June 11, 2007
Living & Dying in L.A.
Los Angeles Noir. By Denise HamiltonDenise Hamilton mentions in her introduction to "Los Angeles Noir," that she was surprised there hasn't been a collection of stories set in L.A. before. You'd think the town that's ground zero to noir, the city whose geography, second to New York City, is as familiar to most Americans as their hometown, would be a natural subject for a collection. Maybe it didn't occur to anyone. Maybe even at Akashic Books, since this is the 13th book in their Noir series. Even a book of stories set in Minneapolis-St. Paul was published before this one. Has L.A. fallen that much on hard times? And wouldn't that be just as noir as you could get?
But that's been rectified, so let's get down to the consumer info. "Los Angeles Noir" consists of 17 stories, divvied up into four parts (Police & Thieves, Hollywoodlandia, East of La Cienega and The Gold Coast). Each story is set in a different locale, and there's even a cool map to show you just how spaced out everything is: from the Pacific Palisades, where Scott Phillips set his tale of the fading actress/cocktail waitress, the perverted music producer and the bartender who's in over his head; to Belmont Shore to the south, where Robert Ferrigno tells of a home invasion going violently wrong for all the right reasons.
The stories are uniformly good, full of fine phrases and sharply observed landscapes:
* Emory Holmes II's story of drugs, rappers, double-crossers and vengeance is reminiscent of "The Maltese Falcon." ("How can you do this to me?" / "It's a gift.")
* Michael Connelly gets the star turn with his story of an accident reconstructionist working the edges on Mulholland Drive, interweaved with the small details of police work that the former reporter does so well: "the victim was a name and the case was going five-by-five. That meant everything about it had to be squared away and done right."
* Neal Pollack does a fine job creating on paper the flop sweat of a hack screenwriter encountering Russian thugs in the gambling dens of the City of Commerce, a city that looked like any other city: "the empty concrete lots, smokestacks, and the shoddy public parks call Gary, Indiana to mind."
* I particularly loved Patt Morrison's debut of Minerva Quires, the rare Beverly Hills native who knows where the bodies are buried and can dissect the 90210 like Jane Goodall does the apes, in part with the help of the Cleaning Lady Mafia:
On their long bus rides from Boyle Heights or Van Nuys, they have plenty of time to compare notes on their employers. What arcane plastic surgery Senora Tiffany treated herself to as a reward for hosting that godawful celebrity charity golf tournament. What little tattletale item Senor Roberto forgot to take out of the pocket of his Sea Island cotton shirt before dumping it in the hamper. Why they haven't written their own nanny diaries, I don't know, except that their idea of celebrity runs to the blondined spitfires on the Mexican telenovela soap operas, not some knotty-calved, tennis-playing billionaire studio mogul whose face they've never even seen on Telemundo.A sharp agent could build a series around her.
* In addition to editing the book, Hamilton contributed the twisted tale of the kidnaped Chinese CEO, a safe full of valuable silicon chips — "a negotiable tender akin to diamonds, gold bullion, heroin, C4 and enriched uranium" — and a particularly nasty double-cross.
* But Lienna Silver's "Fish" resonates most, with its story of elderly Russian immigrants washed ashore the Pacific Coast by history. We follow a day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, who, like the Solzhenitsyn character he's named after, feels trapped in a beautiful world that holds no references to him. "This country gave him everything he could dream of, except he never dreamed of it." Like good fiction should, "Fish" makes us understand what do not instinctively feel, how prosperity can be confining when it's divorced from your past. Looking at his apartment, with his new-bought furnishings, he reflects "Nothing had any history of his life imprinted on it; nothing held memory for him. It was all new and alien, and still smelled of fresh composition board. What was there to say?"
Summarizing "Los Angeles Noir" is impossible. There's 17 writers, 17 stories, set in 17 locations. The characters are mostly white, but there's also Korean masseuses, Russian immigrants, Chicano kids, black rappers, Russian gangsters. Crime is the unifying theme, and most of the protagonists come to a bad end, as noir demands. It may be that the only connection among them is the fact that there is no connection. Almost everyone comes from somewhere and is going somewhere, but they don't realize that they're really heading nowhere. Until it's too late, of course.
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