Los Angeles Noir 2 Read online

  This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2010 Akashic Books

  Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple

  Los Angeles map by Sohrab Habibion

  ISBN-13: 978-1-936070-02-2

  e-ISBN: 9781617752209

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2009911099

  All rights reserved | First printing

  Akashic Books | PO Box 1456 | New York, NY 10009

  [email protected] | www.akashicbooks.com

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the stories in this anthology. “Murder in Blue” by Paul Cain was originally published in Black Mask (June 1933) as “Murder Done in Blue,” © 1933 by Pro-Distributors Publishing Co., Inc., renewed © 1961 by Popular Publications, Inc., assigned to Keith Alan Deutsch, publisher and proprietor of Black Mask Magazine; “I Feel Bad Killing You” by Leigh Brackett was originally published in New Detective Magazine (November 1944), © 1944 by Leigh Brackett, reprinted by permission of the Huntington National Bank for the Estate of Leigh Brackett, c/o Spectrum Literary Agency; “Dead Man” by James M. Cain was originally published in the American Mercury (March 1936), © 1963 by James M. Cain, reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates, Inc.; “The Night’s for Cryin’” by Chester Himes was originally published in Esquire (January 1937), licensed here from The Collected Stories of Chester Himes, © 1990 by Lesley Himes, reprinted by permission of Da Capo/Thunder’s Mouth, a member of Perseus Book Group; “Find the Woman” by Ross Macdonald was originally published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (June 1946), © 1973 by the Margaret Millar Charitable Remainder Unitrust u/a 12 April 1982, reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates, Inc.; “The Chirashi Covenant” by Naomi Hirahara was originally published in A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female Noir (Houston: Busted Flush Press, 2007), © 2007 by Naomi Hirahara; “High Darktown” by James Ellroy was originally published in The New Black Mask No. 5 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), © 1986 by James Ellroy; “The People Across the Canyon” by Margaret Millar was originally published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (October 1962), © 1990 by the Margaret Millar Charitable Remainder Unitrust u/a 12 April 1982, reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates, Inc.; “Surf” by Joseph Hansen was originally published in Playguy (January 1976), © 1976 by Joseph Hansen, reprinted by permission of Johnson & Alcock Literary Agency; “The Kerman Kill” by William Campbell Gault was originally published in Murder in Los Angeles (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1987), © 1987 by William Campbell Gault, reprinted by permission of Shelley Gault; “Crimson Shadow” by Walter Mosley was originally published in Edward Hopper and the American Imagination (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1995), © 1995 by Walter Mosley, reprinted by permission of the Watkins/Loomis Agency, Inc.; “Rika” (excerpted from the novel Understand This) by Jervey Tervalon was originally published by William Morrow & Co., in 1994, © 1994 by Jervey Tervalon; “Lucía” (excerpted from the novel Locas) by Yxta Maya Murray was originally published by Grove Press, in 1997, © 1997 by Yxta Maya Murray, reprinted by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.; “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta” by Kate Braverman was originally published in Squandering the Blue: Stories (New York: Fawcett, 1990), © 1990 by Kate Braverman.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  PART I: KISS KISS BANG BANG

  PAUL CAIN

  Downtown

  Murder in Blue

  1933

  LEIGH BRACKETT

  Santa Monica

  I Feel Bad Killing You

  1944

  JAMES M. CAIN

  San Fernando

  Dead Man

  1936

  CHESTER HIMES

  South Los Angeles

  The Night’s for Cryin’

  1937

  PART II: AFTER THE WAR

  ROSS MACDONALD

  Beverly Hills

  Find the Woman

  1946

  NAOMI HIRAHARA

  Terminal Island

  The Chirashi Covenant

  2007

  JAMES ELLROY

  West Adams

  High Darktown

  1986

  PART III: KILLER VIEWS

  MARGARET MILLAR

  L.A. Canyon

  The People Across the Canyon

  1962

  JOSEPH HANSEN

  Venice

  Surf

  1976

  WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT

  Pacific Palisades

  The Kerman Kill

  1987

  PART IV: MODERN CLASICS

  WALTER MOSLEY

  Watts

  Crimson Shadow

  1995

  JERVEY TERVALON

  Baldwin Hills

  Rika

  1994

  YXTA MAYA MURRAY

  Echo Park

  Lucía

  1997

  KATE BRAVERMAN

  Bel Air

  Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta

  1990

  Acknowledgments

  About the Contributors

  INTRODUCTION

  TOILING IN THE DREAM FACTORY

  Los Angeles is a young city. As recently as the 1860s, it was still a dusty Spanish pueblo where the Zanjero who regulated the water flow from the L.A. River earned more than the mayor.

  Unlike the eastern seaboard, whose world of arts and letters predates the American Revolution, Los Angeles literature bloomed late. But our scant history and tradition freed us up to create new myths. We made it up as we went along.

  Visiting writers were both intrigued and appalled. They praised the city’s golden light and stunning landscapes while damning its vulgarity, hedonism, and the surreal spectacle of Hollywood.

  But love it or hate it, they came to toil in the Dream Factory.

  Los Angeles was the most alluring femme fatale imaginable, dangling glittering wealth and reinvention. In return, all she wanted was a little wordsmithing. How difficult could it be?

  And so they came—Cornell Woolrich, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Norman Mailer, James M. Cain, Chester Himes, Horace McCoy, Paul Cain, Dorothy Parker, and Ernest Hemingway. They were miserable, of course, punching studio clocks and having their work rewritten by less talented writers.

  Luckily for us, many used their sunny new digs as settings for fiction. Some of what they wrote, including Fitzgerald’s nuanced Hollywood stories, aren’t noir enough for this anthology. Others are too long, such as McCoy’s dark masterpiece “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” set amidst a 1930s dance marathon on the Santa Monica pier.

  But many of the genre’s masters have sidled into this anthology. Perhaps the hardest-boiled of them all is Paul Cain, whose prose explodes like a bullet from a bootlegger’s gun. When not scripting for Hollywood under the name Peter Ruric, Cain wrote stories for trailblazing noir showcase Black Mask magazine and a novel, Fast One, before fading into alcoholic obscurity and dying forgotten in a shabby Hollywood apartment in 1966.

  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 standin 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?”

  He nodded briefly and as the orchestra bellowed to a moaning foxtrot he took her again in his arms and they circled towards the far end of the floor.

  “Let’s get out of here, kid.” He smiled a thin line against the whiteness of his skin, his large eyes half closed.

  She said: “All right—only let’s try to get out without the manager seeing me. I’m supposed to work till eleven.”

  They parted at one of the little turnstiles; he got his hat and coat from the check-room, went downstairs and got his car from a parking station across the street.

  When she came down he had double-parked near the entrance. He honked his horn and held the door open for her as she trotted breathlessly out and climbed in beside him. Her eyes were very bright and she laughed a little hysterically.

  “The manager saw me,” she said. “But I said I was sick—an’ it worked.” She snuggled up close to him as he swung the car into Sixth Street. “Gee—what a swell car!”

  He grunted affirmatively and they went out Sixth a block or so in silence.

  As they turned north on Figue
roa she said: “What’ve you got the side curtains on for? It’s such a beautiful night.”

  He offered her a cigarette and lighted one for himself and leaned back comfortably in the seat.

  He said: “I think it’s going to rain.”

  It was very dark at the side of the road. A great pepper tree screened the roadster from whatever light there was in the sky.

  Mazie Decker spoke softly: “Angelo. Angelo—that’s a beautiful name. It sounds like angel.”

  The dark youth’s face was hard in the narrow glow of the dashlight. He had taken off his hat and his shiny black hair looked like a metal skullcap. He stroked the heel of his hand back over one ear, over the oily blackness, and then he took his hand down and wriggled it under his coat. His other arm was around the girl.

  He took his hand out of the darkness of his coat and there was brief flash of bright metal; the girl said: “My God!” slowly and put her hands up to her breast….

  He leaned in front of her and pressed the door open and as her body sank into itself he pushed her gently and her body slanted, toppled through the door, fell softly on the leaves beside the road. Her sharp breath and a far quavering “Ah!” were blotted out as he pressed the starter and the motor roared; he swung the door closed and put on his hat carefully, shifted gears and let the clutch in slowly.

  As he came out of the darkness of the dirt road on to the highway he thrust one hand through a slit in the side-curtain, took it in and leaned forward over the wheel.