When T. Jefferson Parker heard that the argument was going to be made in this article that he is the quintessential California crime fiction writer, he gave a quiet laugh and said, “No pressure. Well, you know, I’ll graciously accept that compliment and note that we would get push back on behalf of certain other writers that we know and love for that title. So accepted and proud, but cautious.” Fair enough.
Since California is a big state with a population of almost 40 million and sometimes it seems as though at least half are writers, we’ll narrow it down to claiming T. Jefferson Parker is the quintessential writer of Southern California crime fiction. And while it might go without saying that there are many, many writers both living and dead with whom he competes, to emphasize how bold and audacious that claim is we should mention a few of them: Raymond Chandler, Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, James Ellroy, Sue Grafton, Rachel Howzell Hall, Denise Hamilton, Naomi Hirahara, Dorothy B. Hughes, Joe Ide, Ross Macdonald, Margaret Millar, Walter Mosley, Kem Nunn and Don Winslow. These writers and many, many more are also quintessential California writers; they have written in and about California, bringing to their characters and their stories of crime all the dark and light, sin and salvation, loss and redemption, love and longing and fear and frustration with which California seems to thrum. That said, the men and women who populate Parker’s novels and the terrain they traverse—from Laguna Beach, Newport and San Diego to Lancaster, El Segundo and Mammoth Lakes—aren’t just in California, they are of California. They couldn’t be anywhere else and be who they are and that sets Parker apart.
There is a stereotype of California crime fiction of the loner, most often a man, who comes to the edge of the continent to find…something or someone and Southern California, more often than not, Los Angeles, is the destination—and that is in no way a disparaging observation because there is phenomenal writing along those lines. In “On the Edge of Nothing,” an essay by Megan Abbott for the Los Angeles Times Magazine, (April 4, 2010) she wrote, “Los Angeles then stands as both the newest of all cities—one supposedly without history, tradition—and the dropping off of the American frontier. Manifest Destiny has reached its endpoint. Instead of finding the promised land, the strivers who populate noir are faced with a never-ending network of modern freeways wrapping around one another in hopeless repetition. …we find characters who move from rural America and small towns across the land, dreaming the Big Dream of Southern California, only to find it a dead end.…”
You don’t have to be a stranger in a strange land to get caught up in California’s noir places, though. California natives are far from immune to their state’s dark side, in fact the press of history can make it even darker. That’s because there’s another stereotype that California struggles with as well: that it is a state without history. That California only sprang into being when James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill on January 24, 1848, a historical irony of the first water since the area that would become the state of California was ceded by Mexico to the United States nine days later, on February 2, 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo—which ended the Mexican American War—was signed in Mexico City.
Characters—like those found in Parker’s novels—and their forebears have borne constant witness to the sins that lurked in the shadows of the sunshiny paradise of the only home they’ve ever known. For Parker’s characters, the dark side of the Golden State isn’t a surprise, it’s a lifelong companion that has shaped them and set them on the course they follow and many of them can be found in his twenty-seven novels, the most recent of which, A Thousand Steps, was published on January 11, 2022.
On December 6, 2021, Jeff Parker joined me from his home in Fallbrook, California via Zoom for a far-ranging discussion of his crime fiction writing in general and A Thousand Steps in particular. A story set in seminal year of 1968 about 15-almost-16-year-old Matt Anthony living and working a paper route in Laguna Beach, with an older brother fighting in Vietnam, a mother who struggles with substance abuse, an absent father and an 18-year-old sister who is missing. Against a backdrop of head shops, drug deals and a police sergeant determined to turn Matt into an informant, Matt takes it upon himself to search for his sister in the face of a maddening nonchalance on the part of most of the Laguna Beach Police Department.
Nancie Clare
A Thousand Steps takes place in 1968—a pivotal year in California, as it was everywhere—in Laguna Beach, California. And while many inside and outside of California thought of Orange County as a Conservative monolith cosseted behind The Orange Curtain, that was far from the truth.
Jeff Parker
My world was little league and junior high school in Tustin. I saw Laguna for the first time around ’68. I would’ve been 14 years old say, [my] mom would drop off me and my brother and a few friends, and we’d body surf, and then we’d go get lunch and hang around and, and just be in Laguna.
And, and was such a fantastically different place for me, for the county. Laguna’s a beautiful place, it’s an art artsy town [with] a lot of artists and galleries, and museums. [In 1968] tens of thousands of hippies drifted down, [after] the catastrophic summer of love in in San Francisco. Laguna became the epicenter for the hippie movement. [There were] strident protests against the Vietnam war and very alert cops—a big police presence.
Nancie Clare
For me 1968 is a study in contrasts; the tipping point where the WWII generation’s hold on society begins to slip. There are just too many of those damn boomers and in 1968, they were young. Now we think of the late 60s as a repressive time, but in reality, especially for teens the age of Matt, it was a time of great freedom.
Jeff Parker
Yeah. We, we did have a lot of freedom. You could get away with a lot more then.
Matt is so comfortable in his own skin and his abilities as a human. He knows he’s young, but he doesn’t think he’s incompetent. He continues to live in the rental house he shared with his mother, his sister, Jazz, and his brother who’s fighting in Vietnam. He’s just doing his paper route, making money, fishing for food. He is essentially functioning as an adult. It’s not how some people remember the sixties and not how our children were raised. We remember the kinds of things we got up to!
One of the things I like about Matt is he’s growing up on the wrong side of the tracks, if there is such a thing in Laguna beach, I mean, he’s one step away from being homeless. His mom basically ditches him. His sister’s in the wind, his brother’s in Vietnam and his dad’s in Texas. Matt doesn’t have a whole lot going on for him, besides his paper route. He’s going through a growth spurt; he’s always hungry. And he’s one step out of the dumpster. He actually thinks about going to the dumpster a couple times in the book because he’s running out of food. But he has a buddy who works at the Hotel Laguna washing dishes and Matt can go to the back door there and his friend will give him leftovers. And so I like the idea that Matt’s one step away from being homeless. He actually is homeless towards the end of the book. He has nowhere to go. All, all he has is [his] van and the cops are looking for the van and everybody’s after him.
Nancie Clare
The Pageant of the Masters, a tableau vivant—people recreating works of art with breathtaking accuracy—which is an annual event in Laguna Beach, takes place during that summer and you’ve included it in the book. If The Pageant of the Masters hadn’t actually been a real thing you would’ve had to invent something like that as a metaphor: this idea of life imitating art. Tableau Vivant is nothing new, they’ve been going on for hundreds of years. But it’s the old-fashioned, high-art concept of the Pageant of the Masters contrasted against a psychedelic Laguna Beach in 1968 when the whole world seems to be turning on its head, is so stark. But Matt, a talented artist himself, is completely absorbed in it. I though including The Pageant of the Masters in the story shone like a gem—the kind of gleaming light that you often include in your stories.
Jeff Parker
When I was working on the book, I knew that I wanted to put the Pageant of the Masters in there because I wanted to have the girl Matt has a crush on in that pageant somehow. I needed a painting or a sculpture with a female figure in it that she could be. I was looking at old programs from the Pageant to see which paintings they’d done and I thought, God, any of these things would be great. I liked this Gauguin, “When Will You Marry?,” I’m gonna pick that! All of the attendant reasons why that’s such a cool painting and how it perfectly dovetails with the themes of the book was a complete accident. I didn’t realize any of that until I went to write the scene and go, oh, well, that’s what’s going on. It didn’t have to be Gauguin just pure luck as a lot of writing is. You see something, you observe something, or you get a notion and it seems so right. So you put it in and you don’t realize till later why you did that. It’s kind of fun.
Nancie Clare
I don’t know about luck. I think it’s something in the subconscious; part of your great random access memory
Jeff Parker
There is some sneaky kind subconscious guidance going on there, or a little, little alarm going on saying, keep this, keep this. Yeah.
Nancie Clare
I want to go back to why I think you are the quintessential California crime fiction writer, and specifically Southern California’s quintessential crime fiction writer. Years ago, Megan Abbott wrote an essay for the LA Times Magazine on what makes California and Southern California specifically such prime real estate for noir and crime fiction. She wrote that Los Angeles stands as the newest of American cities, supposedly without history and tradition—the dropping off of the American frontier. This was an underpinning of undoubtedly great crime fiction writers in the noir tradition: Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Dorothy Hughes, and many more both living and dead. But I see a difference in your work though, it’s noir— I’m not sure I read anything much darker than Silent Joe, unless it’s some of the characters in the Charlie Hood series—but your characters are of Southern California, not just in it. And there are demons here and they are not just bad actors. They are literally, and figurative, demons rushing into your fiction. Can you talk about how your characters including Matt Anthony are of Southern California, not just in Southern California.
Jeff Parker
I’ve always, always pulled heavily on what I see and what I know in my writing. I don’t venture far from my own eyeballs and my own experience in creating stories and characters. So, it’s no accident that a lot of the main characters I write about are of the state —they’re born here and they’re Californians. That’s what I see around me. And that’s how I’ve lived my life. I like the notion that the land, that California, works upon the characters the same way that New York works upon New Yorkers, but it’s a very different way.
I’ve always thought that the historyless-ness of LA is not true. I like mining that, I think there’s endless material here. People always ask me ‘when you gonna set a book somewhere else?’ and I think ‘the answer’s never,’ I can’t. I’ll set scenes in Mexico and Arizona, but California’s my beat. I feel very vested here.
We’ve talked about this before. I mean, I was born here. I’ll probably die here and be buried here. I’ve raised family here. I’ve been married twice here. I’ve buried loved ones here and raised kids and all that. I feel a part of, and I feel like I understand California, at least from my point of view, as well as anyone else does. And I feel qualified to write about it. I don’t feel like I’m having to invent the characters and the psyches and the events and the things around me in my books. I feel like they’re there to be observed. And I’ve felt for a long time, several of my books are literally born of the city where I happened to be living at the time: A Thousand Steps was born of my time in Laguna.
I wrote a book called Full Measure, which was a coming-home-from-the-war story about the Marines coming back from Afghanistan set here in Fallbrook, because Fallbrook is right next door to Camp Pendleton. I had to write about those times and those people and those things, because that’s what I’m surrounded with. It’s funny, you know, being a writer, you wake up in the morning and you go out and you do your thing, and then you go downtown and run your errands and stuff. And you realize that if you choose to be writing about your place, you’re literally surrounded by material on every block, on the way into Fallbrook to pick up my groceries offers a possible story. It’s right there, Laguna’s the same way. I mean, look at A Thousand Steps. I mean, there’s a thousand little stories in that, but that all were born of that place. And so anyway, I love inhabiting where I am and some kind of loose, maybe kind of romantic way, I think all of my novels have been a form of a love letter to whatever town they take place in. Certainly A Thousand Steps was for Laguna Beach.
