A Celebration of California Noir
The California-Canada relationship has been in the news lately, with Golden State Gov. Gavin Newsom last week reminding Canadians that we’re always welcome in his patch. Given that my detective novels are all set in San Francisco, it gave me the idea of paying tribute to California with a look at the best crime novels set in the state.
I tossed out the obvious ones, so there’s no Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep. I tried to avoid non-fiction, which scratched Helter Skelter. And no movies, so Robert Towne’s script for Chinatown is out.
What I’m left with is eight splendid novels. Geographically, they’re almost all set in Los Angeles, even though I tend to prefer San Francisco. There is just no denying L.A.’s rich history of noir. (And with the exception of The Maltese Falcon, it’s difficult to name an iconic San Francisco crime novel.) I’m now working on my sixth novel set in San Francisco, so I always side with the Bay Area in the SF-LA rivalry, but I’m in awe of the body of crime fiction set in Los Angeles.
The other thing that I noticed was how prevalent the sub-genre of private eye novels is. Even the Harry Bosch novel I chose features the LAPD vet working as a PI. Maybe it’s that the combination of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe has a huge impact on West Coast crime writing. Maybe it’s just that there are more private eye novels than police procedurals, regardless of locale.
Anyway, here in alphabetical order are my eight exemplars of California noir, each of which I’d heartily recommend.
1. The Black Dahlia, by James Ellroy
Ellroy launched his L.A. Quartet with this novel in 1987, basing it on the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, whose mutilated body was discarded in an empty residential lot. A master stylist, Ellroy’s Los Angeles is a dark and corrupt place, and the noirish atmosphere is amplified by his lean, streetwise prose.
2. The Choirboys, by Joseph Wambaugh
Most critics consider The Onion Field to be the best book by Wambaugh, who died this year. But I prefer this 1975 novel because it was so ahead of its time. It tells of the misadventures of a group of young cops in Wilshire Division in L.A. Wambaugh was one of those rare crime writers who could be genuinely funny, and he was at his funniest with The Choirboys.
3. Devil in a Blue Dress, by Walter Mosley
I could have chosen several novels by Mosley, but I don’t think he ever bettered his first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress. Hip and atmospheric, this novel introduces us to Easy Rawlins and shows how this African-American laborer becomes a private eye in 1940s Los Angeles. It all starts when a stranger called DeWitt Albright walks into a bar and offers Rawlins a job finding a young White woman named Daphne Monet.
4. The Little Sister, by Raymond Chandler
Just because I ruled out The Big Sleep, it doesn’t mean I can’t sneak in some Chandler. I think The Little Sister is my second-favorite Chandler novel, just because the plot holds together so well. (Some of his stories tend to, well, meander.) True to form, Philip Marlowe is tasked with finding a missing person, and, true to form, things get dicey as Marlowe tries to find him.
5. Vanishing in the Haight, by Max Tomlinson
Given that my detective series is set in Haight-Ashbury, I was naturally drawn to this book, which also features the San Francisco hippie enclave. Though my Haight Mystery Series is set in the late 1960s, most of the action in the first Colleen Hayes mystery takes place a few years later, in 1978. Hayes, working as a private eye while she’s on parole, is hired by a wealthy industrialist to solve the murder of his daughter, who was killed in Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love.
6. The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain
Cain just has to be on this list, and his 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice helped to lay the foundation of California noir. (I was surprised to realize it predates the entire Philip Marlowe series.) The cops in this novel are great, but it’s not a standard police procedural – far from it. It tells the story of drifter Frank Chambers who ends up in a rural diner one night and ends up scheming with the co-owner Cora to murder her husband.
7. The Wrong Side of Goodbye, by Michael Connelly
I had to choose one Connelly book, because he writes so beautifully about Los Angeles, and it wasn’t easy to figure out which one. In this novel, Harry Bosch is hired as a private investigator to find the long-lost love of a dying industrialist. The reason this novel – rather than any other Bosch novel – makes the list is that so much of the action takes place in San Diego as well as L.A.
8. The Zebra-Striped Hearse, by Ross Macdonald
Born in Kitchener, Ontario, Ross Macdonald found fame in California as the creator of the Lew Archer series, and The Zebra-Striped Hearse makes this list simply because I like the hippie vibe of a bunch of kids driving around California in a zebra-striped hearse. A wealthy couple hire Archer to investigate a young artist called Burke Damis, who wants to marry their daughter. The investigation takes Archer to San Francisco, Nevada and Mexico, finding bodies along the way.
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Peter Moreira is the author of The Haight Mystery Series — retro mystery novels set in San Francisco in the late 1960s. Click the link below to sign up for a free prequel novella.
