Christopher Nolan's Early Years

About a decade ago I was tipped off to an odd, inscrutable film by a budding English director living in LA. Christopher Nolan's Memento, which starred Guy Pearce in an ill-fitting pale suit and bleached hair, knocked me out, and I spent an afternoon talking about movies, memory and fragmented narrative with the 30-year old director at his apartment near the LACMA while he played Radiohead's Kid A on a boom box.

I just dug up my old New Times cover story, "Indie Angst," because of Nolan's new film Inception, and part of what's striking is how much a struggle the director went through to get that early film shown. For reasons I have never understood, the company that owns New Times does not keep an online archive for the LA paper, but thanks to the UC Berkeley film archives you can read the story here.

Memento, of course, is one of the most original movies of the last 20 years, with a bizarre structure -- a few minutes of exposition, then a violent jump back to a previous sequence -- that should not have worked but somehow did.

Nolan talked about how the novel had spent more than a half century messing with chronology -- he was especially interested in Graham Swift's Waterland -- and discussed Harold Pinter and his interest in noir writers like Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson and James Ellroy.

"The only useful definition of narrative I've ever heard," Nolan told me, "is 'the controlled release of information.' And these novelists and playwrights -- they're not feeling any responsibility to make that release on a chronological basis. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that we don't feel that responsibility in day-to-day life."

Of all the filmmakers I interviewed during my years at New Times -- Labute, Linklater, Solondz, Spike Jonze, Kevin Smith, the Blair Witch guys -- Nolan was among the smartest, the most sure of himself, and the last one I would have expected would be making blockbuster movies.

Nolan's lean, mean, Hitchcock-inspired debut, Following, was made with borrowed equipment from his British university and almost no money. "For me it's very satisfying filmmaking, because the only sacrifices are practical ones. The filmmaking process in my head, the imaginative process, was identical to making a film for millions of dollars. When I made a film with a bigger budget, I realized it's the same thing. You've just got more trucks."

One thing I don't recall discussing with Nolan, by the way, was comic books.

Jonathan Lethem to the Southland

Novelist Jonathan Lethem, though firmly associated with New York bohemia and a kind of Brooklyn renaissance, will be coming to Pomona College to take over David Foster Wallace's old job.

The author of the Brooklyn-childhood novel The Fortress of Solitude and, more recently, the Upper East Side-set Chronic City is well known to readers of The Misread City: He's among the site's core writers, along with Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, Michael Chabon and Ross Macdonald. Of this esteemed group, he is the only one not lucky enough to have spent the majority his career on the West Coast. But that begins to change this fall, when Lethem arrives at the liberal arts school based in Claremont, where he begins teaching in January. Here is Pomona's release on the position.

I've gotten to know Lethem slightly in our discussions about various authors, including his college classmate Bret Easton Ellis and his literary hero Philip K. Dick, whose Library of America volumes he has edited. Lethem is among the sharpest, intellectually rigorous and most culturally omnivorous people I know, and he's made an important push in the war to rehabilitate genre fiction. He's also a zealous Dylan fan.

Of course, despite representing a kind of post-Auster, vaguely indie-rockish spirit of Brooklyn writing, Lethem spent the first decade of his writing career in California. He lived in Berkeley from '85 to '96, working at Moe's Books and Pegasus bookstore and helping pioneer rock critic Paul Williams run the Philip K. Dick Society. Raymond Chandler and Macdonald are powerful influences on his early novels especially, and in '07 he set a slender comic novel, You Don't Love Me Yet, in Silver Lake, where he lived while putting it together.

So in some ways he's long been a California writer by osmosis.

The Misread City will speak to Lethem in the next few weeks about his imminent arrival and his thoughts about West Coast culture. Until then, all we can say is, Welcome, homes!

Portrait by Julie Jo Fehrle from Jonathan Lethem: Writer

The Return of LA Noir

ONE of LA's greatest exports has always been dread, and our signature writer is still, three quarters of a century later, noir novelist Raymond Chandler. And now, thanks to a new anthology, all that murder, deception and unpleasantness is back.

A few years back, local mystery writer Denise Hamilton (The Last Embrace) and Brooklyn's Akashic Books put together a collection called Los Angeles Noir that looked at the inheritors of the private detective line of crime fiction.

A new anthology on Akashic looks, now, at the origins of that tradition. Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics begins with a Chandler story, "I'll Be Waiting," from the '30s, and includes work from Chester Himes and James M. Cain before moving into the postwar period with Ross Macdonald and, eventually, Walter Mosley and James Ellroy. (Science-fiction fans will be intrigued by a '40s story by sf writer Leigh Brackett, called "I Feel Bad Killing You.)


HERE is my interview with Denise about that first book. It begins: 'You won't find many trench coats, fedoras or Black Dahlias in "Los Angeles Noir," an about-to-be-published anthology of 17 new short stories set in various corners of the contemporary City of Angels.'


What follows is a new interview with Hamilton on LA Noir 2. She and other contributors -- including those behind the new, Gary Phillips-edited Orange County Noir -- will make a number of appearances around SoCal. Saturday Denise, Gary and others will be at Skylight Books; next Friday some of them will be at Vroman's. Here goes:

The first volume of Los Angeles Noir was well-received. What made the time seem right for another, slightly different volume?

Akashic’s noir series follows this pattern. The first volume is new stories, the second one is classics. This was thrilling to me, as I’ve been a classic noir reader for years, and had recently re-visited the classic short stories of noir that are set here when I began working on the first volume of L.A. Noir. In my attempts to cast a broad net, I also read many stories by literary authors such as William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joan Didion (and also Nathanael West) set in Tinseldown. I wanted to steep myself in the genre and really think hard about the lineage from 1930s noir, through the hard boiled 40s and 50s and see how it influence and carried through into contemporary crime writing about Los Angeles. Because I do think there’s a continiuum, we are all dipping into the same well, the white blazing sunlight, the deep shadows cast by Hollywood, the greed, the artifice, the stunning beauty and the desperation.

Almost half of the stories here are from noir's classic period, the '30s and '40s. But some are more contemporary, including one freshly written and set on Terminal Island in 2007. What makes a story "classic."

My definition for ‘classic’ was rather loose. It couldn’t be contemporary, set in the 21st century. I also waffled greatly on whether stories set in the 1990s were ‘classic.’ But 1990 was 20 yeas ago – an entire generation has grown up since then. And certain L.A. neighborhoods have changed dramatically. In the end I opted to include several stories with a historic ‘feel.’ Jervey Tervalon’s story Reka, for instance, is set right before the L.A. Riots of 1992, when the crack and gang epidemic was in full swing. The LA Riots are certainly ‘historic’ today, and Jervey’s story, filled with bubbling anger, drugs, violence and an anguished family, captures the feel of that era. Likewise, Yxta Maya Murray’s story about ‘locas’ takes place in pre-gentrified Latino Echo Park and is a Polaroid snapshot back into history, before the area was studded with upscale eateries, galleries, cafes, clothing boutiques and petcare shops.

It seems like much of the rethinking of noir in the last decade or so has been about its racial and ethnic subtext -- looking at the black neighborhoods of cities, and their potential protagonists, or realizing that Japanese Americans weren't all gardeners.

L.A.’s cultural diversity has always struck me – even back when I was an L.A. Times reporter – as an inspiring fount for modern noir. People come to this city from around to the world to leave the past behind, reinvent themselves. They’re filled with fear and desperation. The city and its beauty seduces them like a femme fatale. They have secrets they want to stay buried. It’s a fantastic literary canvass from which to paint. But when you look at the classic tales, they’re all written by straight white guys and pretty much set in the white community where people of color, if they exist at all, serve as exotic backdrops, maids, jazz musicians and whores. So yeah, it was the natural progression to ask why that was, and then go back into the literary record and search out the hole in the donut of noir, which was all the non-white males.

I was not interested in turning in an anthology of the ‘usual suspects’ we’ve already seen in so many (good) collections, because otherwise we’re just preaching to the choir. There were vibrant Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Mexican, Russian etc communities in LA that date back to the 1800s and I wanted to showcase some authors from those communities. So while I knew I’d include the big bad boys of noir – the masters Chandler, Cain, MacDonald – it was also time to let some air into that stale cigarette-smoke room. And by the way, it’s not only ethnic and racial subtext, it’s also gender. There were some fantastic women writing noir in the 1940s – Leigh Brackett, Dorothy B. Hughes, Margaret Millar, but noir was a sexist male genre and so the gals aren’t as well known, which is a darn shame. Gays also got short shrift. If they were depicted at all it was often as exotic denizens of strange nightclubs. But I found a lovely 1970s story by Joseph Hanson, who wrote an openly gay sleuth back when this was very uncommon.

Was it hard to get the rights for these stories by the old masters? Anything you tried to get but couldn't? I've have loved to see something by Cornell Woolrich, who was here in LA briefly.

Surprisingly, we got everything we asked for thanks to Akashic publisher Johnny Temple working his magic. We even got the rights to reprint the Raymond Chandler short story “I’ll Be Waiting.” But oddly, Chandler’s estate would not allow us to put his name on the cover. SoChandler’s story leads the collection, and he’s mentioned twice on the back cover, but not on the front. Go figure.

And ah, Cornell Woolrich. I looked and looked. He wrote very few short stories set in L.A. The several that I found were not his best, in my opinion. In one, the murderer is glaringly obvious. Another is very dated and somewhat racist, especially by our modern standards. I wanted to include a CW short story called “Hot Water” that begins in Beverly Hills, but it quickly veers off to a Tijuana gambling casino and leads readers on a rollicking ride of mistaken identity, a stolen gambling stake and a car chase ride through the Mexican desert on shot-out tires and a gas tank fueled with tequila. It’s crazy Cornell at his best, but it just wasn’t LA-centric enough to warrant inclusion.

Readers of The Misread City are particularly fond of Ross MacDonald -- Can you say something about his story here, or the one by his wife, Margaret Millar?

A quick hat tip to Macdonald biographer Tom Nolan, who helped me narrow down the oeuvre to a handful of stories that fit my parameters.  Macdonald’s short stories are elegant and well-plotted, and are written in great painterly strokes that really give readers the feel of Southern California in the post-war years. That said, some critics found his wife and lamentably lesser known writer Margaret Millar to be the better wordsmith. Millar’s stories can be very introspective and they focus on psychological dread and the dynamics of troubled families. That is certainly the case with her story in L.A. Noir 2, “The People Across the Canyon,” a hair-raising little tale.

Does the noir tradition still seem to be alive and well here in Southern California?

I read the papers and watch the news, and I see the ghosts of Chandler and Macdonald and James M. Cain and Dorothy B. Hughes everywhere. Except now it’s playing out on a global stage – the protagonists and antagonists aren’t just from Sioux City and Baton Rouge, but fromYerevan and San Salvador and Chiang Mai. I think some of the best L.A. writing today in the genre reflects this diversity, and some are even taking it to other levels, incorporating paranormal and urban fantasy into their noir stories. That also seems a natural fit for a city that much of the rest of the world seems to think is only a holographic figment of our collective unconsciousness anyway.

Robert Crais vs. LA Noir

TOMORROW is the release date for the new novel by Robert Crais, "The First Rule." Crime fiction aficionados know Crais as a deft, literate writer with a strong sense of place and of social history -- one of the great inheritors of Ross Macdonald in the world of West Coast noir.

HERE is my profile of Crais, who is one of the best adjusted novelists I've ever spoken to -- someone who seems comfortable in this world as well as the imaginary world of his fiction. The piece tells the story of his long slog up from TV writing, his embracing and then (partial) outgrowing of Raymond Chandler's influence, the development of his private eye character Elvis Cole, and the emergence of Cole's sidekick Joe Pike into the lead position in some of his novels, beginning with "The Watchman."

And here, by the way, is writer Paula Woods' review of the new Crais novel.

Part of what I like about Crais is that he not only executes these books at a very high level, with a clockwork consistency, he's thought about what he's doing and can speak perceptively about the tradition in the broadest possible sense.

Photo credit: robertcrais.com

Amanda Knox and Italian Noir

THE strange case of Amanda Knox -- a cute American exchange student accused of killing her British roomate -- just took a yet stranger turn as she was convicted of the murder as part of a bizarre sex game. (She is sentenced to 26 years in prison; the family will appeal.)

The fact that this took place in Perugia, the capital of the lovely and green Italian region of Umbria, known as the land of the saints -- is only element that makes me think of the consummate Italian noir writer, the late Englishman Michael Dibdin. In fact, Dibdin even taught at the University of Perugia, where Knox studied -- he set his first novel, "Ratking," there -- and settled in her hometown of Seattle before he died in 2007.

Dibdin captured a tone of weirdness and irony so well, and perhaps because he was a foreigner, could see through Italian charm -- and unravel Italian bureaucracy and political intrigue -- like a great cultural critic.

HERE is my LAT story on the author and his work. Part of what's fascinating about Dibdin's career is the way it demonstrates -- as Pico Iyer has so eloquently observed -- the strength and flexibility of the Chandleresque detective novel (born of course in LA) in wide-ranging international settings.

For those new to Didbin's work, I'd recommend that debut, or the more poltical "Medusa."

This Knox case is likely to get stranger still, I'll bet.

Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles

BOOKS on chandler's LA have become a kind of cottage industry. still, i'm enjoying a new book of photographs called "daylight noir: raymond chandler's imagined city." the book could be a companion volume to judith freeman's "the long embrace," which visited the dozens of SoCal locations in which the novelist lived with his elusive wife cissy, tho the aesthetic of "daylight noir" is starker and less personal

the author is catherine corman, daughter of roger "king of the Bs" corman, who i wrote about when she came up with an eccentric book about joseph cornell. here she matches her own black-and-white photography with very brief excerpts from chandler's novels. we get some obvious LA landmarks, past and present -- bullocks wilshire, musso and franks, etc -- as well as lonely hotels, lush private residences, a spooky pier. when i leave LA, this is the way i want to remember it.

"in chandler the hardboiled style became above all a way of seeing," jonathan lethem writes in a brief introduction, "not far from photography itself." in his progress across the city, marlowe become "a kind of camera, a ghost."

besides the book jacket, these photos -- some of which remind me of antonioni's films -- are from the book. i'll post my story on corman's cornell project as soon as the LAT fixes its web archive.

Nordic Noir Finally Arrives

SOME called 1991 – a decade and a half after the rumbles in London – “the year punk broke.” If so, 2009 is shaping up as the year Nordic Noir finally arrived.

Stieg Larsson – a Trotskyist sci-fi fan now, inconveniently, dead – is the movement’s Nirvana, and “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” a mystery novel with Nordic Noir’s coolest heroine ever, his “Nevermind.” The book’s recent sequel, “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” which continues the adventures of a tattooed hacker and crusading reporter, also kicks ass.

The Exene and John Doe might be Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the Swedish husband-and-wife team whose classic ‘60s and ‘70s-era policiers – “The Laughing Policeman,” “The Man Who Went Up in Smoke” – are being reissued on Black Lizard.

What makes this grim, snowy stuff, with its umlauts and suns hidden for months at a time, so irresistible? You get, in Henning Mankell’s Wallender books, an existentialist detective who resembles “Point Blank”-era Lee Marvin, dropped into a Bergman movie. (Three of these were just ably adapted by Masterpiece.) With Norway’s Karin Fossum, penetrating glimpses into the psychology of killers. And with Iceland’s Arnaldur Indridason, storytelling so epic it’s almost medieval.

Modern crime hardboiled fiction first came out of California in the ‘20s and ‘30s, in newish cities where it was easy to fake a past, and where fog and dark alleys kept everything shadowy.

Scandinavia is an old land, overrun for centuries by Vikings swilling mead. But it’s got contemporary problems – drugs, immigration, global organized crime – that make these books feel pressing and urgent. That fact that it’s usually overcast doesn’t hurt.

“It’s the frontier independence frontier self sufficiency and frontier stoicism, combined with frontier weather, frontier isolation and frontier violence that makes these Nordic books so familiar to a US reader,” Junot Diaz of “Oscar Wao” told me. ”And yet the extremities of all these tendencies (and the almost alien history of these nations) are what gives them their unique compelling and ultimately terrifying tenor."

If 2009 is the year of Nordic Noir, then, we say it’s about damn time.

Photo credit: chatirygirl