A Drive Through the City: Writing About LA

The prospect of writing a crime novel based in Los Angeles was so daunting that I had to live here three years before trying. If I was going to take on a city already explored by Chandler and Ellroy, Crais and Connelly, I wanted to make sure that I knew it. That I had some way to make this place live and breathe, to take readers beyond the fake tans and the Hollywood sign into the beating heart of a city where anything is possible.

Most everyone (except for the eleven people, including my wife, actually born here) come to L.A. looking for something. It’s an intriguing city, full of promise, but it’s also a place where dreams come to be strangled. A lot of bitterness and glamour, resentment and money—a rich, dark undercurrent to all that glitz. Which, of course, makes it a great place for crime.

I wrote five novels that took place in Los Angeles before I wrote what I consider an L.A. novel. The Crime Writer, my eighth, is an L.A. novel because it couldn’t take place anywhere else. It’s about crime and story and infamy, and it features a protagonist who finds himself in that hottest of all spotlights—the L.A. high-profile murder trial. And so it required a more intense grounding in the streets and alleys and personalities of this place.

There’s a convention, in fiction centered here, of the drive—whether real or imagined—through the city. When I hit a certain point in my first draft, I found it was time to write my own dirty noir love song to Los Angeles. The virtual tour of the city comes through the eyes of Drew Danner, my protagonist, as he sits on his back deck and takes stock of a town that has dismissed him as another lurid cautionary tale. After, he observes, “My cheeks were wet with the breeze and the swell of my heart for the lights below. Los Angeles. A mirage of a town that sprang up like a cold sweat on the backs of gold diggers and railroad workers, and took form when pirate film distributors, fleeing Edison’s patents, took a train and a gamble backed by East Coast muscle. Los Angeles, land of endless promise. And endless failure….L.A. of the high-octane sunset, the warm night air that leaves you drunk. L.A. of the prolonged adolescence, the slow-motion seduction, the ageless, replaceable blonde. L.A. where a porn star runs for governor and an action figure wins. L.A. where anything can happen at any time to some poor schmuck or lucky bastard. Where anything can happen to you. Where anything had happened to me.”

And that’s really it, isn’t it? That sense of possibility—good and bad.

In addition to the obvious—crime and punishment, Rodeo and Sunset—L.A. is a city of hidden textures, of many hues. People come here searching for, above all else, identity. No one here is a caterer or bartender—we are all rock stars and dancers, installation artists and cinematographers. Everyone is on the run from a past more ordinary than they’d like to admit, toward a dream they can never fully attain. This search for identity is something I literalize in my latest book, Trust No One. Nick Horrigan had his life taken away after his stepfather’s murder when he was seventeen. For reasons unclear to him, he was forced away from his family and on the run, and as the book opens, he’s returned to this city, to Los Angeles, to seek his identity. He is an ordinary guy, like you or me. Like so many Angelinos, he wants to know who exactly he is, what he’s running from, what he’s moving toward. And we meet him, on page one, on the worst night of his life. His world is about to explode in on him. He’s dragged from his bed to a waiting helicopter where he’s told that a terrorist has just seized control of a nuclear power plant—and will only talk to Nick. This confrontation will lead, of course, back to the events of Nick’s childhood—back to his identity. And there is no better place for this to unfold than against the backdrop of a city that lives to repackage faces and names and sell them the world over.

There’s the fun stuff, too, of course. The trends and fads, the day spas and conceptual dining experiences. My wife took me to a restaurant a while back without telling me what dinner would entail. I was stripped of my cell phone and led by a blind woman through several dense curtains into a pitch black room. We ate in perfect darkness, an experience that was supposed to (and did) heighten our sense of taste. But the entire time, I was thinking, What a great place for something awful to happen! A mysterious meet, a stranger who has information but doesn’t want his face known….As my mind wandered, one of the key chapters of Trust No One took shape. Perhaps that defines L.A. more than anything else: It’s difficult to concentrate here or chew your steak—there’s always a scene waiting to happen.

–Gregg Hurwitz, Los Angeles, 2009

This essay originally appeared in Mystery Readers Journal

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