Bang, Bang, They Shot Us Down

Alas, Los Angeles has slipped from yet another perch. Since the 1930s, L.A. has served as the preeminent city of noir, the favorite locale for America’s detective writers. From “The Big Sleep” by Raymond Chandler to “Devil in a Blue Dress” by Walter Mosley, Los Angeles has served up a thousand sun-blasted, edgy backgrounds for malice and treachery.

Perhaps the writers were attracted by the pantheon of grifters and petty cheats who populated the city during the prewar years and after. Perhaps they liked the idea of L.A. as the welshing Promised Land. Whatever the reason, they were pulled to this city and eventually their work redefined it. As a group, they invented the notion of L.A. that we now carry around in our heads: the bright, sunny place that can steal your soul. Los Angeles, in fact, may be the only American city that was defined largely by detective writers.

But they invent no more. Los Angeles has not exactly dropped off the map of detective fiction so much as it has lost its high position. The best of the new breed of detective novelists, writers such as James Lee Burke or Nevada Barr, have found other cities to explore, or sometimes no city at all. L.A., to these writers, constitutes an old-timers’ game.

“L.A. just got very L.A., you know?” said John Mitchell, chuckling. Mitchell runs Mitchell Books in Pasadena, a specialty store for detective novels. “You don’t get great mystery books out of a city where people ‘do lunch.’ You need a place where people shoot lunch.”

Worse still, according to Mitchell, readers appear to have lost much of their interest in L.A. as the site of murder and mayhem. Sales of the classic writers such as Chandler and James M. Cain, author of “The Postman Always Rings Twice” have gone into steep declines. And in the saddest case of all, novelist Ross MacDonald has disappeared from the bookshelves altogether.

Among lovers of detective fiction, MacDonald usually is mentioned in the same breath with Chandler and Cain. In the 1960s and ‘70s he wrote a number of bestsellers about his hometown of Santa Barbara, including “The Drowning Pool.” The New York Times put “The Drowning Pool” on the first page of its Sunday Book Review, an extraordinary act of respect for a mystery writer.

MacDonald, you see, was no mere copy of Chandler or Cain or Dashiell Hammett. His mysteries usually revolve around modern families with shameful secrets, long-hidden and protected. The secrets may eventually lead to murder, but their unraveling requires a working knowledge of the neurotic California soul.

In MacDonald’s universe the evil often gets connected to environmental decay. Here’s how he described the California landscape in “The Drowning Pool”: “They had jerry-built the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed superhighways through the mountains, cut down a thousand years of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. . . . There was nothing wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn’t cure.”

William Goldman, the author and screenwriter, once told the story of how MacDonald’s work first impressed John Leonard, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Given a copy of “The Chill” by MacDonald, Leonard read the book and thought to himself, “Holy s---, this is real stuff. The family secret is a great theme. My God, this is a work of American literature.”

Yet today, if you walk into any store that sells new books, you will find no copies of Ross MacDonald. He has vanished. No publisher in America prints his books. To get a copy of MacDonald you must go to the library or to a used-book store.

“It’s odd, kind of crazy to have him out of print,” says Sheldon McArthur of The Mysterious Book Store in West Hollywood. “The last time anyone printed his books, we sold a healthy number of copies. That was in the early ‘90s. Then he just got dropped.”

McArthur believes the big bookstore chains took MacDonald down. “For a classic author like MacDonald to survive, the chains must be willing to keep seven or eight titles in stock all the time, all over the country. And they wouldn’t, because they didn’t believe he would sell. So the publishers gave up.”

Did the chains perceive a weakness in MacDonald’s marketability because he represents the old, L.A. school of detective writing? If so, will Cain and Chandler follow MacDonald into the ranks of out-of-print authors? Is the whole school of the L.A. mystery writers headed for collector’s shelves and nowhere else? Or have the chains grown so risk averse that they will not take a chance with a writer of McDonald’s quality?

Who knows. This summer, Vintage paperbacks says it will make an attempt to revive MacDonald by reissuing three of his books. Most likely, this effort will be the last in many years if it fails. For their part, McArthur and Mitchell predict it will fail because Vintage plans to publish the books in the high-quality trade paperback style, where prices hit $10 to $12 per copy.

“Mystery books are mass market books. $4.99 stuff. The number of people willing to pay $12 for a mystery paperback are few,” says McArthur.

So, conceivably, we could be witnessing the sunset of L.A.’s great literary era, one that lasted for almost 40 years. This summer’s experiment with MacDonald may tell the tale.

MacDonald once described his detective, Lew Archer, as “a modern man who is, in effect, homeless, virtually friendless, and who tries to behave as if there is some hope in society, which there is.”

It would be nice to think there is also some hope for Ross MacDonald’s literary legacy.