It’s no accident that Los Angeles is the ultimate home for unmoored detectives—even on a good day, the Big Orange is a noir maze of jungle U-turns, glamor facades, and keen disconnection. The place also just happens to be the unofficial hurricane eye of the record biz, and it played a central role in the development of 20th century pop every step of the way…from the crackling exuberance of the studio musicals to the bop sweat of Central Ave, Hermosa’s cool jazz scene, the hot wax AM radio revolution of Capitol Records and Gold Star Studios, the teenybopper invasion of the Sunset Strip, and beyond.
That’s why it’s no surprise that some captivating novels have been written about the heady intersection of mystery and music here in Tinseltown. As Jim Morrison succinctly put it on the Doors’ “L.A. Woman,” the place is hipped on “motel money murder madness”—the ultimate noir shorthand.
With all of the above in mind, here are five classics that put the melody in mystery and take it to the sunbaked mean streets.
James M. Cain’s hard-hitting trifecta—The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce—are practically the holy writ of hardboiled. Lesser known is his equally strong SERENADE, all about John Howard Sharp, a down-on-his-luck opera singer lost in Hollywood, forced to work the nightclubs for $7.50 a pop. When a lead singer at the Hollywood Bowl falls apart, Sharp steps in, rocks the house, and is handed a movie studio contract. No surprise: it’s not the dream ticket he expected, and when New York’s Metropolitan comes calling, the studio bosses lawyer up to block. All of Cain’s big themes are here—ambition, desperation, betrayal, subterfuge—along with one of the frankest looks at sexual identity anyone could read in 1938. Also no surprise: The book was condemned.
Time Magazine called Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 “a metaphysical thriller in the form of a pornographic comic strip.” Actually, it just might be the true psychedelic fiction masterpiece of the Sixties. When Oedipa Maas, bored wife of a disc jockey, is assigned the role of executor of an ex-lover’s estate, she heads for the fictional SoCal town of San Narciso and plunges into an affair with a former child actor named Metzger. Oedipa and Metzger are hounded by local teenage rockers The Paranoids—a hilariously letter-perfect Surf City group circa ‘65 that gets my vote for best fictional band ever. They fake British accents, pose with extreme disaffection, but still take the time to set up their drum kit on the motel pool’s diving board! The Paranoids are like sirens, drawing Oedipa into a head-snapping mystery littered with half-clues. She herself starts to unravel as she unearths—she thinks—a secret society born of a centuries-old war between two mail distribution companies. The very finest in conspiratainment!
Speaking of L.A. in the freak-out Sixties, nobody has ever taken a more sobering look at it than the great Walter Mosley, in one of his many Easy Rawlins masterpieces, Little Green. The book starts with Easy half-comatose after a near fatal car crash, but just as soon as he steps off his sick bed, he slips, like Alice falling up, into a new Wonderland, the dizzying world of hippie counterculture. Easy’s assignment: find Evander Noon, a young Black man who has gone missing while up on the Sunset Strip checking out some rock bands. Reading Little Green, I couldn’t help but reflect on Arthur Lee and Johnny Echols, Black heroes of the band Love, and the insidious way that L.A.’s invisible color line has always tried in vain to keep worlds apart.
Cut to the 1990s: both the Strip and the record biz had inflated into revolting, bloated monsters, doling out million-dollar contracts to every slime-o with a shaggy haircut, leather pants, and a coke-laced snarl. Elmore Leonard’s Be Cool captures the atmosphere of glam excess and multi-platinum daydreams at a dozen wisecracks per page. Get Shorty’s loan shark Chili Palmer has returned, fresh from the movie biz, and he’s ready to cancel hip-hop debts with bare fists and take over rock star contracts faster than you can say “Walter Yetnikoff.” But Be Cool is more than hilarious, more than a caper. In its knuckle-cracking ferocity, it exposes, once and for all, the gangster heart that has always beat in the chest of the music biz.
Last but not least, in the just republished after 40 years out of print department, Joyce Carol Oates’s astonishing The Triumph of the Spider Monkey is the tale of singer-songwriter Bobbie Gotteson, a refugee of foster homes and detention centers, who makes his way to Hollywood on guts, talent, and murderous rage, all the while composing tunes in his head, including “The Ballad of Jack Ruby.” Somewhere in the flickering uncanny valley between Horatio Alger and Charles Manson, Gotteson is a slick tatterdemalion, winning hearts and then hacking them up with a machete. You want noir? This one’s jet-black and creeeeepy, recounted in a kind of junk sculpture of consciousnesses where perp and vic and headlines are one, and the effect is as nerve-rattling, and as moving, as a mod Faulkner. WITNESSES DISAGREE. KILLER’S DESCRIPTION UNCERTAIN.
Bonus track: Adam Graham over at the awesome Great Detectives of Old Time Radio hipped me to this rare episode of Jeff Regan, Investigator — “The Sweet Smell of Magnolias”—another great intersection of Hollywood, music, and crime. In this organ-pumping melodrama, country-boy songwriter Wellington Butterfield tries in vain to write a pop hit in a desperate attempt to hang on to his wayward wife, the irresistible niteklub performer Sue Butterfield. Wellington’s best tune—”Bluebonnets Blooming in Texas“—is cringey of course, but P.I. Jeff Regan is a gas, a gumshoe in the classic hard-jaw style. Dig his description of Butterfield’s office: “I drove out to Hollywood and the Johnson Building—two stories of old stucco covered with more coats of paint than there were tenants. The Johnson Building used to be a movie studio, then studio dressing rooms. Now: tiny cement offices with skylights and battered doors…I went up, dodged the rooftop ventilators, the broken glass from windows that hadn’t been repaired since Metro met Goldwyn.” Later, after hearing people talk about Sue, Regan cracks, “She sounded like a candidate for Miss Mortuary of 1950”!
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