HOLLYWOOD
The relationship between noir and Los Angeles is so funny. The city's famous for its endless summer, and in the mind's eye, it must always be daytime there--and yet, every L.A. noir seems to be set at night, or even in cold and rain. There's a relationship between the two, of course: the noirish night is the shadow of the L.A. day. It's not so much that the celluloid world of Hollywood conceals the brutality and violence of the nighttime as it's predicated on it, as if what happens at night is the engine of churning blood and bodies that make the daytime possible. It reflects a belief, I think, that any kind of pleasure or leisure requires some kind of blood sacrifice.
Thomas Sanchez's noir Zoot-Suit Murders takes its relationship to Los Angeles seriously. It begins with Nathan Younger, a Catholic social worker and amateur baseball coach (and secretly, a spy for something like the House Un-American Activities Committee) witnessing a movie star screaming for help in the barrio, the Mexican neighborhood of Los Angeles. A pair of shots ring out, hitting two of the stars' pursuers, we presume, who turn out to be undercover cops. The investigation pins the murders on the Mexican youths whose zoot suits--flashy, voluminous, and colorful--have taken on an unsavory political valence during wartime rationing. But Younger, of course, thinks that the real story is more complicated, and related somehow to Kathleen, the spokesperson for a utopian cult, who was at the scene of the crime. Kathleen is beautiful, waifish, red-headed, and chronically sick; as he gets closer to her, Younger begins to fall in love, as demanded by the genre--which also demands that love be dangerous and cruel.
Zoot-Suit Murders does a great job bringing together disparate threads of Los Angeles culture and history. There's Hollywood, of course, although the starlet in crisis turns out to be kind of a red herring. But there's aspects of Los Angeles here that are often left out of the genre, beginning with the racial and class tensions of the 1940s that infamously resulted in the Zoot Suit Riots, when a bunch of Navy soldiers went around brutalizing the young Mexicans. For Sanchez, the barrio is the site of collision between Spanish fascists and communist subversion; both forces see in the disaffection of the Zoot Suiters a kind of powerful, perhaps primeval force which can be leveraged. The novel works in the city's history as the home of evangelical fervor and woo-woo spirituality. In Kathleen--who is hard at work preparing for the arrival of "The Voice of the Right Idea." It's half Aimee Semple Macpherson, and half Scientology. Around the city, a mysterious phone number--DIALGOD--is graffitied on the walls. And Sanchez does a great job filling the cult out with a lot of very persuasive utopian nonsense, while still suggesting that the cult's true aims are more legible, while more secretive.
Sometimes, the book strains to convince us that this is Los Angeles in the 1940s. At one point, a characters says, "Yah, well they'll give Emperor Hirohito an honorary degree at UCLA before that happens." Is a final showdown at the Hollywood sign inspired, or cheesy and too-familiar? Still, I really enjoyed the way the novel takes the historical and cultural moment seriously, and situates its noirishness in time and place. It's a very different novel than Rabbit Boss, about several generations of California Indians (and which I loved), but I see in Zoot-Suit Murders a similar eagerness to grapple with the way in which California and Californian identity are fashioned in the crucible of history.