Jonathan Santlofer - L.A. Noire - The Collected Stories

That’s the thoroughly noir real-world backdrop against which the stories of L.A. Noire unfold, and although Cole isn’t assigned the Dahlia case itself, many of the cases Cole does investigate are ripped straight from the headlines of the day. You’ll get to examine that lipstick-smeared corpse yourself—better have a strong stomach. And lest you think that catching a latter-day Jack the Ripper is all you have to do to earn your pay, rest assured that Cole Phelps’s workday is a long and full one. There are arsons and explosions to look into, vice cases involving fixed boxing matches and reefer peddling (Medical marijuana… Medical marijuana…), hit-and-run cases that hide sordid marital infidelities… oh, and some cases that are tied directly to the film business, though the films involved might not be the sort you’d find playing at your local theater.

Depends on your neighborhood, I guess.

These, then, are the stories in the game, and a satisfyingly sordid lot they are. But the Rockstar crew wanted to go even further on the storytelling front, wanted to give players an extra treat while also tipping their hats to the literary element that has always been central to the world of noir. What they did was invite some of the most acclaimed living practitioners of the noir storytelling art—literary figures such as Joyce Carol Oates and Francine Prose, giants of the crime-writing world such as Lawrence Block and Andrew Vachss, award winners and stylistic innovators and cross-genre geniuses such as Joe Lansdale and Megan Abbott, Jonathan Santlofer and Duane Swierczynski—to each write a new short story inspired by the world of L.A. Noire . Some of the stories use particular cases from the game as a jumping-off point, others simply share the game’s setting and era and spirit—but they all give you a view of humanity in extremis, of the beaten-down and those who savagely dole out the beatings, and of the thin blue line that tries, not always successfully and not always in ways that are strictly legal, to stand between the two.

It is perhaps worth noting that, to the best of my knowledge, not a single one of these authors lives in L.A. The closest is probably Joe Lansdale, who lives in Texas; otherwise it’s a bunch of New Yorkers, a Philly boy, a Jersey girl.

Doesn’t matter. L.A. is where you come to drink at the weathered bar with Chandler’s ghost—to luxuriate in the shadows, to walk the mean streets, to remember, if you’re a noir writer, where it is you came from. In its way, what Rockstar has done is invite eight of the finest writers in the business to a dinner at Musso & Frank—and what a feast it is.

So: tuck in. Napkin in the shirt collar, knife and fork at the ready—you’re going to be served a rich and subtle and darkly delicious meal, savory in its unsavoriness. Just keep your wits about you. It takes a while to finish an eight-course meal, and it’s getting dark out there. By the time you step out onto Hollywood Boulevard again, there could be some dangerous souls sharing the street with you. And, yes, those are police sirens you hear in the distance—but if there’s one thing L.A. Noire teaches us, it’s that the police don’t always make it to the scene in time.

The house was famous. A Mayan fortress made of ferroconcrete blocks stacked like teeth. A powerful man lived there. June had heard of it long before this, her first introduction.

The talent agent who brought June called it the Shark House.

It was in Los Feliz and you could drive by a hundred times and miss it. But once you saw it, you couldn’t turn it away. There were no windows. The tiny lawn sloped up, feathered with ivy that looked red in the strange light. It was a house that seemed to hold things inside. You felt you might be walking into a maw. You were.

“Huston will be here,” the agent said. “ Key Largo . The part’s perfect for you.”

“Claire Trevor’s got it sewn up between her thighs,” June said softly, looking up at the house from the open door of the agent’s middling car. “Ten years, every bed I land in is still warm from her.”

“She’s not married to Guy,” the agent pointed out.

“You can see how far that’s got me,” June said.

The agent was very young, with a scruff of dandelion hair, a splashy tie, and shiny cheeks. She almost wanted to take a bite out of him. Then spit him out.

There were always young men like this and, for a decade or more, they’d look at the line of June’s bust and her slanting smile and figure maybe they could sell her. But she looked in the mirror and saw everything.

Two years ago, she’d married Guy, who ran sports book on the West Side for Mickey Cohen and liked to trot her up and down the Strip, his “actress wife.”

Now, the talent agents saw different kind of possibilities in June, different ways to lay odds. They knew producers cast actresses for all kinds of reasons, including big vigs they needed to pay off, big secrets they needed to hide. Sure, her carnival days might be over, but she may still have sheen left, they told her.

But June had long given up on sheen. She wanted a job.

“What does it matter?” her friend Gladys asked. “You married the honeypot. Just slip on your silver mink, prop your feet up, and listen to Dick Haymes all day.”

Sometimes she considered it.

But June held onto a few small things from when she first came to the City of Dreams. A button from her baby brother’s shoe, her first pair of silk stockings, and a deeply felt longing to show someone something sometime. Something inside her that no one else had ever seen. All these years of lifted skirts and pearl-mouthed hangovers hadn’t scrubbed that yearning away. It was her favorite part of herself and she would not let it go.

When June was young, before her father left the first time, before he became a forgotten man and ended up in Chicago and married a hotelier’s daughter, a bigamist in three states, by her mother’s count, he would pull her on his lap and read her stories from a big book with crumbling foiled edges she liked to touch while he read.

She would lie against his humming chest and watch the gold dust gather on her fingertips.

The story she always remembered, her favorite, was the one about the miller who had fallen on hard times. One day, the devil approached him in the woods and promised the miller all the riches in the world in return for what stood behind his mill. The miller, knowing all that lay behind the mill was a gnarled old apple tree, eagerly agreed. What he did not realize was that his beloved daughter, at that moment, was standing behind the mill, sweeping the yard. And now she was the devil’s own.

It was a long story, with many turns, and June couldn’t remember all of it, but she did remember this: the devil tries to take the daughter but is unable to because she is pure. He tells the miller that he must chop off her hands. The miller cries and cries and his daughter hears him. The daughter, who loved her father, held out her hands.

“Dear father,” she said, “do with me what you will.”

At this point, June’s father always lifted his hand and dropped it on June’s tiny wrists and laughed. They both laughed, maybe.

“That’s a terrible story,” her mother would say, from the laundry tub.

“It is,” her father would reply. “But she loves it.”

As they walked up the pathway to the house, the fleshy succulents tingling around them, the air itself changed, became wet and thick and scented. The leaves curled against June’s face, cradling her with long fingers.