![]() ![]() What about drug stories? Among many others, Lithium for Medea is a tale of addiction and of LA as an anti-paradise: “The deformed sun dissolving above me and spitting sick orange blood on the pavement,” writes Kate Braverman. Devil in a Blue Dress is hard to think about without remembering Denzel Washington walking through mid-Wilshire and LA Confidential is one of the most enduring films about Los Angeles, crudely introducing us to street hustling.īut lovers of Los Angeles stories would say: don’t stop. In Los Angeles, of course, the movies stick with us as much as the books do. The distance between rich and poor, between the grime of the streets and the clean swimming pools, threads through LA noir stories: James Ellroy’s LA Confidential, Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, also follow LA detectives through its mean streets. Women jump into bed with you, but sometimes they have a gun. With The Big Sleep, he began the stories of Philip Marlowe, the hard-boiled detective who finds that Los Angeles is full of liars, cheats and dirty deals. LA Noir, the sub-genre encompassing tales of crime set in the shadows of the streets, is impossible to imagine without Raymond Chandler. I’ve always liked the idea that Los Angeles writers think they’re making up a new language The beach, the house, the hair, the intangible wealth, nothing is real. And that is the essence of all LA stories: nothing is as it seems. One of its minor characters, Homer Simpson – which inspired the Simpsons TV character – walks out into what he thinks is a mob but turns out to be people in a film. ![]() Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust, set in the Great Depression era, describes piles of houses with a strange mixture of architecture from everywhere, as if a child God were playing with stacking toys between the freeways. LA stories like F Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Love of the Last Tycoon place films as a major character in the city, a backdrop for everything. Hollywood itself is, no doubt, the setting for much of the town’s literature. There are many Los Angeles in literature – and all feel vaguely familiar thanks to countless celluloid adaptations. That clichéd dream is perfectly reflected in Carolyn See’s Golden Days, which also follows a tradition of California phonies like Aimee Semple McPherson: it features a lunatic with followers and then nuclear apocalypse. People move to California to reinvent themselves. It has glorious sunshine and apocalyptic events, fires, floods, earthquakes, riots. Not simply wife, kids, yard, but palm trees, oranges in winter, beaches and more sin, drugs and fun than the rest of the country can imagine. The Southern California dream is like the American dream, but better. “Los Angeles is like the rest of the country, but more so,” in the words of journalist and author Patt Morrison. The stories of Los Angeles make people want to come here. ![]()
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