Jim Gavin's Los Angeles Stories

IT'S not often that a book of short stories as good as Jim Gavin's Middle Men rolls across our desk -- rarer still when a book of any kind captures Los Angeles, especially its overlooked, non-mythic aspects, quite so intelligently.

And don't take our word for it: The galleys of Middle Men come with so many raves from execs, editors, and publicists at Simon & Schuster than I can picture dewy office interns being flogged by their bosses, "Write a rave for Gavin now or you are out of here!" But it's all in the service of a great work, so we here at The Misread City are happy to see this kind of medieval method applied.

Gavin has been in and around L.A. for a long time, and pursued a number of "failed careers," including gas station manager and quiz-show gopher, and seems to have paid close attention all the way through: There's also an understated comic quality from the very first paragraph.

Among the things we have in common with Gavin are an obsession with California detective writer Ross Macdonald, a connection to Loyola Marymount University, Irish Catholicism in the family (though less unalloyed than in his), some years on Curson Avenue in the Fairfax district, and some serious damage from the 2008 Wall Street crash.

This dude is there real thing. Check him out at Skylight Books on March 14. And don't miss Middle Men.

Here is my Q and A with the author.

These stories seem to view LA from a number of fresh angles – from the middle you might say. What is your experience with Los Angeles – what ‘hoods have you lived in and what kinds of things have you done here?

I’m fourth generation SoCal on my dad’s side, which is always a smug and annoying thing to say. My dad is an old Long Beach guy, a “scholar and champion” from Long Beach Poly. I grew up for the most part in Orange, CA.  

As a kid, I played tons of sports, went to the beach in the summer, ate lots of fast food, lost my mind when Gibson went yard in ‘88. I graduated from Loyola Marymount University in West LA. While there I was a DJ for their radio station, KXLU 88.9 FM, which broadcasts all over Los Angeles. I loved it and spent a lot of my time going to shows at a lot of places that no longer exist, like Jabberjaw and the Alligator Lounge. 

After college, I worked on the sports desk of the Orange County Register.  Later, I lived up north in Berkeley for a few years, and when I came back down I lived in Long Beach, in an apartment called “The Versaille.” It was significantly less opulent than the one in France. After that, I lived in the Miracle Mile, within smelling distance of the La Brea Tar Pits. My local tavern was Tom Bergin’s, which recently went through a bunch of pointless renovations. Basically, they just made the menu more expensive, and they no longer serve chicken tenders. I’m not happy about these developments.  

I moved back up north between 2007-2009, and then I spent a year in Boston, my first and hopefully last winter.  

I currently live in Culver City, a block from the Culver Studios, in one of those little bungalow courts from the 1920s.  I’m pretty sure my apartment is haunted by a hack screenwriter who hung himself in 1947.  I can walk to Trader Joe’s and the new Expo line station, which is awesome. I’ve gone downtown more in the last six months than in my previous 36 years of existence. I also love driving down Sepulveda between Pico and Jefferson, because if you squint, it’s like your driving through Los Angeles in 1973. 

The city, here, seems about as far from the old “sunshine and noir” trope as I’ve seen in literary treatment. We don’t have a sense of a palm-treed utopia, a paradise lost, or of a seedy underbelly. Do feel a connection to any of the classic writers of LA or California fiction who help build those mythologies?

Ross MacDonald is one of my favorite writers.  I’ve probably read more books by him than anyone, though they do blend together.  But he is brilliant, and Lew Archer is my favorite LA detective (followed closely by Jim Rockford).  Based on a few off-hand references, I figured out that Archer’s dingy bachelor apartment was in the Miracle Mile, somewhere north of Pico, and east of Fairfax.  I was living in that neighborhood when I figured this out, and suddenly the Spanish fourplexes on Curson Avenue took on a new and brilliant grandeur.  

Raymond Chandler casts a long shadow too, of course, and I can’t drive Mulholland without thinking of him.  One of my great dreams in life is to be tailed by goons.   So I love the noir legacy, and part of me wishes I had the ability to write a detective novel.  I love all the great Hollywood novels too.  One of the stories in my collection is based on my experience as a production assistant for a certain game show. It views Hollywood from the bottom, but I think it still fits in that tradition.  

But like the detective novels, most Hollywood novels are written by people who didn’t grow up here and so they can only see it as it as a nightmare funhouse populated by tawdry phonies.  It certainly is a nightmare, but there is a whole other realm of experience in Southern California that, like any other part of the country, can only be captured by someone who has been here a long time and who can see the place on its own terms, not refracted through the vision of Hollywood.   

In the last few years,  wonderful writers like Victoria Patterson, Dana Johnson, and Michael Jaime-Becerra have staked out their own territory, and as a native, reading their work provides a special kind of pleasure.  I get to see a familiar world for the first time. 

Craft typically sets the story apart from the novel. How do you approach craftsmanship? Where does a story usually start for you, where does it go from there, and do you revise like crazy?

I always know what I want to write about, I just don’t know how.  There will be some experience that haunts me in some way, but I don’t what the story is. I just know that I can’t get a certain image or moment or line of dialogue out of my mind.  Months will pass, years, and I’ll bang my head against a wall for a while, but then I’ll write a sentence that has a certain spark to it .  There’s a coiled energy in the tone and voice, and I try and let that sentence lead the way.  

I had wanted to write the story “Bermuda” for over a decade.  I had actually been there as a young man on a doomed romantic mission, but I had no idea what the story was, or who was telling it, until I wrote these sentences: “Ravens nested in the lemon tree and each morning a woke in the shadow of a minaret. Plus we had cheap cable.” For whatever reason this gave me the narrator and the rest of the story fell into place.  

I spend a lot of time on the opening page of a story.  Everything has to be there.  The tone, the language, the hierarchy of characters. The ending is always in the beginning.  I tend to revise as I go. I don’t write a first draft and then go back to the beginning.  Instead, I spin my wheels, rewriting the same sentence over and over, but I think that’s when you’re writing the rest of the story.

I can’t quite figure out Max Lavoy – the Walloon quiz show host, self-absorbed history buff, etc. – from the story “Elephant Doors.” Sometimes I can’t stop thinking about him, either. Give us a sense of where he came from in your imagination, how he fits into your vision of the story, the book, the city.

I remember hearing a story about Mad King Otto of Germany.  I have no idea if this is historically accurate, but apparently he got it in his head that if he didn’t execute a peasant each day, the kingdom would collapse.  So each day his handlers would fetch a peasant who worked the royal grounds and they would put him in front of a wall and hand Otto a rifle.  He’d shoot the peasant and then go about his day.  But as soon as he departed, the “dead” peasant would get up and go back to work.  

The whole thing was staged.  The gun shot blanks and the peasant pretended to get shot.  All these people went through this ridiculous charade every day to appease the whims of a king.  

I don’t if this actually happened, but I think it is a brilliant illustration of how all organizations essentially work.  There is a king at the top, and everyone down below, scrambling to appease.  This is true in the corporate world, in Hollywood, and in many families. I had this in mind when I was writing the character of Max.  

He’s a king, of sorts, and gets whatever he wants, which, in a way, means he will always be isolated and unhappy.  Someone on the other end of the spectrum, like Adam, the production assistant, has to perform any number of ridiculous charades while convincing himself that this kind of humiliation is worthwhile and necessary.  Adam is just as narcissistic as Max, but he at least knows this about himself, and in the end he chooses to humiliate himself on his own terms, by rededicating himself to stand-up comedy, rather than jumping through any more hoops for Max. 

The book as a whole feels shadowed by the crash of 2008, and the diminished expectations, that followed -- without being “jaded” in a hackneyed way. I expect much of it was begun back in the good old days, but did the downturn have an influence?

Yeah, I think it had a big influence.  My family has always had lots of ups and downs, so being broke isn’t anything new to us.  

In “Play the Man” there’s a sort of sub-story about the collapse of his family, though the narrator is too wrapped up in his own life to totally understand what his parents are going through, financially and emotionally. But this recession got us good and we lost the house in Orange where I grew up.  It was a long and exhausting process and I still can’t bring myself go down to Orange. It makes me too sad.  

At the same time, I feel lucky that I got to grow up in a house, and I can only hope that I can provide something similar if I ever have kids.  A simple middle class wish, but it’s becoming harder and harder to come by, especially in California.  

Our house already had multiple mortgages but the whole bankruptcy/foreclosure process started in earnest after 2008 crash.  I remember those months, the shame, the fear, the insomnia, the sense that something had been irretrievably lost.  That mood definitely worked it’s way into the stories, especially “Bewildered Decisions in Times of Mercantile Terror.”  

It seems the worst of it is over, but like everyone else, my dream is no longer to get rich, it’s simply to get out of debt. 

One element that sticks out is what I’ll call “non-Latino Catholicism,” or judging from your surname, Irish Catholicism. How did growing up with some relationship to the church (school perhaps) shape your approach to seeing and writing?

It’s been a huge influence.  I grew up with a lot of kids whose parents were born in Mexico and Central America, so when I think of the Catholic Church, I’m more likely to think of Archbishop Romero and the Maryknoll sisters, than the grandeur of St Peter’s Basilica.  

My parents made a lot of sacrifices to put me and my sisters through Catholic elementary school and high school and later I went to a Jesuit college.  I have fond memories of all those places, but that has more to do with the people I was lucky enough to meet than with any real understanding of the Church.  

In typical lapsed fashion, I had to drift away from the Church to finally become interested in its history and theology.  Sixteen years of Catholic school and I was never assigned the Divine Comedy!  I had to discover all that on my own, and sadly I think that’s pretty common. 

Everything that is beautiful and inspiring about the Church has been buried under the rubble of a few conservative talking points and the ongoing horror of the sex abuse scandals.  

All the characters in the collection come out of this parochial environment, and though Catholicism isn’t always foremost on their minds, they can’t escape its influence, and they see the world accordingly.  My favorite songwriter, Dan Treacy of Television Personalities, has a beautiful line in “Everything She Touches Turns to Gold”:

Catholic school, the pain the guilt

My story is no different to tell

Every young man’s hell

Just waiting for the bell

That could be another epigram for the collection.  In fact, I’m kind of annoyed that I didn’t use it.  

In any case, there is the pain and the guilt but there is also this idea of mercy that I think plays a central roll in the book.   I think we all want mercy, and a few of the protagonists are lucky enough to find a person who is selfless enough to provide it.  

Congrats on Middle Men. What’s next for Jim Gavin?

I’m working on a novel and trying to improve my golf game. I play at Los Feliz.  $7 for nine holes and the greens are littered with cigarette butts. If I can start hitting under 30 on a consistent basis, I will be very happy. 

Slacker Noir in San Diego

THERE'S a pretty good TV show that's just made its debut on FX. Terriers -- don't know about the name -- is like a Ross Macdonald novel crossed with The Big Lebowski. Or something like that. Either way, the casting and storytelling are quite fine. (The second episode goes up Wednesday.)

Here is my review, which leads this way:

The protagonist in FX's "Terriers," Hank Dolworth (Donal Logue), is two parts the Dude from "The Big Lebowski," one part '70s Kris Kristofferson. He works as an unlicensed private eye with a young partner even more naive than he is in Ocean Beach, a slightly hippie-esh San Diego neighborhood that recalls both "Jackie Brown" and Thomas Pynchon's latest slacker-noir novel. Hank, a recovering alcoholic, was fired from the local police force; we've heard that one before, too. So originally is not one of the great virtues of this show.

This is the first of occasional television reviews I'm writing for The Hollywood Reporter, which is under new management.

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 Enigma of Artie Shaw

One of the orneriest musicians in history, swing-era bandleader and clarinetest Artie Shaw is the subject of a new biography by Tom Nolan. What a character Shaw was -- rising to great heights, dropping out of music when his fame and talent were at their highest,  provoking no less than THREE of his many ex-wives to write memoirs about him. He spent his last four decades in the west Valley.

Nolan is an L.A. based culture writer who wrote the definitive biography of a beloved figures for readers of The Misread City -- noir novelist Ross Macdonald. His new book, Three Chords For Beauty's Sake: The Life of Artie Shaw, is just out on Norton. (Review here by music historian Ted Gioia.)

The anecdote Nolan recalls on the first few pages, about Shaw's attempt to woo a girl he fancied, is so funny and profane I'm tempted to recount it here. But I'll let readers experience it for themselves.

What follows is my Q+A with Nolan:

Just how famous and influential was Artie Shaw at his apogee?

Artie Shaw, in the late 1930s and throughout the '40s and '50s, was one of the most famous people in the world.  He sold millions of records, was in movies and on the radio, and often made the front-page with news of his sensational career and marital doings.  He was well-known and popular in Europe and beyond. 

In July of 1941, Time Magazine wrote that "for the youth of Germany ... the U.S. ... [is] the land of skyscrapers and Artie Shaw and Clark Gable."  

As for influence: His hiring (at different times) of African-American band-members Billie Holiday, Oran "Hot Lips" Page, and Roy Eldridge hastened the public integration of jazz (as did Benny Goodman's combos); swing music's progressive actions in this regard preceded major-league sports' by almost a decade. 

And his orchestral conceptions, his periodic use of strings and classical horns, and the arrangements he commissioned from such talented men as William Grant Still and Eddie Sauter changed the nature of big-band jazz. The critic Nat Hentoff, in a jacket-quote for this book, called Artie Shaw "the most creative clarinetist in jazz history ... an orchestra leader who not only produced hits but also new dimensions of this music." 

What made you want to write about him?

He was a fascinating person and a great great artist.  He deserved a decent biography. We got along well: He liked to talk, and I think I'm a good listener.

The opportunity begged to be seized. 

Shaw married eight times, called his fans "morons," went from great fame to great obscurity... Sounds like an odd cat -- was he?

He was brilliant, self-centered, very protective, even a bit shy. From a young age, he never felt safe in the world.  He didn't like crowds, but he was dependent upon them for his living.  All things considered, I think he did fairly well. (And he didn't call all his fans 'morons' -- just the obnoxious jitterbugs who'd jump onstage and disrupt the show, something all the bandleaders were upset about in 1939.  Artie was almost the only one with the guts, or poor judgment, to complain in public. And he paid a big price.) 

You call him "jazz's Hamlet"?

Because he could never decide whether he wanted to be a bandleader or a writer, a celebrity or a private person, a married man or a lone wolf -- or so it seemed to the public. 

How do you explain his dropping out of music near the height of his fame?

Leaving was his lifelong way of coping with circumstances not to his liking or beyond his control.  The first time he left music, he wasn't even famous yet -- just very successful as a New York radio orchestra-player; but he hated the commercial sounds he was forced to make, so he bought a farm in Bucks County and tried to write a novel.  He went back to the business as the swing-music craze began and became a huge star, but the pressures he faced were enormous.  "Quitting" in 1939 was his way of getting a vacation, and starting the game again on his own musical terms; he was only gone a few months. He'd repeat this pattern throughout his career -- always coming back with a new concept and playing better than ever. 

How was this project different from writing about Ross Macdonald?

Ross Macdonald left a large archive filled with personal correspondence, which I spent years going through.  Artie Shaw's official archive contains his orchestras' arrangements but not too many private papers.  But Artie gave lots of interviews over the years, and I pored over those.  For both projects, I spoke with many of the subjects' colleagues and friends.  And I visited with Artie several times during the last 14 years of his life.  That was the biggest difference: I never met Ross Macdonald.  But Artie did: During the 1970s and '80s, he often attended the twice-a-month Santa Barbara writers' luncheon co-founded by Macdonald. 

Tom Nolan appears at Book Soup on Sunday May 23 -- the 100th anniversary of Artie Shaw's birth -- at 5 p.m.

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

Ross MacDonald and California

Sometimes it's the outsiders who tell us the most. And Ross Macdonald, the Canadian-reared detective novelist who spent most of his career in and around Santa Barbara, wrote some of the most enduring private eye novels set in the Golden State as well as, between the lines, some of the best social history of the postwar period.

HERE is my piece on the work and life of MacDonald (1915-'83), who would celebrate his birthday this Sunday. He's inspired other crime writers -- Robert Crais loves his work and carries his mantle in some ways, and James Ellroy has often talked to me how the emphasis on family roots in MacDonald's work has shaped his own. But more mainstream/literary writers have taken off from his as well: You can see private eye Lew Archer sneaking around the shadows of Lethem's "Motherless Brooklyn" and Chabon's "The Yiddish Policeman's Union."

For my piece I speak to writer Crais, biographer Tom Nolan, LA noir queen Denise Hamilton and his old editor Otto Penzler.

Besides incredible plotting and psychologically rich characters, I love the way the author captures the gradual and seismic changes in California culture in the '50s and '60s -- the coming of long hair and rock music and drugs, changing sexual morals, the excitement of the young and the disorientation of the older generation. He writes about it all with sensitivity and grudging sympathy.

More on Ross Mac later. To answer your first question: Start with "The Galton Case."