about him at PaulDMarks.com  Or right here every other Tuesday.  Over to you, Paul!

— Rob

***

Adventures in La La Land

by Paul D. Marks

Thank you, Rob, for the great intro. And thanks for saying I “clean up nice.” My mom would be glad to hear that.

Before I get into my first post for Sleuth Sayers, I’d like to thank Velma Negotiable , oh, and Rob Lopresti and Leigh Lundin and the other Sleuth Sayers, for asking me to come aboard.

Since this is my first post, I thought I’d write about two things I know pretty well, Los Angeles and me. Sort of an introduction to my writing and me, my influences, especially my inspiration for setting. And since it is an intro it might be a little longer than a normal post...

I’m old enough to have grown up in Los Angeles when both Raymond Chandler’s L.A. and Chandler himself were still around. When I was a kid L.A. still resembled the city of Chandler's "mean streets," Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer and Cain's Double Indemnity. In fact, I grew up in a Spanish-style house very much like the one that Barbara Stanwyck lives in in the movie version of Double Indemnity.

L.A. was a film noir town for a film noir kid. And that certainly had an influence on me and my writing. And a lot of my writing involves L.A., not just as a location but almost as a character in its own right. Of course, we’re all influenced by our childhoods, where we grew up and the people we knew. And those things, whether conscious or unconscious, tend to bubble to the surface in our writing like the black pitch bubbling up from the La Brea tar pits.

* * *

Two things that Los Angeles means to me are movies and noir, oh, and palm trees, of course. Movie studios and backlots were everywhere in this city. You couldn’t help but see the studios, feel their presence and be influenced by “the movies” one way or another. Many of the studios and backlots are gone now, but almost everywhere you go in this city is a movie memory and often a noir memory. L.A. is Hollywood’s backlot and many films, including many noirs, were filmed throughout the city.

As a kid, a teenager and even a young adult, I experienced many of the places I read about in books and saw in the movies, once the movies got out of the backlot and onto those mean L.A. streets. Not as a tourist, but as part of my “backyard.”

So Los Angeles has insinuated itself into my writing. Here’s some examples of how it might have gotten there and how it reflects my view of the ironically named City of Angels.

photo credit: Angels Flight via photopin (license)

Angels Flight is a funicular railway in downtown Los Angeles. Star of many films and many noirs, including Kiss Me, Deadly, Criss Cross and others. Chandler visits it in The High Window and The King in Yellow. As a young boy, my dad took me to the original Angels Flight (now moved down the road and since closed). And though I may not have known about noir films and hardboiled novels then, it was an experience I’ve always remembered. Such a cool little pair of trains going up and down that hill, the tracks splitting in the middle just as each car approaches the other and you think they’re going to smash into each other head on. Angels Flight slams back to me in memory every now and then and makes its way into my writing, most notably in the eponymous story Angels Flight, which I must say came out before Michael Connelly’s novel of the same name.

That story, about a cop whose time has come and gone, is still pretty relevant today. The world is changing and he’s having one hell of a time catching up, if he even wants to. He’s a dinosaur. And he knows that Angels Flight is an anachronism, just like he is. He says to the other main character:
 

“Will Angels Flight bring back the glamour of the old days? Hollywood’s lost its tinsel. Venice’s lost its pier. And there are no angels in the City of Angels. What can Angels Flight do to bring that back?”

“Sometimes you need something for the soul,” the other person says.

I think that sums up a lot of my attitude not only toward Angels Flight but to the City of Angels as well. 

In Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, Tod Hackett comes to L.A. thinking he’s an artist. And like so many others he gets trampled by that dream. Not much has changed all these decades later in my story Endless Vacation, when a young woman comes to Hollywood with big dreams and a bigger heroin habit. The narrator tries to help but he also knows:

Who the hell am I to talk? I came to L.A. looking for a Hollywood that died before I was born. A glamorous town of movie stars and studios and backlots. A studio system that nurtured talent, whatever you say about how it also might have stifled it with the other hand. A town that made movies in black and white but whose streets were, indeed, paved with gold. Yeah, I bought it – hook, line and clapboard.

Luis Valdez examines the Zoot Suit Riots that took place in L.A. during World War II in his play Zoot Suit. I remember my grandfather, who lived through that time, talking about “pachucos” when I was a kid. In my story Sleepy Lagoon Nocturne, set during the war, I take a stab at dealing with the racial tension of that era.

Hot jazz—swing music—boogied, bopped and jived. And Bobby Saxon was one of those who made it happen. Bobby banged the eighty-eights with the Booker “Boom-Boom” Taylor Orchestra in the Club Alabam down on Central Avenue. It was the heppest place for whites to come slumming and mix with the coloreds. That’s just the way it was in those days, Los Angeles in the 1940s during the war.

Venice Beach and boardwalk is the number one tourist destination in Los Angeles. People think it’s cool and flock to see the “freaks,” and maybe the nearby Venice Canals. Developer Abbott Kinney wanted to recreate Italy’s Venice in L.A., and he did, to some extent. But it didn’t quite work out. Many of the canals were drained and filled in, though some remain. They can be seen in several movies, too numerous to name. And, because they were another place I’d done time at, they pop up in my short story Santa Claus Blues, which opens with a bunch of kids playing along the canals and coming across a dead Santa floating in one of them.

Staring at the canal, Bobby thought about Abbott Kinney's dream for a high culture theme park, with concerts, theatre and lectures on various subjects. Kinney even imported Italian gondoliers to sing to visitors as they were propelled along the canals. When no one seemed to care about the highbrow culture he offered he switched gears and turned Venice into a popular amusement area. And finally the people came.

My grandparents always referred to MacArthur Park, on Wilshire Boulevard on the way to downtown, as Westlake Park, its original name. It was renamed for General Douglas MacArthur after World War II. But for my grandparents it was always Westlake. When I was a kid it was the place they took me to have a picnic and rent a boat and paddle around the lake. A nice outing. In the movies it’s the scene of a murder in one of my favorite obscure noirs, Too Late for Tears. By the time of my novel White Heat, set during the 1992 “Rodney King” riots, the nature of the park had changed from when I was a kid:

MacArthur Park is midway between Hancock Park, not a park, but an upper class neighborhood, and downtown L.A., a neighborhood in search of an identity. When I was a boy, my grandparents used to take me to the park. We’d rent rowboats and paddle through the lake, tossing bread crumbs to the birds. The park is a different place today. You can still rent paddle boats – if you want to paddle across the lake while talking to your dealer. Sometimes on Saturdays or Sundays immigrant families still try to use it as a park. Most of the time, it’s a haven for pushers, crack addicts, hookers and worse. Even the police don’t like treading there. If they were scared, who was I to play Rambo?

Even if someone’s never been to Los Angeles, most people know Sunset Boulevard and the Sunset Strip. Sunset begins or ends, depending on how you look at it, at Pacific Coast Highway on the west and continues to Union Station in downtown L.A., though recently the last part of the jog has been renamed. It goes from wealthy homes in Santa Monica and the West Side, into Beverly Hills, through the Strip in West Hollywood, where hippies back in the day and hipsters today hang out. Into Hollywood and on to downtown. It’s a microcosm of Los Angeles. Of course, both Union Station and Sunset have made multiple appearances in movies and novels and have made several appearances in my writing. Sunset was a major artery in my life as well as in the city. One time I walked almost the entire length of Sunset on a weekend day with my dad, ending up at Union Station. Later, I hung on the Strip. I drove it to the beach. I slammed through the road’s Dead Man’s Curve, made famous in the Jan and Dean song. Sunset appears in my stories Born Under a Bad Sign, Dead Man’s Curve, L.A. Late @ Night and more. In the latter, Sunset is as much of a character in the story as any of the human characters.

She'd only noticed the mansion. Not long after that, her parents had taken her to the beach. They had driven Sunset all the way from Chavez Ravine to the ocean. She had seen houses like the one in the movie. Houses she vowed she'd live in some day.

What she hadn't realized at the time was that there was a price to pay to be able to live in such a house. Sometimes that price was hanging from a tag that everyone can see. Sometimes it was hidden inside.

And who doesn’t know the famous—or infamous—Hollywood Sign? Something I saw almost every day as a kid, and which a friend of mine and I hiked up to many, many years ago, before it was all fenced in and touristy. In Free Fall, originally published in Gary Lovisi’s Hardboiled magazine, a man recently separated from the service, heads west, as far west as he can go until he comes to the terminus of Route 66 in Santa Monica, near the Santa Monica Pier. This is the end of the road for him in more ways than one.

I kept looking at the Hollywood Sign, wondering about all the people down below, pretending to be in its glow. Where do they go after L.A.? There is nowhere, the land ends and they just tumble into the arroyos and ravines, never to be heard from again.

So this is a sampling of my writing and my relationship to L.A., La La Land, the City of the Angels, the Big Orange. Could I have written about these places without experiencing them? Sure. We can’t experience everything we write about. But hopefully it has made my writing more authentic.
Maybe there are other cities less well traveled that would be ripe for exploration in movies and books. Maybe L.A. is overworked and overdone. But Los Angeles is part of me. Part of who I am. So it’s not only a recurring locale in my writing, it’s a recurring theme. And I’ve only just touched the surface here of Los Angeles, the city, its various landmarks and neighborhoods and my relationship to it.

So that’s part of what shaped me and makes me who I am. And some of my L.A. story. You can take the boy out of L.A., but you can’t take L.A. out of the boy. Oh, and here’s an L.A. story for you (a true one): I’m one of the few people who pulled a gun on the LAPD and lived to tell about. But that’s for another time.

What's in a (Place) Name?

by Jim Winter

Once upon a time, I had a friend from New York who insisted on pronouncing everything with a French name in French. Never mind that the closest she had come to Paris was growing up about 200 miles from the border with Quebec. When she lived in Cincinnati, it deeply offended her that nearby town of Versailles, Indiana was called "Ver-Sales."

"It's pronounced vayr-SIGH!"

"Yes," I said. "In France, it is. In Indiana, it's pronounced 'ver-sales."

"Well, that's ignorant. It should be pronounced in its native tongue."

"OK. From now on, you have to call the town in Clermont County 'Moskva.'"

She wasn't down with that. Russian, to her, was too ugly. So even the Russian capital, in her reckoning, was called "Moscow."

But this has long been on my mind since childhood. I grew up in a town called Lodi. Most people can pronounce it since we've all heard, sooner or later, the Creedence song "Lodi" at least once. This song ended up being massively overplayed on Cleveland's WMMS and even CKLW out of Windsor. All because there was a town in the Cleveland area called Lodi.

Growing up, we were told the town changed its name from the original Harrisville, named for the town's founder, to Lodi in honor of Napoleon's first battle. Why? Well, Americans hated the British and liked Napoleon. By the time yours truly emerged from Lodi Hospital, the town square had a fountain with the village mascot, Chief Lodi. Nobody ever told us there had been a real Chief Lodi. And yet for a time, the Wikipedia article stated that Chief Lodi was a real person. Never mind what tribe or where he lived. The reference is gone now, but methinks a local had a little fun with the article before it was corrected.

But what goes into those names? Why do we call them what we call them? A small industrial city near where I grew up is named "Wooster," as in Jeeves & Wooster. However, the settlers hailed from Worcester, Massachusetts. Only it's pronounced "Wooster." The Massachusetts town is named for Worcestershire. Yes, that's where the sauce was invented. In true English fashion, that town is called "Woostersher," a concept I still have trouble with these days.

But what of fictional towns? Ross MacDonald loved Santa Barbara so much that he modeled Santa Teresa on it instead of using the real Santa Barbara. Sue Grafton picked up on this and based her career on this fictionalized version of her home.

Ed McBain, in turning New York into his fictional five-borough city, named the main borough "Isola," Italian for "island." I even got in on the act with the city in my current work in process called "Monticello" after the city on Edge of Night. The original had the Cincinnati skyline in the credits. My version probably looks more like Cleveland with the bluffs over the Ohio River flanking it.

I've found when creating or reading about a fictional place, it's good to embed common family names to streets and neighborhoods, corrupt the names of European cities for the names of towns and sections of a city, and reference events in history. It's good if the writer knows that history and how everything came to be, but the reader does not need to know. Done properly, it gives a place that may have been invented only a couple of years before publication an illusion of reality.

The Places You've Never Been

I will be revising a novel I'd been working on forever soon. Which is going to be fun. It takes place in a city in Ohio called Monticello. Monticello came about as an exercise in world building. I can tell you the history of the place, who all the landmarks are named for, and that, if you own a Passat or a Jetta, it wasn't built there.

If the name sounds familiar beyond the reference to Thomas Jefferson's estate, I admit I lifted it. Once upon a time, when I was much shorter, there was a soap opera called Edge of Night. Like Dark Shadows, Edge was genre-based rather than hospital melodrama like most other soaps. Unlike Dark Shadows, it was a crime show. Set in a city called Monticello, the series existed in a Midwestern state so generic that it's capital was Capital City. The skyline in the opening credits was actually Cincinnati, home of Procter & Gamble which produced the show. (Except for its final two seasons, when LA was used.) But it's not the only fictional city that crime aficionados have adopted.

Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhonne lives in Santa Teresa, which looks suspiciously like Santa Barbara. While Santa Teresa does not exist, Kinsey shares the town with another PI, Lew Archer. That should be no surprise. Archer's creator Ross McDonald also used the name for a fictionalized Santa Barbara. And Grafton did know McDonald in his later years. Santa Teresa is so real, thanks to Grafton, that many people look for it while driving down Highway 101. Read enough of the novels, and you can see downtown and the seedy Hungarian restaurant where Kinsey would be treated to goulash.

Take it a step further. Hill Street Blues, the classic police show from the 1980's, took place in a city even more generic than Edge of Night's fictional state. It had a Major League baseball team, but even the team was never named. Still, the city was quintessentially Midwest without looking like a thinly disguised LA or Chicago (or Toronto, which has doubled for several American cities.) It's amazing how Hill Street made its city look so real without giving any clue as to where it was.

But the mack daddy of fictional towns?

That would be Ed McBain's Isola. Many people assume Isola is the name of McBain's fictitious city, but actually, it's a borough (a word McBain never uses) roughly analogous to Manhattan. The City is and yet is not New York. Indeed, many 87th Precinct movies have been shot in, and sometimes set in, New York. Yet the precinct, even the other boroughs, have distinct characters all their own. One wonders if the City is sandwiched between Metropolis and Gotham City.

What makes a fictional city real to a reader? A sense of place. When neighborhoods and landmarks are described as though the author might have lived there, it makes the setting a character unto itself. Similarly, giving a fictional place a history gives it a life of its own. There's a reason certain names pop up on streets, schools, and landmarks. The reader may never know why, but if the writer does, it creates a sort of randomness that's hard to duplicate otherwise.

So where is your favorite place you've never been?

The Big Moving Sleep Target

by Terence Faherty

This time last year I was serving as the program chair for a great mystery conference we have here in Indiana, Magna Cum Murder.  (This year's conference is being held in Indianapolis on October 25, 26, and 27, and there's still time to register.)  At Magna, they often pick a classic mystery as the conference book.  All attendees are encouraged to read it, at least one panel is devoted to it, and the movie version is shown, if one exists.  I chose The Moving Target, the first Lew Archer novel by Ross Macdonald.  (Yes, it does say "John Macdonald" on the first edition cover.  Macdonald, whose real name was Kenneth Millar, didn't settle on Ross for his pen name until the fifth or six book.)  I selected that early book, rather than one of Macdonald's later classics, because there is a movie version, 1966's Harper, starring Paul Newman.
 
After making my decision, I reread The Moving Target for the first time in perhaps thirty years.  The first few chapters made me glad I'd picked it, the last few less so.  But what struck me most about the novel was its close relationship with another first number in a famous series, The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler's first Philip Marlowe novel.  It's so close, in fact, that I'm convinced Macdonald reread The Big Sleep before laying out The Moving Target, if he didn't have a copy open on his lap as he wrote.

I'm not going to summarize the two plots here.  I'll save that arduous task for when I expand this post into my doctoral dissertation (later to be an Edgar-nominated critical work and, later still, a direct-to-DVD cartoon).  I'll confine myself to citing ten examples to support my contention that, in many ways, The Moving Target (TMT) is a play on and an inversion of The Big Sleep (TBS).

- 1 -

In both books, the PI is called in to straighten out a problem for a wealthy family whose senior representative is an invalid:  General Sternwood in TBS and Elaine Sampson in TMT. Both these characters are heartsick over the loss of a pseudo son, the general's runaway drinking buddy and Elaine's killed-in-action stepson.

- 2 -

The characters of the fathers of these two families and their respective daughters is an example of Macdonald's inversion of Chandler's plot.  In TBS, General Sternwood is wise and his daughter is wild.  In TMT, Ralph Sampson (Elaine's missing husband) is wild and his daughter is wise beyond her years.

- 3 -

Both plots feature rackets complicated by and eventually undone by other crimes.  In TBS, a smut book racket is undone by a blackmail play.  In TMT, a smuggling racket is undone by a kidnapping.

- 4 -

In both books, the initial crime seems vague and phony:  the too polite blackmail of the Sternwoods and the kidnapping of Ralph Sampson that might not be one. 

- 5 -

In both cases, a shadowy underworld figure appears to be pulling the strings.  Each has a last name that's a vague classical allusion, Eddie Mars in TBS and Dwight Troy in TMT.  Both own or have owned a gambling joint, and both are gray-haired.

- 6 - 

Both books feature dens of iniquity:  the house where the wild Sternwood daughter does drugs in TBS becomes the red, zodiac-themed bedroom of the wild father in TMT.

- 7 -

Both the Sternwoods and the Sampsons employ a lovesick young man whose infatuation with a drug user will get him killed (and, again, the names are similar):  Owen Taylor, a chauffeur, in TBS and Alan Taggert, a pilot, in TMT.   Here, Macdonald's inversion of the Chandler model is again apparent.  Taylor chases a Sternwood daughter while Taggert is chased by Sampson's.

- 8 -

The supporting casts have other parallel characters, including two hard luck little men with criminal pasts whose devotion to the wrong women will end them:  Harry Jones in TBS and Eddie Lassiter in TMT.

- 9 -

And in both novels, the PI has a friend with either a current or past connection to the local district attorney's office, and, yet again, the names are similar:  Bernie Ohls (TBS) and Albert "Bertie" Graves (TMT). 

- 10 -

The final link is another name clue, in some respects the most obvious one Macdonald planted.  The wild daughter from TBS is named Carmen.  The not-so-wild daughter from TMT is named Miranda.  Get it? 

Carmen Miranda!

A coincidence?  I think not.  In fact, I rest my case.

Who's On First

Last Tuesday, Dale Andrews published a thought-provoking piece in this space about the first and third person points of view.  In it, he listed some innovative things recent writers have done with the first person, which I found especially encouraging.  In my own writing, I've always favored the first person point of view, and it rankles to occasionally hear it dismissed as simplistic, as a stage a beginning writer works through on his or her way to more mature narrative techniques.  As Dale's examples demonstrated, first person can be pretty complex.

Marlowe and (Almost Certainly) Treacherous Client

And it's the point of view used by Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, writers who made me love the private eye subgenre.  First person is part of the traditional private eye story's deceptively straightforward structure:  a problem is posed and a hero sets out to find a solution.  It's like some ancient epic, except that the challenge isn't being set for the hero by some god or demigod, who may be treacherous, but by some client, who is almost certainly treacherous.  Chandler and Macdonald's take on this simple formula required that the private eye also serve as bard.



Covers Held at Bay

Unfortunately, even a simple formula can lead to some hard work for the writer of book-length mysteries.  Think of the challenge like this.  Your job as a mystery novelist if to hold the front and back covers of your published book about three quarters of an inch apart.  That may not seem too hard.  What, after all, is three quarters of an inch?  But the only thing you can use to get that job done are sheets of paper, none much wider on edge than a human hair.  And you can't scrunch the pages up, either.  (Leave that to reviewers.)  You have to lay them perfectly flat.  You'll need hundreds of them, about three hundred, in fact, to keep those covers at a safe distance.  Start writing.

Waiting for Godot

If you start writing in the first person, you've made the challenge even harder for yourself.  Everything that happens in those three hundred pages has to happen to or be witnessed by one person, the narrator.  The exceptions are stories told to the narrator by other characters, and you'll get a few of those in a mystery novel, as witnesses come forward and suspects try to clear themselves.  You can't overdo that, though, or your readers will start to feel like spectators at a play in which the only thing that happens on stage is talk.  Waiting for Godot, perhaps.   A less esoteric example is the Sherlock Holmes story "The Copper Beeches," which features not one but two long recountings by the client, Violet Hunter, and almost no on-stage action until the closing pages, when Watson shoots a dog.  (The doctor was provoked, but he was also probably tired of listening to Violet prattle.)


To keep the action on stage, you have to twist the plot and twist it again, because holding your covers apart isn't the only challenge you face.  You also have to fool your protagonist (and hopefully your readers) for three hundred pages.  The result can be a very complex plot, the kind Chandler and Macdonald were known for.  (One of my plots was called "labyrinthine" by a reviewer.  I didn't mind the adjective, but not being able to pronounce it still embarrasses me.)  After all, your detective hero is no dummy--it would be another turnoff for your readers if they were always way ahead of your Holmes, waiting for him to catch up.  So you'd better have convolutions within your convolutions.


It's no wonder that many writers relieve the pressure by filling their mystery novels with non-mystery material, like bread crumbs in the meatloaf.  The bread crumbs can take the form of romantic subplots, comic subplots, and updates on an extended cast of supporting characters that can start to read like a Christmas letter.  ("A funny thing happened last fall to Uncle Ollie at the state fair. . . .")



Another pressure relief valve that's been popular for a while is for the writer to slip out of first person to write passages or chapters or every other chapter in third person, often from the killer's point of view.  This approach offers the writer the chance to have it both ways, to have the distinctive voice and convincing inner life of first person and the fly-on-the-wall aspects of third.  For me, though, this technique "breaks the fourth wall," to borrow a motion picture term.  That's when Groucho Marx or some other comedian directly addresses the

Groucho, Breaking the Fourth Wall

camera to get a laugh.  ("I have to stay through this, but there's no reason you folks shouldn't leave.")  Breaking the fourth wall reminds the paying customers that they're watching a movie--or in the case of a mystery novel, that they're reading a book.  It can wake the reader up from the continuous dream that the writer works so hard to create.  And this is an even bigger sacrifice in a first person story, since this point-of-view shift can shatter the illusion that a Marlowe is sitting next to you at the bar, telling you his story himself.
   
And that's the great thing about first person, the thing that makes it worth all the effort it takes to stay in character for three hundred pages:  its intimacy.  And it's also the best answer to the charge that first is simplistic.  Creating a character like Marlowe from the inside out, who's familiar to the reader not because of some external trappings but because his inner voice is recognizable and believable and, on some level, not unlike our own, is anything but a simple job.  But if you pull it off, the reward is immortality.


Actually, it isn't.  But you do get to feel like you've done a day's work when you knock off for your martini.  Cheers.