Executive Chef Gianluca Lonati and Owner Cristian Gorgees
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Aambra is a Levantine restaurant set inside a beautifully restored 120 year old church in Rose Bay.
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Ach the good old tastes
Jordan Harper’s new novel proves noir can still channel the crises and neuroses of the moment.
(Like many places DownUnder,) Los Angeles has had a rough couple of years. Fires have destroyed entire neighborhoods, the Hollywood streaming boom is going bust, ICE raids have torn through neighborhoods, and the city was subjected to an airborne toxic event; the vibes are so bad that a reality-TV villainalmost made the mayoral primary. Such crises and anxieties are not exactly new; darkness has always lurked under the bright L.A. sun. People far beyond Southern California know this, in part, because of the homegrown literary genre known as noir.
Contemporary readers might consign this hard-boiled brand of thriller to the 1940s—a time of seduction and secrets when Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe stalked the mean streets, neither tarnished nor afraid. But the genre’s origins aren’t so straightforward. The literary tradition goes back at least a decade earlier, to when Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain published stories in 1930s magazines. Then came the classic novels, followed by black-and-white film adaptations that filtered the books’ existential themes through plays of light and shadow, while doubling down on their sex, tawdriness, and cruelty. After World War II, French film critics saw them in a flash and called them noir. Named in France, the form is a cultural ouroboros orbiting L.A.
Because many of the societal ills probed by those artists—corruption, inequality, Hollywood exploitation—haven’t gone away, noir can still thrive in the hands of writers with the talent and savvy to make it feel contemporary. At its best, the genre makes room for perpetual innovation; at its worst, it can slide into kitsch. Sometimes this happens with the same author: Take, for instance, the L.A. Confidential author, James Ellroy, who revived noir in the 1980s but has lately had trouble keeping up.
Jordan Harper, a Los Angeles writer influenced by Ellroy, has published a new novel that far surpasses Ellroy’s latest. The title of Harper’s fourth thriller, A Violent Masterpiece, is brazen but not inaccurate. In some ways the novel is a classic L.A. noir, with three characters confronting secretive forces that run the city. At the same time, it is a vivifying refresh, with ripped-from-the-headlines villains. A powerful pedophile dies in jail; is it really suicide? A handsome actor has a cannibalism fetish. A prominent doctor somehow gets away with heavy drug use and carrying on with much younger women. Some readers will immediately think of real-life analogues; many more will recognize the contemporary flavor of corruption.
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These tabloid antiheroes are just a few of the many men (almost all men) who tap the services of Sub Rosa, a high-end concierge service for drugs, sex workers, and other illicitries. Among its employees is one key protagonist, Kara Delgado. She’s in charge of setting up an orgy at an empty former nunnery, which is stuck in legal limbo as a pop star is trying to buy it. In addition to hiring the dancers and the DJ, Kara is ordering the drugs and the sexual accoutrements. She is basically satisfied with her job; she’s also self-medicating, a lot. Once, running to work, she thinks she’s got her personal cocktail of pharmaceuticals just right: “They solved her like a Rubik’s Cube. The world is a TV set. She is the shimmering pixels on the surface of the screen. She can feel the glow in each of her cells.” Kara is probably a little too high to do data entry, but at the moment her job involves tracking down a wayward actor in a private club, so she’ll fit right in.
One important—maybe the most important—thing about noir is that it can’t get by on plot alone. Almost every page of A Violent Masterpiece has a spark and crackle of language, detail, idea. Kara’s druggy observations are laced with beauty. And Harper could simply have introduced his second protagonist, Doug Gibson, as a defense lawyer whose marriage is floundering. But he describes the trouble this way: Gibson “can still see the argument they should have had but didn’t, floating in the air like dust motes.” With a solo practice in Little Tokyo and bus-stop ads across the city, Gibson refers to himself as the knife his clients bring to a gunfight.
The third main character, a livestreamer named Jake Deal, cruises the night looking for chaos while narrating to his audience. “We are America dreaming itself. We’re a fractal of fortunes and crimes, fortunes and crimes. We’re cars and guns and land grabs and tacos, money and movies and big tits and death, all served under a dirty sky,” he says, while pulling up to the site of a shooting. “LA is America with no place left to run. LA is America with its back against the wall.” A dark philosopher behind the wheel, a Weegee for the Housewives era, he frames the story and speeds it forward.
The novel begins with Jake driving to the scene of a young rapper’s death. Having gotten the first and most gruesome snapshots, he sells them to his old employer, the sleazy celebrity-news outlet Truth or Dare (think TMZ). His former boss tips him off to a contract gig: For a chunky fee, he’ll get dirty pictures of a few powerful men doing bad things and upload it to a super-ultra-secret online repository. Meanwhile, Gibson is pulled out of his routine by a recently jailed Hollywood producer desperate enough to put a bus-stop-ad lawyer on retainer. Kara, for her part, is crashing out on drugs and takeout because her friend is missing and she fears that a serial killer is responsible. Of course, these three storylines are destined to converge.
As Harper accelerates the plot, modern-day Los Angeles comes into sharp focus. Gibson meets a contact in “Monterey Park, another strip mall: Sichuan hot pots, dance halls, seafood markets, this boba shop.” Kara, waiting for a delivery, thinks, “The alley behind the events center is gorgeously cool. Palm trees placed against the night sky just so. In Santa Monica even the alleys are clean.” Jake, after leaving a crime scene, “tilts the dashcam to catch a line of taco stands on the wide sidewalks in front of Target, lines snaking, gusts of smoke washing over the crowd from carne asada grills and a blazing trompo.”
Gibson has an unhoused client who lives in MacArthur Park, the site of a notorious tent city not far from downtown. Traveling between that ad hoc, impoverished community and his normal life—catered parties, a modern farmhouse-style home in the Valley—he’s not unaffected. “Call it the LA Bends—going up and down in the city too fast puts bubbles in your blood.” While at the park, he’s caught in a police sweep and counterprotest that turns violent; one protester’s eye is liquefied. I’m probably not the only reader who thought of a recent incident during a protest in the city, when a Homeland Security officer shot a student journalist with a projectile, resulting in the loss of an eye.
On a recent podcast, Harper said that he wrote that scene long before the real-life incident. He was merely doing what any good writer does: paying attention to life on the ground, and then imagining their characters into it. This isn’t prescience, but rather a deep sensitivity to what’s going on—and where.
In that same interview, Harper said that he took his novel’s three-character structure—a smart way to build momentum and tension—from Ellroy’s major novels, including L.A. Confidential. Ellroy rebooted L.A. noir by laying out Hollywood conspiracies and dirty cops with fearless, brutal language and proving that the genre wasn’t bound by classic noir conventions. But his latest novel, in its shortcomings, only strengthens the case that noir will stagnate if it isn’t perpetually refreshed by new generations.
In Red Sheet, which is set, like most of his novels, in mid-century Los Angeles, Ellroy abandons the three-character structure in favor of a single narrative voice that clamps down hard. (Full disclosure: More than a decade ago, I interviewed Ellroy twice during special events, after which he sent two dozen roses to my office at the Los Angeles Times; I had to call his assistant to explain that this was not okay.) His earlier novels wove together the stories of people who held outsize power, especially the police, and those, such as sex workers, who had none. In more recent work, he’s resorted to pulling in marquee historical figures to juice the story. This book includes Richard Nixon and Hugh Hefner; his last one, The Enchanters, featured Marilyn Monroe, Robert F. Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy.
This is Ellroy’s third novel narrated by Freddy Otash. Otash was a real person, a fixer in postwar L.A. Ellroy’s fictional, bearlike Otash is unburdened by a conscience, sometimes carries a badge, and employs a photographic-memory technique developed by a Nazi. He leads a crew of police thugs and works with Daryl Gates (the future LAPD chief, who would resign in ignominy after the 1992 Rodney King riots). Across more than 500 pages, the book covers just two months at the end of 1962. To fill in the story, Ellroy has convoluted the facts of history: A key counterfactual in Red Sheet is the idea that American Communists were secretly aligned against the civil-rights movement.
Breaking my cardinal rule for noir, Ellroy tries to get by on plot alone. The reader has very little sense of the day or time, and characters have little interiority. Many descriptive phrases recur no matter who is speaking, which makes the author’s prose feel like a fire hose aimed at the reader. The plot itself starts to fall apart in the end. What’s more, aside from a few swinging-’60s hotel rooms, the texture of Los Angeles is almost completely absent.
Ellroy’s breakthrough novel, The Black Dahlia, published in 1987, brought new life to a somewhat-tired literary form—or one that had been surpassed by a noir resurgence in film. Think of Robert Altman’s full-color, updated version of Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, in 1973, and Roman Polanski’s retro, abject Chinatown, the following year. Both, significantly, are set in Los Angeles. The Long Goodbye is full of glamorous hippies, with the actor Sterling Hayden (a veteran of the earlier noir era) surveying his domain on the beach in Malibu. In the 1937-set Chinatown, Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes starts out following a philanderer and finds himself investigating a real-estate and water-rights conspiracy. Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential, is, similarly, an exemplar of retro noir.
This earlier generation was more closely tied to the past, but noir doesn’t have to stay there. Harper distinguishes himself by looking forward, although he is not alone. Writers such as Steph Cha, Ivy Pochoda, and Gary Phillips are also bringing today’s Los Angeles, in all of its awful, beautiful chaos, to life on the page. The newsiness of the crimes in A Violent Masterpiece makes it feel contemporary, but the look and feel of the city—seen, so often, from behind the windshield of a car—also makes the novel a robust story of place. Noir thrives on style, on sensibility, and on situated-ness. Sure, there are bits of classic Ellroy here: chopped sentences, words italicized for emphasis. Harper has incorporated these tropes in Jake’s narration, and it reads both old and new. The old, in this case, is peak Ellroy.
Harper and his Angeleno peers show how noir in any setting can work in this century, a time of rampant corruption, outsize villains, and morality turned inside out. While Ellroy spins his wheels, a new generation is taking Chandler’s path: walking down today’s mean streets and writing down everything they see.
