L.A. is the perpetual dark heart of crime writing | Hacker News Reader

L.A. is the perpetual dark heart of crime writing

latimes.com

41 pointssamclemens26 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20191020022021/https://www.latim...

I haven't read much L.A. based crime, tbh, but it's nice to see noir / pulp draw its fans in. I'm one, 100%.

My man for urban street crime is George Pelecanos. I think I've read damn near all his stuff. His prose hits all the notes to convey an era, a mood. And the plots are excellent and I like his protagonists. Most settings are Baltimore/D.C., from where he hails. Good stuff.

<would not consider downstream posts with fave authors off-topic even if they didn't RTFA (I did, first, honest).> [edit: I transplanted to LA around the 2nd bubble pop, just random timing]

Didn't know this name. I just learned that he was a co-writer for the TV series "The Deuce". Very interesting

I would guess that one factor is Hollywood acting as an incubator for up-and-coming writers - the article hints as much.

I think Los Angeles with its myriad of personalities, neighborhoods, and cultures, makes an excellent setting for crime writing. I’m reading the latest Michael Connelly right now and it’s just fascinating learning more about Los Angeles.

It helps that huge segments of the city are basically expensive ghettos with storied histories of racial tensions, crime, gangs, and drugs. And it doesn't hurt that the LAPD has such a bad reputation. It really is an easy place to set a crime story and have it still be believable.

Let's not forget Florida - or is its problem that reality sometimes strains credibility?.

But why not Chicago?

Chicago is good for run-of-the-mill / noir crime stories, but the audience for those is limited. LA is a weird place in that pretty much anything crime-related is actually plausible, so the potential breadth of stories is a lot bigger. You could make a story about a group of Croatian street dancers laundering dirty Persian money through Venice beach dispensaries using couriers on electric scooters to move cash around and I would actually believe that's a thing that could be happening right now.

Your example really amuses me and reminded me of the famous and real Zankou Chicken Murders: https://www.lamag.com/longform/the-zankou-chicken-murders/

What does Chicago have? Banks?

Lots of mob and machine politics and run of the mill crime good for pulpy novels.

Yeah, bigcorps, corruption, and a big shiny ball.

L.A. has serial killers, disaffected body builders, criminal surfer gangs, kung fu sidekicks, crooked magicians, new age cults, disgruntled aerospace employees, gratuitously wealthy people, pornographers, and loads of driftwood in orbit around Hollywood, flitting from project to project. Chicago has Catholics and Perogies.

Any crime story set in Chicago could be better done in New York or Philadelphia.

That is one interesting and reductionist take on Chicago. The south and west sides of the city are cultural melting pots. The north side also has its ethnic enclaves. I am not defending Chicago but as the only other true metropolis outside of NYC, its more than the two things you listed. The architecture alone gives a great backdrop to any story.

It certainly is reductionist!

Chicago is far more diverse than that. There's a huge black community. There's a gigantic Puerto Rican and Latin American population. A sizeable Asian community. Hipsters. A steady influx of wide eyed Midwestern kids arriving every fall. There's plenty to write about, like a corn fed Americana noir (if such a thing doesn't exist already). It's lack of perceived weirdness is pretty weird for such a large city

I like and used to live in Chicago, but I think it’s hyper segregation is what prevents it from being perceived in this way (especially compared to somewhere like LA).

I've only visited, what makes it hyper segregated?

Back in the early days of TV, "The Untouchables", set in Prohibition-Era Chicago, ran for a while on network TV. David Mamet made a movie out of it some years ago.

Any other recommendations by him? I grew up here and would love to read some cool crime thrillers that are close to home.

Have almost everything he's published. Aside from The Poet and The Narrows (my loss probably) I would say take your pick. Connolly's a masterful writer and stylist which I've found means that he's rewarding to reread, not something I can say about some other best selling authors.

Some good recommendations in the article. As a resident, I have enjoyed Joe Ide and especially Walter Moseley’s writing and sense of place. Not to mention all the crime TV and movies set here, from Chinatown to the Rockford Files.

Remarkable to read a longish article on LA and noir and not find a single mention of James Ellroy.

Except, perhaps, this one:

Like the men and women in its crime novels, the city, a multicultural diary of splendor and hurt, is its own character: grisly, sinister, smooth, sly, urbane, verbose, sparse, fatalistic, celebratory, hopeful and occasionally as doomed as James Ellroy’s "Black Dahlia."

Hunh - I missed that!

Ross MacDonald is worth a look, too.

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