Listen: Los Angeles is the Great American City. It’s America with the volume turned all the way up, so the speakers blow and your ears hurt – but it’s beautiful too. It might not be the “Real America” of a reactionary’s dreams, but it’s the America of the Real – it’s all cars and real estate and illusions and lies, it’s people of every color, it’s money and poverty, it’s celebrity and pollution. It’s the place where Westward Expansion smacks up against the Pacific Ocean. It’s America with its back to the wall.
Noir is one of the great American art forms, so it only follows that LA would be the epicenter of crime fiction. We all know the greats, from Chandler and Hughes to too many film noirs to list to Chinatown to Ellroy’s masterworks. But it’s time to name the new classics, a canon for what is happening now and for what is happening next. When I wrote my new novel EVERYBODY KNOWS, I wanted it to be part of the new LA canon, the story of Los Angeles that is happening right now.
Here’s a multi-media list of works to help bring the LA Crime Canon up to date. (A list like this could go on forever, and could mention the mysteries of Joe Ide and Rachel Howzell Hall, Michael Connolly and his 30-year-and-counting project of telling the story of LAPD cop Harry Bosch, the music of all the hip-hop storytellers like Nipsey Hussle and Drakeo the Ruler, movies like Training Day …).
Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha
Cha’s compelling standalone novel explores the fraught relationship between Los Angeles’ Black and Korean communities, a soured relationship that stretches back decades and played a large part in the LA Riots of the 90s. Cha fictionalizes the real-life murder of Latasha Harlins in order to tel the story of two families, one Black and one Korean-American, who must confront the violence of their shared past. Stories about how different races try and fail to co-exist under white supremacy is a vital and complex part of LA history, and Cha plunges into it with open eyes and telling perceptions.
Neon Demon – Directed by Nicholas Winding Refn
The title says it all – everything is beautiful in this movie, and everything is cursed. The story of a wannabe model who gets thrown in the deep end (literally) of the LA modeling world, Refn’s film is hypnotic, strange, gorgeous and violent. It is about the power of the gaze and the power of the gazed upon, with an undertone of horrific violence and a final scene that is sure to infuriate those who like a nice, tidy ending. But if you turn out the lights and crank up the Cliff Martinez soundtrack, you’ll be subjected to one hell of a dream/nightmare. (Refn also made the spectacular LA crime drama Drive).
The Damned Lovely by Adam Frost
The city of Glendale is the setting for perhaps the greatest film noir of all time, Double Indemnity. In Adam Frost’s terrific first novel The Damned Lovely, Glendale is a place of also-rans and good-enoughs, a place that is, like the titular bar, shabby and comfortable as an old t-shirt, far from the chafing high fashion of the Sunset Strip. Frost paints a portrait of the Los Angeles that most art ignores, lingering not in the gutters or the mansions but in the Los Angeles of strip malls and corner bars. Frost uses sharp prose to tell a tale about the one thing everyone in Los Angeles has: desire. Desire for truth, for justice, for love, or maybe just a place to call home.
Heat directed by Michael Mann
Michael Mann’s greatest film, and perhaps the definitive crime epic of the post-Godfather era, travels from one end of Los Angeles to the other, from DeNiro’s icy Malibu home to the freeways to underground Koreatown bars. From swooping helicopter shots to in-the-streets gunfights, Mann uses Los Angeles to its fullest extent. Heat has inspired fandom and study to an amazing degree, including a podcast, One Heat Minute, which dedicated a full episode to each and every single minute of the film with host Blake Howard and a legion of obsessed fans (including myself – I guested on the podcast multiple times).
Complicit by Winnie M Li
The Hollywood of your imagination is not a geographic place (the real Hollywood is a grimy tourist trap), it is a state of mind, and while Li’s novel spends much of its time in New York City, it’s a novel about making movies, about power and dreams, and about men who use their status to prey on women … in other words, this is an LA story, no matter where it takes place. Li, a fierce advocate for sexual assault victims, understands the power dynamics and structures that have allowed the movie industry to become a haven for very bad men. Although it is fiction, Complicit tells the real story of what happens behind the scenes better than many reported pieces.
The Shield created by Shawn Ryan
The Shield is the best TV show of all time, an intricate, pulpy story of violence and power in policing, centering around sociopathic detective Vic Mackey and his team of dirty cops. This is no copaganda. The show is morally grey, not afraid to paint complicated pictures, and none of the cops at the center of the story could be considered “good,” even if they sometimes do good things. The show has aged terrifically, delivering both episodic storytelling and a overarching story arc that is unmatched on television. It’s hyperbolic vision of Los Angeles competes with Ellroy in its lunacy and its accuracy.
Grand Theft Auto V by Rockstar Games
While in typical Grand Theft Auto style, Los Angeles is fictionalized into the massive city of Los Santos, it remains perhaps the most epic Los Angeles crime story yet conceived. Leave aside the storyline, familiar characters and broad satire – where else can you carjack a cop in front of the Beverly Center and lead the police on a chase to LAX where you can steal a jet and then skydive into the Salton Sea? The massiveness of Los Santos presents a Los Angeles that surpasses the breadth and depth of any fictional representation of the city.
***
