Denise Hamilton, Michael Connelly, Naomi Hirahara, Emory Holmes II, Janet Fitch, Patt Morrison, Christopher Rice, Héctor Tobar, Susan Sraight, Jim Pasco, Neal Pollack, Lienna Silver, Gary Phillips, Scott Phillips, Brian Ascalon Roley, Robert Ferrigno, Diana Wagman
Los Angeles Noir
The Akashic Books Noir Series, 2007
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L.A. is epidemically everywhere and discernible only in glimpses.
– James Ellroy, “James Ellroy Comes Home,” 2006
It occurs to her that what she most appreciates about this City of the Angels is that which is missing, the voids, the unstitched borders, the empty corridors, the not yet deciphered. She is grateful for the absence of history.
– Kate Braverman, Palm Latitudes, 1988
INTRODUCTION
CITY OF ANGELS & DEMONSI write crime novels now, but for a decade before that I was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Although I’m a native, there are still places I don’t know and the landscape changes at such warp speed that it’s impossible to keep up. Journalism gave me a passport to excavate the city’s layers, nose behind the scenes, and interview everyone who wanted to talk and many who didn’t.
Walking into the newsroom each morning, I never knew whether I’d face a triple homicide at South Pasadena High, a celebrity stalking in Malibu, or a brown bear that lumbered down from the San Gabriel Mountains to splash in someone’s pool. The city was mythic and alive, pulsing with a thousand short stories unfolding all at once, tales of heartbreak and triumph, survival despite incredible odds and tragedy so horrifying it could have come straight from the ancient Greeks.