Surf Noir: Get on Board

(Editor’s note: This essay comes from Denise Hamilton, a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times, who has turned to crime-fiction writing. Hamilton is the author of five books in the Eve Diamond series, beginning with The Jasmine Trade [2001]. She also penned the standalone thriller, The Last Embrace, and edited Los Angeles Noir and Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics. Her new novel is Damage Control [Scribner], about a public relations “crisis manager” whose latest assignment forces her to confront troubles from her past.)

I’m a Los Angeles native, but unlike some beach worshippers here, I have always had a love-hate relationship with the sugar-white sands, swaying palms, and cold blue Pacific of my hometown.

Yes, it’s a postcard-perfect paradise. We Angelenos are longtime civic boosters and our Dream Factories have spread the Surfing, USA lifestyle around the globe.

But there’s also a dark side to beach culture. The cult of the body can approach narcissism. The golden sunlight bakes skin. And yesterday’s surf gods lurk on the fringes, nursing swollen beer bellies and incipient skin cancer and wondering when the endless summer turned to ash.

As a crime writer, I admit I see the world through a noir lens, and that includes our coastal playgrounds. My new novel, Damage Control, pivots on something awful that happens to some teenagers at a beach party one night, a memory that still haunts them 15 years later.

Turns out I’m in good company.

L.A.’s classic crime writers understood the atavistic pull of the tides and have explored its metaphoric possibilities for almost 80 years. For Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Horace McCoy, Leigh Brackett, and Dorothy B. Hughes, the Southern California coast was far from glamorous. It was a lonely and desperate place where dreams came to die.

Who can forget Horace McCoy’s slender 1935 novella, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, which turned the Santa Monica Pier amusement park into a sadist’s amusement park where desperate people moved through tortured weeks of a Depression-era dance marathon.

The L.A. beaches of mid-20th-century crime novels are often cold and blanketed with fog. Dead bodies wash up with the tides. Pedophiles lurk in shotgun shacks overlooking decrepit Venice canals. The damp air breeds TB. Oil derricks stain the white sands black and the sea mist corrodes more than metal.

Leigh Brackett’s 1944 novel, No Good from a Corpse, unfolds against the backdrop of World War II. The entire coast is a “military dim-out zone.” Brackett describes the sea “lashing the beach with big thundering waves and then backing off with a slow hiss.” In Venice, we smell “a heavy pungence of oil and sump water under the clean salt ... there were derricks, thick as flies on a dead dog.”

As for the canals where today’s celebrities lounge in multi-million-dollar homes: “You wouldn’t want to swim there ... the banks are black with seeping oil, and the water’s black too, and it stinks. There aren’t any fish in it, now.”

In 1947, Dorothy B. Hughes wrote an under-sung masterpiece called In a Lonely Place. It’s narrated from the first-person perspective of a male serial killer who hunts his victims along the California Incline, the isolated road leading down to the Pacific Coast Highway.

He could hear the boom of the breakers far below, he could smell the sea smell in the fog. There was no visibility, save for the yellow pools of fog light on the road below, and the suggested skyline of the beach houses.

He was there for a long time. Lost in a world of swirling fog and crashing wave, a world empty of all but these things and his grief and the keening of the fog horn far at sea. Lost in a lonely place. And the red knots tightened in his brain.

For Hughes, beach sand wasn’t a memento of lazy days at the seaside. It was a chilling clue to murder.

Coastal cities in L.A.’s hard-boiled noir world tended to be places of casual brutality and corrupt police. This is true for Chandler’s mythical “Bay City” and Brackett’s “Surf City” in the 1944 story, “I Feel Bad Killing You” (which was reprinted in Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics).

Ross Macdonald, who lived much of his life in picturesque Santa Barbara, often used the coast as a setting for murder and other unsavory doings. In 1962’s The Zebra-Striped Hearse, private eye Lew Archer is hired by a wealthy family to dig up dirt on their prospective son-in-law. Here’s Macdonald describing Zuma Beach at night:

Bonfires were scattered along the shore, like the bivouacs of nomad tribes or nuclear survivors. The tide was high and the breakers loomed up marble black and fell white out of oceanic darkness.

Deep into the 1970s, crime writers voiced their doubts about the Southern California coast. Joseph Hansen created the first gay P.I. in fiction, Dave Brandstetter, and lived in Laguna, a rustic, genteel beach community in South Orange County. But in his 1976 short story “Surf” (also reprinted in Los Angeles Noir 2) he describes a sliding glass door in Marina del Rey that looks out “onto a marina where little white boats waited row on row like children’s coffins in the rain.”

But my favorite surf noir novel of the late 20th century is Kem Nunn’s magnificent Tapping the Source, which was a finalist for the 1984 National Book Award.

Set in Orange County’s Huntington Beach, Tapping the Source depicts a sleepy rustic beach town that no longer exists, bulldozed away as developers bought up the coastal land and built giant luxury resorts along the waterfront. But there’s no nostalgia, just a steely, hard-boiled sensibility and stark acceptance of humanity’s failings:

And then it was back to the shop or down to the beach, with a pocketful of Hound Adam’s dope and an eye out for the girls, down in the hot sand and maybe a noseful of coke, because he had discovered where Hound Adams found the energy to party all night and surf all day.

... After that night with the redhead, he had tried not to fuck them, just to recruit them for the parties, sad stupid little girls. And he had laughed at himself for ever thinking there was more to it, something magical, even, and he both wished back the magic and sneered at himself for ever having believed it there.

No matter how many times I read that passage, it still sends a chill down my spine.

Because Nunn understood the Faustian bargain of the endless summer.

And he nailed it.

Just One More Thing ...

Rushing, rushing, rushing off to Bouchercon ... must finish writing assignments before I depart ... haven’t enough time for proper packing ... can relax once I’m on the plane, but not a moment sooner, it seems. However, I do want to draw attention to a few matters before going.

• Author Denise Hamilton has a new piece up at L.A. Observed, noting that “It was 59 years ago today that brunette starlet Jean Spangler vanished, leaving behind a young daughter, gangster pals, movie star connections and a mystery that remains unsolved more than a half-century later.” (Click here for that full story.) Spangler’s twisted yarn, of course, provided the inspiration for Megan Abbott’s 2007 novel, The Song Is You, as well as Hamilton’s latest book, The Last Embrace (2008). In the past, both authors have recalled that still-unsolved 1949 case for The Rap Sheet. Look here for Hamilton’s thoughts on the subject; here and here for Abbott’s

• Good news for British TV watchers: Andrew Martin, the creator of “Steam Detective” Jim Stringer, will host a documentary this week on BBC4 entitled Between the Lines: Railways in Fiction and Film. According to the BBC Web site, this program will look at “how the train and the railways came to shape the work of writers and film-makers.

At the beginning of the railway age, locomotives were seen as frightening and unnatural--Wordsworth decried the destruction of the countryside, while Dickens wrote about locomotives as murderous brutes, bent on the destruction of mere humans.

Martin traces how trains gradually began to be accepted--Holmes and Watson were frequent passengers--until by the time of [Edith Nesbitt’s 1906 novel] The Railway Children they were something to be loved, a symbol of innocence and Englishness. He shows how trains made for unforgettable cinema in The 39 Steps and Brief Encounter, and how when the railways fell out of favour after the 1950s, their plight was highlighted in the films of John Betjeman.

The first broadcast of Martin’s documentary is scheduled for this Thursday at 9 p.m. (Hat tip to Euro Crime.)

• And a quick reminder that tomorrow night will bring the third Noir at the Bar event in Philadelphia. Participating will be Canadian writer John McFetridge and Irish author (and recent Rap Sheet guest blogger) Declan Burke. More information can be found here.

Good Ideas Get Around

Authors often find themselves unintentionally writing about the same subject, even though their topic might have seemed pretty obscure at the time they began. Another such coincidence is found now in the penning of stories based on the mysterious 1949 disappearance of aspiring Hollywood actress Jean Spangler (pictured below). As The Rap Sheet has noted before (see here and here), New York novelist Megan Abbott, the author of 2005’s Die a Little, is due out in January with The Song Is You, a pulpish and atmospheric fictionalization of the Spangler case that made my list of the winter books I most look forward to reading.

Earlier today, however, Los Angeles journalist-novelist Denise Hamilton (Prisoner of Memory, Savage Garden) wrote to tell me that she was “surprised to learn” about Abbott’s forthcoming book, “because I thought I was the only author who had stumbled across Jean’s tragic life and seized upon it as a haunting topic for a noir crime novel.” In that e-mail note, Hamilton goes on to remark:

Perhaps the more intriguing issue, however, is not why two crime authors have recently discovered Jean Spangler but why the story about her disappearance, two years after the Black Dahlia [murder], has languished in obscurity for so long when it has all the elements of a spellbinding novel.

Consider the characters and their relationships: Pretty starlet, violent ex-husband fighting a custody battle for their only child, known association with gangsters who also disappeared, references to a mysterious “Kirk” when Jean had filmed a movie with Kirk Douglas, lack of a body but discovery of a broken purse with a cryptic note found inside.

Set these characters in play against 1949 Hollywood--which featured gangster shoot-outs on the Sunset Strip, the mob war between Mickey Cohen and Jack Dragna for control of L.A.’s turf, crooked cops (both the LAPD chief and his deputy
were indicted that summer) the decline of the studio star system, the dawn of television, the post-WWII recession, the Hollywood Blacklist, the Cold War, the rise of lurid tabloids like Confidential, the incipient conservatism of the 1950s after women left the wartime factories and returned to the home, high-stakes homophobia in Hollywood, the rise of suburbia, the Golden Era of movie special effects--and you’ve got a fantastic canvass to paint on.

My first five novels are set in a noir-accented but very contemporary and multicultural Los Angeles. When [publisher] Scribner approached me in 2005 about writing my first standalone, we discussed my fascination with L.A. and what a noir place I think it is--as much today as during the glory noir years.

But that got me thinking. Authors like James M. Cain, Nathanael West, Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler, Walter Mosley, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy B. Hughes and Chester Himes have been touchstones for me. So I thought I’d go back to the source, the era they wrote about, just sift through the sand and see what I came up with. On top of that, I’m an L.A. native and a former L.A. Times reporter. The city’s iconography runs through my veins (ouch!) and I see L.A. as a character in its own right. I was especially intrigued by the idea that Hollywood was a small town 50 years ago and movie stars were part of the landscape. You’d see them buying toothpaste at the drugstore, memorizing their scripts at the coffee shop. You could sit in on Steve Allen’s midnight radio show, watch Frank Sinatra record. The access was amazing.

Thanks to a story by L.A. Times staff writer Cecilia Rasmussen, who writes the great “L.A Then and Now” column, I came across Jean’s story and was immediately entranced. I was also shocked that no one had written about her before.

But maybe it’s the O.J. syndrome. More than a dozen women in Los Angeles were killed by domestic violence during the years that Simpson’s trials dragged on. But you only ever read about Nicole. Finally one day, the Times ran a round-up story about some of the others. I think that the Black Dahlia case loomed so large on people’s minds for so many decades that it obscured many of the era’s other tragic crimes. It was almost like there was only room for one such tragedy in the public consciousness, and Elizabeth Short’s mythology had already claimed the turf.

Then of course, Spangler’s body was never found, dangling the seductive possibility that she wasn’t dead after all, but had absconded to Mexico or New York, perhaps with “Little Davy” Ogul and Frank Niccoli, Mickey Cohen’s associates who also disappeared that fall. Jean had been seen partying in Palm Springs with these gangsters shortly before she disappeared. Had she fallen afoul of a gang war? Was it her violent ex-husband? Or was it more complicated?

Oddly enough, both Megan and I are published by the same umbrella house--she’s at Simon & Schuster and I’m at Scribner, which is owned by S&S. (We were also both Edgar finalists for our first books.) But my editor at Scribner didn’t know about Megan’s book until I e-mailed her after reading your column. And I doubt very much that Megan’s editor knew about my book. I don’t submit an outline or a plot synopsis when I sign a new publishing contract, my editor and I just have an informal chat.

But I do think that our converging novels are an example of the Zeitgeist at work. The adaptation of the James Ellroy [novel] The Black Dahlia also came out this fall, as did Hollywoodland, another noiry period movie. Those films aspired to the greatness of the movie L.A. Confidential, based on another Ellroy novel, but didn’t quite succeed. Perhaps that’s because writers of all stripes need to infuse this familiar 1940s world with fresh, ahem, blood if they intend to captivate new audiences. We want prose that is both new/different AND projects the reassuringly familiar miasma of that smoky boozy shadowy world.

That’s why I say that my 1949 novel--which doesn’t yet have a title--is “inspired” by Jean Spangler’s life. Jean’s story ended inconclusively, never a satisfying finale for a crime novel. As I explored the themes of her life, I wanted to find out who did it and why, and how that played out against that pivotal time in L.A. history. So my novel’s got a body and plenty of motives. Perhaps you might call it “Expressionist” as opposed to “Impressionist” in tone. My starlet is from the Midwest but she’s never been married and doesn’t have a child. She lives in a Hollywood boarding house for aspiring young actresses--a common practice at the time--which allows me to give her a supporting cast (sometimes friendly, sometimes jealous and competitive), plus an enigmatic landlady.

The sleuth I’ve created is a young woman with an OSS [Office of Strategic Services] wartime background who returns to her hometown of Los Angeles to look into the actress’ disappearance at the request of the missing girl’s mother. She moves into the boarding house and becomes embroiled in the dead girl’s life, especially her connections to Hollywood. But so much has been written about the Dream Factory that I also knew I had to approach it from an oblique angle. So I created a special-effects wizard inspired by Ray Harryhausen, who with his mentor Willis O’Brien pioneered stop-motion animation. Harryhausen is 86 now and I had the privilege of meeting him and talking to him about what the special-effects world was like in 1949, the year Mighty Joe Young came out. (He did 90% of the animation on MJY; O’Brien had animated King Kong). This was wonderful background and local color to weave into a book. Through him, I’ve been able to tell the history of Hollywood special effects long before Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas made it hip and trendy. My guy’s a hardcore geek, shunned by starlets, but bearing a torch for the missing actress. We’re behind the scenes a lot, which is a place I like to be.

Jean Spangler was the embodiment, the crystallization of so many things that I find fascinating about L.A. at the time--and her very desires and dreams made her vulnerable. She yearned to be an independent modern young woman during a time when society was lurching back toward more traditional roles. She wanted fame badly and was hustling to get there, even though she knew how tough the odds were. And she disappeared into thin air, creating the perfect template. But behind the newspaper headlines there was also a real flesh-and-blood girl and that’s what I think haunts me most. As authors, we like to ask “what if?” We imagine ourselves in people’s shoes, set a train of events into motion and see what happens. I wanted to explore Jean’s story, set against the transitory and yet pivotal year of 1949 in L.A.’s history.

I’ll be turning in my novel at the end of December 2006, so it certainly won’t be jostling the bookshelves at the same time as Megan’s book. Besides, I’m sure they’ll be very different takes on a 53-year-old, mostly forgotten crime. But young women still disappear in L.A. Which makes it both an archetypal and a cautionary tale. Sometimes time changes nothing.

I, for one, look forward to reading both Abbott’s The Song Is You and Hamilton’s novel, whenever it’s released.