L.A. Private Eyes

L.A. PRIVATE EYES

QUICK TAKES: MOVIES AND POPULAR CULTURE

Quick Takes: Movies and Popular Culture is a series offering succinct overviews and high-quality writing on cutting-edge themes and issues in film studies. Authors offer both fresh perspectives on new areas of inquiry and original takes on established topics.

SERIES EDITORS:

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is Willa Cather Professor of English and teaches film studies in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies and professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Rebecca Bell-Metereau, Transgender Cinema

Blair Davis, Comic Book Movies

Steven Gerrard, The Modern British Horror Film

Barry Keith Grant, Monster Cinema

Daniel Herbert, Film Remakes and Franchises

Ian Olney, Zombie Cinema

Valérie K. Orlando, New African Cinema

Stephen Prince, Digital Cinema

Dahlia Schweitzer, L.A. Private Eyes

Steven Shaviro, Digital Music Videos

David Sterritt, Rock ’n’ Roll Movies

John Wills, Disney Culture

L.A. PRIVATE EYES

DAHLIA SCHWEITZER

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schweitzer, Dahlia, author.

Title: L.A. private eyes / Dahlia Schweitzer.

Other titles: LA private eyes | Los Angeles private eyes

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2019] | Series: Quick takes: movies and popular culture

Identifiers: LCCN 2018028854 | ISBN 9780813596372 (cloth) | ISBN 9780813596365 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Detective and mystery stories, American—History and criticism. | Film noir—United States—History and criticism. | Detective and mystery television programs—History and criticism. | Los Angeles (Calif.)—In literature. | Los Angeles (Calif.)—In motion pictures. | Los Angeles (Calif.)—On television.

Classification: LCC PS374.D4 S394 2019 | DDC 813/.087209979494—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018028854

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2019 by Dahlia Schweitzer

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by US copyright law.

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. Los Angeles

2. The Detective Story

3. The Detective

4. The Black Detective

5. The Lady Dick

6. The Girl Sleuth

Acknowledgments

Further Reading

Word Cited

Index

About the Author

L.A. PRIVATE EYES

INTRODUCTION

I grew up first with Encyclopedia Brown. Then there were Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift. I never had much interest in the Bobbsey Twins, but I devoured Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes. I visited the infamous 221B Baker Street, a miniature Disneyland for mystery buffs. While I adored all the mysteries and took infinite comfort in the reassurance of every tidy ending, the narratives all took place in an imaginary location. The stories always felt like yarns spun by clever authors, intellectual hopscotch to be played on a lazy weekend.

When I moved to Los Angeles, my love of mysteries took on another dimension. I embraced Mickey Haller and Harry Bosch. I tore through Michael Connelly books, discovering the streets of Los Angeles as his characters drove down them, experiencing traffic and crime (and Hollywood, Echo Park, and Van Nuys) through the eyes of Haller and Bosch. These did not feel like imaginary detectives in hypothetical locales. These were real people who were my actual neighbors. Los Angeles became synonymous with crime and intrigue, webs of conspiracy lurking just behind the palm trees and movie stars.

I revisited my favorite film noirs—Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, Chinatown—and it made sense that they were all in Los Angeles. After all, Los Angeles was the city of crime, belonging to private detectives in trench coats and fedoras, alienated characters imprisoned by the diagonal lines of harsh sunlight on venetian blinds, Cadillacs driving down rain-slicked streets, femmes fatales smoking endless cigarettes in dark alleyways, lit only by the light of the moon. This was my Los Angeles.

What about Jennifer Aniston and Julia Roberts, Robert Downey Jr. and George Clooney? They existed in the same sort of hypothetical imaginary where Miss Marple and Poirot also set up camp, some vague over there that was never here, a fantasy land with a direct conveyer belt to movie theaters and television screens. They were not real, and they were certainly not my neighbors. But Mickey Haller? I was surprised that I did not run into him in the courthouse when I had jury duty.

Los Angeles was the private detective. The private detective was Los Angeles.

I appreciated that mine was not the normal Los Angeles, at least not as defined by TMZ or the Hollywood Reporter. I grew curious as to why, exactly, the private detective and Los Angeles were so intrinsically intertwined. It was not just the connection between noir and Los Angeles—a connection that made sense while still seeming contradictory—or the connection between Hollywood and the darkness that surrounded the unlucky actor or actress, such as Lana Turner or Elizabeth Short (more commonly remembered as the Black Dahlia). There was something specific about Los Angeles and the private eye, but I could not put my finger on it.

I watched The Lincoln Lawyer (Brad Furman, 2011) and thought of Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974). I watched Chinatown and thought of The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946). I watched The Big Sleep and thought of L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997). I watched L.A. Confidential and thought of Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin, 1995). I realized that, as much as the superficial context had changed, there remained something consistent about the figure of the L.A. private eye. There was something specific about the way he drove, about the way he understood the city, and there was something peculiar that happened when the he was a she.

This book serves as an introduction to the world of the L.A. private eye. It starts in chapter 1 with an analysis of place, unpacking the significance of the sprawling streets, the endless neighborhoods, and the ubiquitous palm tree. Los Angeles is a place unlike any other, and for this reason, the L.A. private eye cannot exist anywhere else. Chapter 2 examines the structure of the mystery story, the rules that remain stubbornly consistent over the decades, and the careful motivation and methodology behind this (virtually) unwavering template. Chapter 3 looks at the character of the private detective, his quirks and his talents, the aspects of who he is that make him so uniquely suited to this city by the sea. Chapters 4–6 explore what happens when the private detective is different, when he is no longer the ordinary white man who can blend in so easily in Brentwood and Silver Lake, in courthouses and city halls. While the conventions of the genre may have remained consistent and recognizable, the points where they evolve illuminate much about our changing gender and power roles. What happens when the private eye is no longer white? No longer a man? No longer an adult? These chapters examine the various ways the archetype has been both challenged and redefined. Finally, the book considers how we might be moving toward a version 2.0, a new private eye better suited to the world in which we currently live than Philip Marlowe, a legend, to be sure, but also an artifact of the past.

1

LOS ANGELES

L.A. has always been flat and featureless. Anybody could be anywhere out there. . . . There was no logic to the layout of the city. And there were more people every day. Sharecroppers and starlets, migrant Mexicans and insurance salesman, come to pick over the money tree for a few years before they went home. But they never went home.

—Walter Mosley, Black Betty

THE L.A. PRIVATE EYE

From Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe to Michael Connelly’s Lincoln Lawyer (aka Mickey Haller), the figure of the renegade sleuth driving around the winding, crime-ridden streets of L.A. has remained a favorite for almost a century. Permanently single, often alcoholic, usually en route to emphysema, and always acting alone, the L.A. private eye has become an icon. And the rootlessness of his footsteps—rarely would we find him in a permanent place of his own—echoed that of many Angelinos. The detective’s home would inevitably become a surrogate office space, and his office space would be his car. Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946) may have shaped the mold, giving us the lasting visual of the trench-coated private eye with rain dripping from the brim of his hat, but detectives have continued to roam the streets of Los Angeles as solitary heroes and urban knights ever since. Despite the rapid evolution of society since the 1930s, the conventions of the genre, the character of our hero, and the trappings of the city have remained consistent.

Surprisingly, considering the power and persistence of that enigmatic figure known colloquially as the L.A. private eye, or P.I. (private investigator), he is a relatively recent creation. Not even a hundred years old, he first appeared on the pages of Raymond Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep in 1939. The Big Sleep was then adapted into the classic film—starring Humphrey Bogart as the quintessential L.A. private eye—seven years later, not only shaping the template of the L.A. private eye but also embracing and advancing the aesthetic and tone of film noir.

NOIR

Literally translating to black film, film noir was only referred to as such in later years. At the time of the initial release of noir films, they were merely considered to be melodramas. French film critics, however, finally able to watch Hollywood pictures again after World War II, observed the distinctive darkness—both literal and metaphorical—of films such as The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944), and Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944). The French critic Nino Frank may have coined the term film noir in 1946, but the term was not adopted in America until the 1960s and ’70s. It then came to refer to films made in America largely during the 1940s and 1950s that had a style both dark and cynical, with urban settings full of pessimism, fatalism, and paranoia and characters full of intrigue and suspicion.

Visually, the high-contrast black-and-white imagery echoed the cinematography common to German expressionism, a German art and film movement characterized by highly dramatic visuals and psychological states. These films often featured criminals, psychopaths, and serial killers, such as the character of Jack the Ripper (Gustav Diessl) in Georg Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929) or Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) in Fritz Lang’s M (1931). Many German filmmakers, such as Lang, Billy Wilder, and Otto Preminger, came to Hollywood to escape the Nazi regime, and they brought this style with them. As David Marsham wrote for Life magazine in 1947, Whoever went to the movies with any regularity during 1946 was caught in the middle of Hollywood’s profound postwar affection for morbid drama. From January through December, deep shadows, clutching hands, exploding revolvers, sadistic villains and heroines tormented with deeply rooted diseases of the mind flashed across the screen in a panting display of psychoneuroses, unsublimated sex and murder most foul (qtd. in Clarens 192). While this comment may be as melodramatic as some of the plot twists found onscreen, it does reflect the popularity of noir films and the vivid imagery within then.

More than just a group of films particular to a certain era, noir became a style, a reflection of urban anxiety that transcended a specific moment in time. The protagonists of these movies—much like the character of the private detective—were defined by an inability "to dwell comfortably