James Ellroy and Red Riding 1974

Many, many years ago (before some of you were born, no doubt), I picked up a paperback copy of James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential without knowing anything about it. I liked the cover. I liked hard boiled detective fiction and I liked St. Marks Bookshop - which was still actually on St. Marks Place back at the dawn of the 90s.

Ellroy's L.A. Quartet are the blackest of noir. He uses a gigantic canvas to tell his long, violent story of corruption, crime and the emptiness at the heart of the dreams of post-war Southern California. His style is baroque and deeply profane, troubling to its core.

A few weeks ago the Curtis Hanson directed film of L.A. Confidential aired. Trav and I hadn't seen it in a good long while, so we watched it and it's... fine. But it's awfully clean for a film about the ugliest perversions and the deepest corruption. The movie is a well made, intelligently plotted period piece with some nice performances. It doesn't wear its period particularly comfortably and those suits worn by all those cops look awfully new. It seems a little small compared to the book, which is a different sort of animal entirely. There are two (!) serial killer subplots (both excised in the screenplay), dozens of characters - including many clearly based on real people including Walt Disney (who commits suicide), spanning nearly eight years. When I first read it I was dying to see it as a movie, but thought it was unfilmable. I was right, in order to film it, it had to be cut so far to the bone it had to become a different species entirely.

Most telling, the movie's villain, corrupt police Captain Dudley Smith, is killed at the end. James Cromwell is perfectly cast, but in the movie he is just a villain, a bad man doing bad things. In Ellroy's books he's the devil himself. All human greed and corruption made flesh. And like evil itself, he's unkillable. He can be momentarily neutralized, but never destroyed. In the books, taking down Smith destroys Ed Exely utterly, and Smith still isn't dead.

L.A. Confidential is a perfectly respectable movie, but what it needed was HBO and the fulfilled promise of novelistic storytelling television has given us in the last decade or so.

All this brings me to last night when I watched Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 1974. I haven't read David Peace's quartet of books of crime, corruption and perversion in Yorkshire in the 1970s and early 80s, but I have a feeling they were given the sort of treatment that would have served Ellroy's books well. Set in Yorkshire (the West Riding, I believe, Brontë country) the landscape is bleak indeed. I don't know it for a certainty, but I wouldn't die of shock if Peace was influenced by Ellroy. Both have police so corrupt, they murder and torture, both contain serial killers who attach the wings of birds to the back of dead children. The film is violent and sometimes hard to watch, but it's awfully beautiful. Filmed in gorgeous 16mm, its period setting is perfect.

Yorkshire is thousands of actual and conceptual miles from sunny L.A., but they share the same corrosive misery, a baroque inescapable violence and doom. The young reporter who ineptly tries to sort out the killings and the corruption and lies that surround him is destroyed utterly. Bam. The end.

Hard Boiled: Megan Abbott

The two have been so conflated, one almost forgets that hard boiled detective fiction and film noir are different entities that inspired and influenced each other, but are different none the less. I feel pretty comfortable saying that pretty much anyone alive in America right now started with the movies. I know I did. German expressionism meets post-war nihilism. Crime, bad men, shady dames and unhappy endings, all shot in glorious black and white (it took Polanski to make it work in technicolor). I was raised seemingly from birth on a pretty steady diet of film noir. And then I started reading: Hammett, Cain, Thompson and Chandler. In later years with the internet and all the wonders it brings, I tracked down lots of short stories that were originally (and in some cases, only) published in magazines like True Detective and Black Mask.

And then James Ellroy came on the scene in the 80s and 90s with his operatic, Grand Guignol L.A. Quartet. He took us through shady, ugly, racist, movie steeped, post-war Los Angeles, intertwining true crime and and hard boiled detectives with his own obsessions with race, depravity, violence and redemption. His canvas is enormous: Mike Hammer meets Hieronymus Bosch meets Kenneth Anger.

But recently I've been thinking. I've never really paid much attention to Westerns - I'm a city girl, through and through, and an East Coast one at that. Europe seems closer to me than Wyoming. But, like I said, I've been doing some thinking. Inspired mostly by the fact that my inamorato has been doing lots of Western movie research for a possible project. Most hard boiled fiction and noir takes place out west (Cornell Woolrich, I know, and a few others were in New York and placed a lot of their work there. Vera Caspray, with Laura, too). As I said, I know this is a generalization, but just bear with me here. I'm starting to think these two most American of genres are somehow linked. That the optimism of Western expansion turned into the cynicism of Noir when things didn't turn out as hoped. The wide open freedom of the plains and the West Coast and the deserts was taken over by greed and crime and rootlessness, and in some cases, despair. Or, maybe it was all of America and I'm just projecting outwards to some Western other.

I first discovered Megan Abbott by reading her brilliant article on V.C. Andrews in The Believer (co-authored with Sara Gran) about a year ago. I saw she was a Film Noir scholar and had a few novels out and got very interested. I read her second novel, The Song is You, and enjoyed it, but wasn't over the moon. It is set in 1950s L.A. amongst the publicists, B-Girls, reporters, and criminals who circle the movie business. For good or ill, and these are probably my own prejudices talking, when dealing with this milieu, I can't help but think of it at this point as Ellroy's Los Angeles which I know isn't entirely fair. She glances against the kind of depravity that I think James Ellroy needs to write about, but in her book it felt a little tentative: Ellroy-lite. But she's a good writer and gets the period top to bottom. I have a little bit of a Barbara Peyton fascination, so it was fun to see her make a guest appearance.

Then, I read Bury Me Deep and it was a fucking revelation. Let me apologize, Miss Abbott, for not giving you your due as a writer of hard boiled detective fiction, because your most recent book blew a hole right through my skull. It's set in an unnamed Phoenix, Arizona around 1930. As seen here, it reminded me of Hammett's Poisonville or Chandler's Bay City: a mid-sized town out west that is rotten to its core, corrupting all its residents just by touching them. She wears her Depression-era period lightly and well, no info dumps, no explanations. The book just inhabits it. Her prose is sparse and tough and smart. In it, Marion, a previously naive mid-western preacher's daughter, is left alone by her morphine addicted doctor husband when he gets a job with a mining company down in Mexico. Abbott gets deep inside of Marion's head, and in some ways it's inverse noir. Hard boiled crime novels are all about the point of view as no one is ever really innocent. In a traditional hard boiled fiction or noir film, it is seen from the man's perspective. Marion starts off as an innocent, but as the book lives in a city and a world where all women alone are whores, she could, in another story, by a different writer, be painted as a shady noir dame.

This is taught thriller writing at its very, very best. Abbott based her story partly on infamous "Trunk Murderess" Winnie Judd, but giving her a fictional third act. I don't want to give too much away, but it was this book that really, oddly, made me start to think about the Noir/Western continuum, and the ways in which both these genres are somewhat relegated to the historical. I've written about this before, but to a large extent our right as Americans to live freely and reinvent ourselves has been completely shattered. I'm not going to argue here about the reasons for it, or whether it's a good or bad thing, the point is that one can no longer get on a train in Philadelphia, take it out to California, cut all ties and become somebody else. Not really. It's hard to be that shady for too long in the age of the internet and social security numbers. Abbott's wonderful, fictional third act would be an impossibility. Marion and her husband came out west, like so many of the characters in Ellroy and Cain and Chandler (hell, like Chandler himself) to make new lives where nobody knew them, and to a certain extent succeeded. What tripped them up, of course, was never a well thought out computer background check, but this wicked world and their own dark natures. Which is a different thing entirely.

Barbara Redux

In addition to "Lucy Troma: the Graphic Novel", or perhaps as a test run, I may be doing "Die Like A Lady: the Graphic Novel". In 2002 I wrote and directed a play of the same title which has haunted me in one way or another ever since. The production nearly put me in the hospital from exhaustion, malnutrition and stress. I weighed about 100 pounds at the end of it and I was just shattered. "Die Like A Lady" tells the bad girl life story of Barbara Graham, the last woman to be executed in the state of California. I first read her life story on a true crime website and I thought it was such fascinating stuff - mainly because she had a series of opportunities to escape her downward spiral to the gas chamber and managed to either be bludgeoned by fate or to fuck things up herself. My play was a clown show and a comedy and an example of the self mythologizing nature of all Americans. The famous Susan Hayward movie "I Want To Live" was based on her life, but although it was pretty racy for the '50s it was full of lies. It tried to make her more sympathetic by pretending that she wasn't a junky and a murderer (the movie was okay with her being a whore).

When I was in the middle of working on the show people asked me why I found her story so fascinating and I never had an answer. One thing I do know is that I'm not done with it. I think I know what this story itself is, however. You know those incredibly dangerous women in the noirs of the 40s and 50s? Did you ever wonder what Brigid O'Shaughnessy's life was like before she ran into Sam Spade? Or what had happened to that monstrous woman played by Jane Greer in "Out of the Past"? Or all the damaged, slutty, criminal women played by Lizabeth Scott and Gloria Grahame? Or Hammett's girl with the silver eyes? Take them out of the context of making Robert Mitchum's or Humphrey Bogart's life a misery, and their lives were very likely a lot like Barbara's, just with better clothes and lighting.

So I've been working on some sketches. I've done some ink/ink wash drawings which are a mess as I did them on the wrong kind of paper. Can one be in love with pencils? Because I'm in love with my color pencils. They arrived in the mail yesterday as buying the 72 pencil set from Amazon turned out to be cheaper than buying the 48 pack from Pearl. As I fleetingly mentioned, I've been trying to branch out into color, and one of the problems with this is that I'm not a very good painter. So I got these colored pencils and so far I love them. The only downside that I can see is that I think I have a repetitive stress injury from a marathon of pencil sharpening last night.

But I'm super excited about this and my script is so spare and carefully plotted and so light on dialogue it's pretty much ready to go, story-wise. I miss Barbara, though like a true noir dame she has infected me like a virus.