GUEST INTERVIEW: DENISE HAMILTON

GUEST INTERVIEW WITH DENISE HAMILTON BY DANIEL OLIVAS

Aside from writing the nationally best-selling Eve Diamond crime novels, Denise Hamilton also edited 2007’s award-winning Los Angeles Noir (Akashic Books) which featured seventeen stories by such writers as Michael Connelly, Susan Straight, Janet Fitch and Hector Tobar.

Hamilton now brings us Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics with stories by Raymond Chandler, Paul Cain, James Ellroy, Leigh Brackett, James M. Cain, Chester Himes, Ross MacDonald, Walter Mosley, Naomi Hirahara, Margaret Millar, Joseph Hansen, William Campbell Gault, Jervey Tervalon, Kate Braverman, and Yxta Maya Murray. These are tight little engines of literary mayhem that unequivocally establish L.A. as noir’s first and most natural home. Hamilton kindly took time out of her busy book tour to answer a few questions for TEV’s readers about this new anthology.

DANIEL OLIVAS: Whose idea was it to do a second volume of Los Angeles noir fiction?

DENISE HAMILTON: Akashic’s noir series follows a pattern. The first volume is always brand new stories, written especially for the collection. The second volume is reprints of classic short stories set in different neighborhoods of that city. I thought this was a great idea, and I was eager to take on the project, as I’m a longtime fan of classic noir and had gone back to re-read the L.A. canon when I began working on the first volume of L.A. Noir. Before I could assign stories, write my own and decide what I wanted to include, I knew that I had to steep myself in the noir tradition and think long and hard about what the genre meant to me. I also had to consider noir from a very broad perspective, not just urban Hollywood, downtown and the beach cities. And so I spent a lot of time thinking about the genre’s lineage – from 1930s noir, through the hard boiled post-war 40s and 50s – to the contemporary crime and literary writers of L.A. who have absorbed and been influenced by classic noir at a DNA level. Because we are all Chandler’s children. And Los Angeles is the ultimate femme fatale, beckoning and promising riches and glory and love, but now the suckers come from Yerevan and San Salvador as well as Sioux City and Tulsa. And there is a continuum, we are all dipping into the same well, the same white blazing sunlight, the deep shadows cast by Hollywood, the greed, the artifice, the stunning beauty and the desperation. But what’s different today is the cultural landscape. So that the sleuth is just as likely to be Vietnamese or Mexican-American or investigating a murder in the Lebanese Armenian community.

DO: How did you go about choosing the stories in this new collection?

DH: The first thing I did was read, read, read. I must have read 500 short stories and novels set in Los Angeles. With the novels, I was looking for chapters I could excerpt that might stand alone. So I cast a wide net and read in the genre and outside, including literary authors such as William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joan Didion and Nathanael West. If it was set in L.A.’s past or near present, I tried to read it. And I was lucky because most of the celebrated authors of the 20th century at one time came to Hollywood to write scripts, so there are plenty of stories set in LA. I also read Donald Goines, Iceberg Slim, Sessue Foster, Luis Rodriguez, Roland S. Jefferson, John Fante, Erle Stanley Gardner, Charles Bukowski, Hisaye Yamamoto, Robert Bloch, Wanda Coleman, Richard Matheson, Budd Schulberg and Michael Nava, who had a terrific story about a gay sleuth that was just too long for the anthology. And there were a multitude of others. For almost a year, that was my bedside reading. I’m also indebted to previous anthologies of L.A. writing and crime fiction which gave me many leads, including collections edited by David Ulin, Scott Timberg, Bill Pronzini and others.

So bear in mind that the authors collected in Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics are the tip of the iceberg, 15 stories “curated” by me (isn’t that a pretentious word?) out of the hundreds I read. I was terribly vexed, in the end, to leave out several of my own personal favorites. Cornell Woolrich set a few stories in L.A., but they were not among his better ones. And the one I really liked, “Hot Water,” started in Beverly Hills but quickly veered south to a Tijuana casino and ended with a car chase and shootout in the Mexican desert. When the car runs out of gas they put tequila in the engine and keep driving. It’s pure vintage Woolrich. But alas, not L.A. Woolrich. One story I loved by Fitzgerald was too long. Some weren’t noir enough. I had to pass on several of my favorite noir novels because I couldn’t find a way to carve out a self-contained chapter. But they deserve to be widely read. The first was the 1930s Horace McCoy masterpiece “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They,” which while written in the depths of the Great Depression is as modern, crisp and devastating today as it was 80 years ago. If you’ve only seen the movie, do yourself a favor and read this slim 132-page novella.

The second was Dorothy B. Hughes novel “In a Lonely Place,” which was published in the late 1940s and written from the first person perspective of a male serial killer – a WW II vet and fighter pilot. It’s got a creepy Patricia Highsmith-esque feel and the first chapter, which sets the stage with a young woman walking up Santa Monica’s California Incline alone on a dark foggy night, sets the stage. The movie with Humphrey Bogart didn’t quite do it justice.

DO: You've divided the book into four parts: 1. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang; 2. After the War; 3. Killer Views; 4. Modern Classics. Why? Did you have this template in mind from the beginning or did it develop as you decided upon stories?

DH: It made sense to do this chronologically. So the anthology starts with stories set in the 1930s era of Depression-era Prohibition and gangsters and moves slowly (and zig-zaggedly) through time. The reader can also notice as the slang changes and the outlook – while always black – varies from devil-take-the-hindmost to bleak to post-war disillusionment to absurd fatalism. The idea was to show the development, and breadth of noir. I also had to define for myself what “classic” noir was. Did it end in the 1950s or much later? Ultimately, I decided that if the story was set in a past that we recognize as historic or if the cultural landscape has changed significantly, then it was classic enough for me.

For example, Jervey Tervalon’s story Rika takes place during the lead-up to the 1992 L.A. Riots and the main character is a young female crack addict who has shot her boyfriend in the face, then goes out to score more rock, to her family’s utter despair. The Riots took place almost 20 years ago. An entire generation has grown up. So to me, that era has moved into history. Likewise, the Echo Park of “Locas,” while still recognizable today, is a much different place due to gentrification. In the bleak landscape where Yxta Maya Murray set her novel in the 1980s, there were few art galleries, upscale coffee houses, fancy eateries and bohemian yuppies. I know because I lived there then. Echo Park and Silverlake have always had a boho feel and been an arts refuge, but nothing like today.

DO: In gathering these stories, did you learn anything new or startling about noir fiction?

DH: As I mulled about noir and what 15 stories would make the cut, it also struck me what a white male world classic noir was. The masters – Chandler, Cain, Macdonald – are all white. Walter Mosley writes an African-American PI in the classic era but he’s contemporary. Where were the Latino Raymond Chandlers of the WWII years? The Asian-American James M. Cain? Where were the women of noir? Were there any gay sleuths? And the more I read, the more I realized that there was a huge hole in the donut of noir. And the hole was everyone who wasn’t a straight white male author. Because let’s face it, classic noir was a pretty sexist white world. You can argue all you want from a post-modern perspective that the femme fatales actually had all the power and manipulated men through sex, but the reality is that women characters in noir fell into one of two stereotypes – they were either the good little girl who needed to be saved or the evil vixen. And sometimes at the end the good little girl was revealed as ‘gasp,’ the evil vixen. And characters of color? They were relegated to the roles of maids, gardeners and whores. Gays were usually swanning about in louche nightclubs, adding color and a transgressive frisson.

So in my reading, I was on the keen lookout for stories by and about people who weren’t the “usual suspects” of classic noir.

I found some incredible hard-boiled women writers of the 1940s. Margaret Millar was Ross MacDonald’s wife and a best-selling and well-reviewed writer in her day of gripping psychological suspense. Leigh Brackett had a 50-year career in the pulps, sci-fi and Hollywood screenwriting. She co-wrote The Big Sleep with William Faulkner and 50 years later co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back for George Lucas. And yet few people know of her. Someone should write her biography, it would be fascinating.

So Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics includes Brackett and Millar, and also Chester Himes, who wrote crime fiction set in the African-American community in the 1940s. There’s a Walter Mosley story too, as well as one by Joseph Hansen, who probably wrote the first openly gay sleuth in the 1970s and 80s. As to classic Asian and Latino crime fiction set in L.A., I didn’t find any, and I queried academics and writers of color and noir historians. There were plenty of period writers of Latino and Asian heritage writing in L.A., they just weren’t writing crime fiction. Their literature focused more on the immigrant experience, the strength of family. My perhaps half-baked theory is that writers from those immigrant communities chose not to write villains and criminals and sexpots because they were trying to assimilate and not bring more discrimination down on their communities by writing marginal, lawless characters.

So I turned to contemporary writers such as Naomi Hirahara, who wrote a moving story about an adulterous Japanese American wife in 1951 Los Angeles. Naomi’s character has returned from the Manzanar internment camp and now that she’s free, feels trapped in a different way by post war Los Angeles and the expectations of Japanese-American culture. I also excerpted a chapter from Yxta Maya Murray’s seminal novel Locas about girl gangs in 1980s pre-gentrified Echo Park. If noir is about marginalized people leading desperate lives of spiraling doom, then Murray’s female characters certainly fit the bill.

So in the end, noir purists may quibble and people may complain that I’ve left out their favorite author, but I had to make hard choices and the collection ultimately reflects my admittedly idiosyncratic editorial vision of the best classic noir writing of Los Angeles. 

For a complete listing of Denise Hamilton’s events for Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics, visit here. 

Daniel Olivas is the author of five books and has been widely anthologized including, most recently, in Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America (W. W. Norton). He will be reading from his new short-story collection, Anywhere but LA. (Bilingual Press), at Metropolis Books on Saturday, April 17 at 4:00 p.m. For more information on this event, visit here.

Comments

[Niall]

Does Vol 2 contain anything by Cornell Woolrich? He wrote in LA for a while, so he should count.

Also, I think it would be great for Akashic to publish a volume of great noir screenplays, since noir film and noir fiction are so intertwined.

[denise hamilton]

No Cornell Woolrich, alas. As I mentioned in the Q&A, I read all his LA stories (there were only a handful) and they just were not very good. And "Hot Water" starts in LA but quickly heads south, so I couldn't justify including that one. (The publisher and I had a little discussion about whether to include it; I had originally submitted a list of 17 stories. That was one of the ones he nixed). And ultimately, I do see his point.

[Niall]

Also: Someone needs to start republishing John Franklin Bardin's oeuvre. My copy of Purloining Tiny is getting mighty banged up.

[Milena]

You have no rights to overgeneralize and call people coming from countries such as "Yerevan and San Salvador as well as Sioux City and Tulsa" "suckers"!!!