Denise Hamilton: Los Angeles Noir 2

It’s funny how two noir writers share the ultimate biblical bad boy name—Cain. The better-known is James M. Cain, whose novels The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity ooze with sex, murder, and betrayal. The movie adaptations are pretty twisted too—we all know Fred MacMurray’s a goner as soon as Barbara Stanwyck opens that door. In this collection, James M. Cain’s story about a Depression-era hobo riding the rails into town offers an even bleaker take on crime and punishment.

Then there’s “The Night’s for Cryin’” by Chester Himes. Set near historically African American Central Avenue, this story packs more love, brutality, and revenge into five short pages than most 500-page novels.

Throughout this anthology, characters swill bootleg liquor, take bribes, get hooked on morphine, work as grifters, taxi-dancers, and hired guns, hang out at speakeasies and soda fountains, and betray their lovers. Nobody dies naturally.

“Find the Woman,” a story with a strong postwar flavor, provides an early look at another godfather of crime fiction—Ross Macdonald. Some critics argue that Macdonald, who stole his plots from Greek myth, was the best of the bunch. “Find the Woman,” a twisty tale of family secrets and betrayal, introduces the tough yet compassionate private eye who’d earn acclaim in Macdonald’s later novels as Lew Archer.

I’ve also included a tale of dark psychological suspense set in an unnamed L.A. canyon by Macdonald’s equally talented but lamentably lesser known wife Margaret Millar.

The truth is that early noir was a man’s world where sexism prevailed.

All the more impressive, then, that the hard-boiled writing of Leigh Brackett stands up to anything her male contemporaries ever dreamed up. Brackett’s 1949 story “I Feel Bad Killing You” certainly wins the “best title” award. It also includes the most diabolical scene with a cigarette lighter ever written that contains no actual violence. Director Howard Hawks was such a fan that he ordered his secretary to get “this guy Brackett” on board to help William Faulkner write the screenplay to The Big Sleep .” Which Brackett did! She also wrote science fiction and ended her amazing fifty-year career cowriting The Empire Strikes Back for George Lucas.

I was especially interested in stories that reflected the city’s historic diversity. Walter Mosley has written terrific novels about Easy Rawlins, a black, midcentury PI, but the story in this collection features another memorable Mosley character—ex-con and reformed murderer Socrates Fortlow, who lives in a two-room apartment off an alley in Watts.

Naomi Hirahara takes us back to 1949 Terminal Island with “The Chirashi Covenant,” the tale of an adulterous young Japanese American woman who married her husband in a World War II internment camp. As the daughter of an L.A. Harbor fisherman, Helen Miura knows how to gut fish, a skill that finds grisly use before this story ends.

In “The Kerman Kill,” William Campbell Gault introduces an Armenian-American PI with a large, boisterous family who munches lahmajoon and hangs out in his Uncle Vartan’s carpet store. And in 1970, back when homosexuality was still a relatively taboo subject, Joseph Hansen published his first novel about a gay insurance investigator named Dave Brandstetter, who investigates a murder in the story “Surf.”

Moving east, the ever-reliable James Ellroy pens a furious tale of murder and deception in the West Adams district of Los Angeles just after World War II. Ellroy did impeccable historic research, and indeed this entire collection bristles with the evocative slang of various eras: ixnay, coppers, chumps, saps, shivs, cinch, dames, toot sweet, swells, rumdums, rye, and girls who “gargle” champagne.

Inevitably, some of the earlier stories reflect the racism, homophobia, and religious prejudices of their times. But it’s important to remember that crime fiction was the first to liberate language from the parlors of “proper” society.

So what exactly makes a story “classic”? For starters, it has to have a “historic” feel. That’s why I included Kate Braverman’s “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta,” a hallucinogenic, paranoid tale filled with echoes of the Vietnam War.

Jervey Tervalon’s story “Rika” from his novel Understand This is a brilliant depiction of a crack-addled city just before the L.A. riots of 1992. Yxta Maya Murray’s story “Lucía,” excerpted from her powerful and moving novel Locas , recounts a girl gang leader plotting revenge for the shooting of one of her “locas.” Set in the impoverished, as yet ungentrified barrio of 1980s Echo Park, it’s a gritty postcard from the recent past, just before the boho artists and yuppies took over.

With some of these stories, the challenge lay in tracking down the real-life identity of fictional neighborhoods. Is Brackett’s “Surfside” supposed to be Santa Monica? What canyon was Margaret Millar thinking of when she wrote her short story? Is Hansen’s fictional beach community “Surf” a stand-in for Venice?

The sleuthing through old tales, dusty copies of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and long defunct publications like Black Mask provided its own joys. I hope the stories in this volume convey the same thrilling sense of discovery and nostalgia to you, the reader.

Denise Hamilton

Los Angeles, CA

January 2010

PART I

KISS KISS BANG BANG

MURDER IN BLUE

BY PAUL CAIN

Downtown

(Originally published in 1933)

Coleman said: “Eight ball in the corner.”

There was soft click of ball against ball and then sharper click as the black ball dropped into the pocket Coleman had called.

Coleman put his cue in the rack. He rolled down the sleeves of his vividly striped silk shirt and put on his coat and a pearl gray velour hat. He went to the pale fat man who slouched against a neighboring table and took two crisp hundred dollar notes from the fat man’s outstretched hand, glanced at the slim, pimpled youth who had been his opponent, smiled thinly, said: “So long,” went to the door, out into the street.

There was sudden roar from a black, curtained roadster on the other side of the street; the sudden ragged roar of four or five shots close together, a white pulsing finger of flame in the dusk, and Coleman sank to his knees. He swayed backwards once, fell forward onto his face hard; his gray hat rolled slowly across the sidewalk. The roadster was moving, had disappeared before Coleman was entirely still. It became very quiet in the street.

Mazie Decker curved her orange mouth to its best “Customer” smile. She took the little green ticket that the dark-haired boy held out to her and tore off one corner and dropped the rest into the slot. He took her tightly in his arms and as the violins melted to sound and the lights dimmed they swung out across the crowded floor.

Her head was tilted back, her bright mouth near the blue smoothness of his jaw.

She whispered: “Gee—I didn’t think you was coming.”

He twisted his head down a little, smiled at her.

She spoke again without looking at him: “I waited till one o’clock for you last night.” She hesitated a moment then went on rapidly: “Gee—I act like I’d known you for years, an’ it’s only two days. What a sap I turned out to be!” She giggled mirthlessly.

He didn’t answer.

The music swelled to brassy crescendo, stopped. They stood with a hundred other couples and applauded mechanically.

She said: “Gee—I love a waltz! Don’t you?”