What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

Tell us about the first story/stories you ever wrote. First book, published or no.

by Paul D. Marks

I don’t really remember what the first story I wrote was. But when I started writing I was trying to write more mainstream or literary fiction. And just in the last few weeks I resurrected one of those ancient stories, rewrote it as crime fiction and sent it out into the world to hopefully be picked up somewhere. The theme is the same as the original story, as well as some of the elements, but I like it better as a murder mystery than as “serious” fiction. Especially because, as one of my first stories I was horrified at how badly written it was. But I liked the idea enough to keep it in the back of mind all these years and try again with the basic elements from it. I think it works better this time. Hope so anyway.

Breaking News: Speaking of stories, and before I get back to the current question, Coast to Coast: Noir from Sea to Shining Sea, volume 3 in the Coast to Coast series of crime fiction anthologies that Andy McAleer and I co-edit dropped last week. Twelve noir stories from twelve terrific authors, with stories set throughout the US from…coast to coast. The “chronology” of the book (if that’s the right word) goes from the West Coast to the East Coast, noir all the way. The authors are: Colleen Collins, Brendan DuBois, Alison Gaylin, Tom MacDonald, Andrew McAleer, Michael Mallory, Paul D. Marks, Dennis Palumbo, Stephen D. Rogers, John Shepphird, Jaden Terrell, Dave Zeltserman. See the post I did earlier this week at SleuthSayers for more on this collection: Hope you’ll want to check it out: 

Available at Amazon and Down & Out Books

And now we return you to our regular programming already in progress: Another thing I remember is that I began by writing poems and song lyrics. I wanted to be a rock star—who didn’t? But I was always writing something.

One of my early novels—maybe my first completed novel, that’s also hard to remember—a satire about a screenwriter trying to make it in Hollywood, was almost published way back in the 80s. Almost. It was accepted for publication (if that's the right terminology) by a major publisher.  But then there was a "housecleaning" at that publisher: the old team of editors and assistant editors got swept out. And the new team didn't want most of the old team's slate of projects, so I got swept out with the "new broom". So that one almost got published. But by the time it was put into “turnaround” it was too late for it as a lot of the humor was dated. Remember Fawn Hall, Jessica Hahn, Donna Rice and Gary Hart—see what I mean, dated. ’Cause even though it was about a guy trying to make it in Hollywood, it had a lot of topical and satirical humor of the day. I work on it every once in a while to remove the dated satirical elements and make it more neutral in terms of topicality. So one of these days it might see the light.

The first writing that I got paid for was a piece in one of the L.A. papers about John Lennon on, I believe, the one year anniversary of his murder. It wasn't fiction, but it felt awfully good to actually get paid for writing something. But even though it felt good to be paid, I had mixed emotions because of the subject matter. Appropriate that this should appear today as today is John Lennon's birthday.

Available on Amazon

My first published fiction, but certainly not the first story I wrote, was a short story called Angels Flight (before Michael Connelly borrowed the title from me 😉). It was published in the Murder by Thirteen anthology and republished in L.A. Late @ Night, a collection of five of my stories. A review of L.A. Late @ Night in All Due Respect calls Angels Flight the reviewer's favorite story in the collection and says this about the two main characters, "They're a dynamic pair, and I'd like to see them together in more stories," so I might just have to oblige him.

The title for Angels Flight was inspired by the famous funicular railway in downtown L.A. and my love for old Los Angeles. I think the story was inspired when they drained one of the lakes in L.A. and found all kinds of junk there. So in my story they drain Echo Park Lake, find a dead body and the story takes off from there. And even though it was originally published a looooooooong time ago, it's still one of my favorites. I think it's (hopefully) surprise ending brings to mind Shakespeare's quote, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." 

Angels Flight

After Angels Flight, I had more stories published and eventually my novel White Heat, and others. And then I happily reached one of my major short stories goals, getting published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and its sister publication Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Another thrill was to be listed on the cover of EQMM, as well as winning their Readers Award. So there’s always hope, don’t give up.

All I can do to end is quote another rock band, the Grateful Dead, "What a long strange trip it's been." 

~.~.~

And now for the usual BSP:

The Blues Don't Care got a nice review from It was a Dark and Stormy Book Club.

“On one level it’s a mystery where Bobby Saxon, with secrets he wants no one to find out, works to solve a murder and clear his name under extraordinary racially tinged circumstances. With a lot of twists and turns, this is an excellent mystery.  It takes place in World War II-era Los Angeles, and the author does a brilliant job that brings the long-gone era alive with memorable characters, scents, descriptions, and most of all, jazz. Highly recommended."

Buy on Amazon or Down & Out Books

***

And Tom Bergin at The Name is Archer Facebook page had this to say about Coast to Coast Noir:

"This is the new book out that contains stories by Archer group members Paul D. Marks and Dennis Palumbo. There are 12 stories in all in this collection and so far I've read the stories by Paul and Dennis. They are both really good stories. Paul's story is called Nowhere Man. The story is set in Southern California and the year is 1965. The story does conjure up the Beatles song but is also a very clever nod to the 1944 movie Laura. The story by Dennis is titled Steel City Blues and is set in Pittsburgh in the year 1970. Here's the opening line of the story - I'm sitting at my usual spot on the roof, back against one of the brick smokestacks, the revolver across my upraised knees. Dennis never wastes any time getting the reader involved in his stories and Steel City Blues is no exception. Interestingly both of these stories deal with obsession. Both stories show what can happen when a man becomes obsessed with a woman. It's noir. Things don't go well. Check the book out. I have a feeling the remaining ten stories will be as good as these two."

Please join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/paul.d.marks and check out my web site www.PaulDMarks.com

Location, Location, Location

When it comes to creating a sense of place in your work, how do you do it? (Research and real places? Invention and fictional ones?) What’s worked for you, and what hasn’t? 

by Paul D. Marks

This one’s going to be on the long side. Mostly because I’m using several excerpts from stories or novels and I’m focusing only on things set in L.A. or Southern California here.

There’s no end to the ways one can do research in terms of creating a sense of place. I tend to set a lot of what I write in Los Angeles and Southern California. And those areas become another character in my work, so much so that author Steve Lauden said, “…[it’s] almost as if the region was one of the main characters.” And I know SoCal pretty well. But it’s also changed a lot and I don’t go exploring as much as when I was younger. Back in the day, a friend of mine and I would get in one of our cars, point it in a direction and drive and explore. And we explored pretty much everything in Southern California.

There’s different kinds of “places,” not everything is a street or building, a park or landmark. Sometimes it’s just a room or other interior. And there are different ways of doing research: in person first-hand, internet, books and libraries – still, talking to people, maps, music, old movies and others. And I will do all or any of them in various combinations on any given project.

It’s always great to be able to do first-person research, to travel to a location and feel it, smell it, get to know the people, at least a little. But that isn’t always possible. I was hired once to do some polishing on a project that was set in the Amazon. I’d never been there, still haven’t, though it’s on my bucket list. But I have been to other tropical jungle type places. So I did research on the Amazon, probably in books in those days, but I also transposed my own jungle experiences from other tropical locales to that area so the characters could have a better feel for it. And I think it worked pretty well. 

So let me talk about some specific locations from some of my works. It’s hard to narrow it down to a handful of examples, but here goes:

Angels Flight is a funicular railway in downtown Los Angeles. Star of many films and many noirs, including Kiss Me, Deadly, Criss Cross and others. Chandler visits it in The High Window and The King in Yellow. As a young boy, my dad took me to the original Angels Flight (now moved down the road). And though I may not have known about noir films and hardboiled novels then, it was an experience I’ve always remembered. Such a cool little pair of trains going up and down that hill, the tracks splitting in the middle just as each car approaches the other and you think they’re going to smash into each other head on. Angels Flight slams back to me in memory every now and then and makes its way into my writing, most notably in the eponymous story Angels Flight (currently available in L.A. Late @ Night, a collection of five of my previously published stories), which I must say came out before Michael Connelly’s novel of the same name. And also in Ghosts of Bunker Hill (Ellery Queen, December, 2016).

Angels Flight

Angels Flight is about a cop whose time has come and gone, and that theme is still pretty relevant today. The world is changing and he’s having one hell of a time catching up, if he even wants to. He’s a dinosaur. And he knows that Angels Flight is an anachronism, just like he is. He says to the other main character:

“Will Angels Flight bring back the glamour of the old days? Hollywood’s lost its tinsel. Venice’s lost its pier. And there are no angels in the City of Angels. What can Angels Flight do to bring that back?”  
“Sometimes you need something for the soul,” the other person says.

I think that sums up a lot of my attitude not only toward Angels Flight but to the City of Angels as well. That said, here’s a little more Angels Flight, from Ghosts of Bunker Hill:

I stood at the bottom of the hill, staring up at Angels Flight, the famous little funicular railway in the Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles, that brought people from Hill Street up to Olive. I desperately wanted to ride those rails up to the top. But now the two twin orange and black cars were permanently moored in the middle, suspended in mid-air, ghosts from another time.

***

And there’s Bunker Hill itself, also from Ghosts of Bunker Hill. Bunker Hill was L.A.’s first wealthy enclave. But around World War I, the rich folk started moving west and it fell into disrepair. In the late 1960s, the grand Victorians were being torn down or moved to other parts of the city. I was lucky enough to have explored the area with friends before it was all gone and even “borrowed” the top of a newel post (see pic) from a stairway in one of those grand Victorians. In Ghosts of Bunker Hill Howard Hamm, the detective, inherits one of those moved Victorian mansions from his now-murdered friend:

 

My newel post from Bunker Hill

Howard and Nicole wanted to escape the past; I wanted to escape into it. For me, Nicole moved to our classic, refurbished Victorian on Carroll and I’ll love her always for that. In the 1960s someone had the brilliant idea to tear down the old Victorians on Bunker Hill, many of which had become SROs and flop houses, and build a sparkling new downtown of gleaming high rises, but it won’t be long till they’re shabby town too—high-rise shabby town. Luckily several of the grand old dames were saved, moved to Carroll Avenue a few miles away, including ours.

Every time I walked those creaky wooden floors, I felt the presence of the past. The people who’d lived there. Not ghosts, but history, something Los Angeles often doesn’t appreciate. Carroll Avenue was close to downtown, where I worked. But the whole short street looked like something out of early 1900s L.A. I loved everything about it.

***

Hollywood Forever Cemetery is the cemetery to the stars. It makes appearances in several things I’ve written, most notably Continental Tilt (published in Murder in La La Land anthology), a satirical mystery – what else can you write when you open on this place? A place where people sit outdoors on graves, eating brie and drinking wine, watching movies on the mausoleum wall. So how did I research this – well, I had to go to a movie there. And other things as well. I guess I’m just one of those people sittin’ on the graves...doin’ research, of course.

Movies on the mausolem wall at Hollywood Forever Cemetery

In the heart of Los Angeles, in the heart of Hollywood, a vampire movie played on a humongous silver screen. This wasn’t your usual movie venue, but the crowd of seven hundred loved it. Spread out on beach chairs and blankets, with bottles of wine and beer, Boba tea, doing wheatgrass shooters and eating catered Mexasian sushi, fusion food for the Millennial-iPod generation.

Did I forget to mention that the movie theatre was the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in the heart of Hollyweird? That over the summer they show movies on the mausoleum wall, while people sit on their beach chairs and blankets—Beach Blanket Bloodshed—and munch their munchies amongst the graves of movie stars, rock stars and even mere mortals? The back wall of the cemetery, clearly visible from the field of graves the watchers watched the movies from, was appropriately the back wall of Paramount Studios.

“Yeah, a movie in a cemetery, but hey, this is Hollywood,” I said.

 “Yeah, Hollywood—cemetery as theme park.” Mari lit a cigarette.

***

Venice Beach and boardwalk is the number one tourist destination in Los Angeles. People think it’s cool and flock to see the “freaks,” and maybe the nearby Venice Canals. Developer Abbott Kinney wanted to recreate Italy’s Venice in L.A., and he did, to some extent. But it didn’t quite work out. Many of the canals were drained and filled in, though some remain. They can be seen in several movies, too numerous to name. And, because Venice is another place I’ve done time at, it pops up in my short story Santa Claus Blues (from Futures), which opens with a bunch of kids playing along the canals and coming across a dead Santa floating in one of them (not quoted here),as well as my short story Windward (Best American Mysteries of 2018 anthology):

Venice Beach and Boardwalk

I’m talking about Venice, California. Los Angeles. Hey, the other one in Italy has canals and grand thoroughfares with colonnaded arches. We have grand canals and streets with grand colonnaded arches. Okay, so we don’t have such grand canals these days, most of them have been filled in, including the Grand Canal. And Venice didn’t quite cut it as the cultural paradise-by-the-sea that Abbott Kinney, its founder, had envisioned. Today it was an ever-changing kaleidoscope of people, dudes dancing on skates, musicians, artists. Maybe a few pickpockets here or there. But it was home. And I liked it here.

***

Hollywood Sign: And who doesn’t know the famous—or infamous—Hollywood Sign? Something I saw almost every day as a kid, and which a friend of mine and I hiked up to many, many years ago, before it was all fenced in and touristy. I guess that was presearch – pre-research, just in case I’d ever need it. In Free Fall (originally published in Gary Lovisi’s Hardboiled magazine, but available in the L.A. Late @ Night collection), a man recently separated from the service, heads west, as far west as he can go until he comes to the terminus of Route 66 in Santa Monica, near the Santa Monica Pier. This is the end of the road for him in more ways than one.

I kept looking at the Hollywood Sign, wondering about all the people down below, pretending to be in its glow. Where do they go after L.A.? There is nowhere, the land ends and they just tumble into the arroyos and ravines, never to be heard from again.

And the Sign from my novel Broken Windows:

The Hollywood Sign beckoned her like a magnet—or like a moth to a flame. The sign glowed golden in the magic hour sun—that time of day around sunrise and sunset when the light falls soft and warm and cinematographers love to shoot. Like so many others, Susan Karubian had come here seeking fame and fortune, hoping to make her mark on the world. Oh hell, she had come to be a star like all the others. And she would do it, just not quite in the heady way she’d anticipated.

The young woman drove her Passat down Hollywood Boulevard, turning up Franklin, passing the Magic Castle. She turned slowly up Beachwood Canyon, past the low-rent area north of Franklin, up through the towering stone gates with their “Welcome to Beachwood Canyon” signs. Past the movie star homes in the hills—past where she thought she’d be living by now. She drove in circles, past piles of rubble from the earthquake several months ago, figuring that sooner or later she’d hit the right combination of roads and end up where she wanted to be.

If she couldn’t be famous in life, she would be famous in death. But she’d make her mark one way or another. She hoped her fall from grace would be graceful, even if her life hadn’t been.

***

The Box: Well, what is the Box? It’s that small interview room in the cop shop that you don’t want to find yourself in. A small room with you on one side, a cop on the other. So what research did I do for this? Well, luckily I’ve never been “boxed” for real. But I have been in them, visiting – kind of like in Monopoly when you’re in jail but “Just Visiting” – people I knew who worked there. And, believe me, that’s the only kind of research I want to do for The Box (Mystery Weekly, May 2019):

The room grows smaller with every word coming from the man across the table. His stale, garlic, cigarette and bourbon breath slam me in the face—what the hell did he have for lunch? Or was it dinner? I’ve lost track of time. It might be bright daylight outside or dead of night. No clocks in this room. Neither of us wears a watch. Time stands as still as the air in the confined, windowless space—a room they call the Box. And the air, thick as tar and smelling just as good, suffocates me. I try not to show my discomfort. Try not to let my scratchy throat betray me. It’s not easy, but I think I’m pulling it off.

Nothing to look at. Bland, non-descript brighter-than-white walls nearly blind me. No pictures, no view. Nothing to focus on but the burly man in the rolling chair a few feet away. His chair has wheels. Mine doesn’t. His chair sits higher than mine, so he can look down at me while I have to crane my neck to look at him. No doubt who’s the alpha dog here.

***

A velvety whorehouse: Well, I won’t tell you what research I did for this one…in House of the Rising Sun (available in Switchblade Issue 9, released 4/19):

Tacky chintz and red velvet decorated the gaudy parlor. Looked like a New Orleans cathouse and that’s just how Mrs. Winter wanted it. Could have been right out of someone’s pervy Victorian fantasy. And that’s just how the boys wanted it. Yeah, the boys, the men who came and paid money for girls or women—women pretending to be girls and girls pretending to be women. Men who snuck out on their wives or girlfriends or wanted something they wouldn’t give them. Those boys. Hell, this might as well have been New Orleans. Inside the house in the Hollywood Hills you were in the Big Easy. It was a different world—away from the boys’ everyday world. But it was Vivien’s everyday world—and she wanted out of it, though she had nowhere to go anymore since her family was all gone. Mrs. Winter had even imported kudzu and a Bourbon Street beat. But this was Los Angeles, land of make-believe glamour and real life whores. So a phony Big Easy whorehouse fit right in. Right down to House of the Rising Sun—a song about a New Orleans whorehouse—playing in Vivien’s head. If this house had been in the real New Orleans it would have been in the red light quarter. The quarter she knew best.

***

The Rodney King Riots: I was in L.A. during the riots, and while I could see the smoke not all that far away, I was glad I wasn’t actually in the middle of them. But I’ve been in some hairy situations, some scary situations. So I used those experiences, those emotions and recast them into the riot situations and characters there. And I’ve had several people tell me, both cops and civilians, how real they thought those scenes were in my novel White Heat:

The crowd surged toward another small grocery/liquor store. We were caught in it. No escape. The store owner, shotgun in hand, hard-charged someone who’d broken off from the crowd. He waved the gun wildly, maybe at the man who’d broken from the crowd. But we were all in his kill zone. Through the smoke it was hard to tell if he was Mexican, Korean, Armenian—didn’t matter anyway. He was shouting. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Neither could anyone else it appeared. It wasn’t English, and the din was too loud to figure out what it was. No one was listening anyway. He jacked the slide of his twelve gauge. People hit the deck, dispersed, fell all over each other. A blast rang out. A young woman fell. I rushed to her, tearing my belt off, making a tourniquet on her arm that was bleeding profusely. Tiny pulled me off. 

“It’s no use. We got business. Leave her be.” 

“Somebody’s got to.”

“She’s dead,” Tiny said. “Get it? She’s dead. Doesn’t matter what you do.”

I didn’t move. He lifted her head. The side that had been facing away from me was a mess of bloody hamburger. How could I not have seen it? Maybe I didn’t want to.

He pulled me away. I let him. 

We dashed across a gas station where two men were lighting a Molotov cocktail. Behind us the sound of shattering glass. I slid beneath a car on the street. Tiny hugged a wall. The gas station went up in an overwhelming fireball of light and heat. White heat. And it seemed as if the Post Modern Age had gone up with it.

 Welcome to the Apocalypse.

***

Los Angeles in the Mid-1940s during World War II – for The Blues Don’t Care (novel coming in 2020): I really enjoyed doing the research for this. I love that era. Yes, the war. But still there was the music, the movies. The feeling that we were on the side of right. But there was no way I could research this first-hand. I have a love of history so I already knew a lot about the era just sort of by osmosis over the years. But I didn’t know about specific things related to L.A. So I went to books, the internet. I listened to the music of era and watched movies for styles and slang. One of the best things I did was to get maps of L.A. from the era. Things have changed, streets and street names. And there were no freeways. One of the locations that’s repeated in the story is the Pike amusement park in Long Beach. How the hell did one get there before freeways? This is where the maps came in more than handy. I also remember a lot of “that” LA from when I was a kid. World War II was before my time, but when I was a kid Los Angeles hadn’t changed all that much…yet. But my best resource was my mom and her friends who were here then, who could tell me things that I wouldn’t find in books or on the net, And who I think really helped make the story and the locations that much more real:

Los Angeles – The Homefront, World War II

Bobby Saxon stood across Central Avenue from the Club Alabam, watching the crowds spilling into the street, lingering on the sidewalk. A near-lone white face in a sea of black. Dragging on his cigarette, trying to steady his nerves, he watched the people in their swanky duds entering and exiting the club, working up his nerve to go inside. Sure, he’d been in the Alabam before, but this time was different. He wasn’t there just to see the bands blow and the canaries sing.

Everyone played the Alabam, or wanted to, including Bobby. Young, inexperienced—white—he knew he could knock ’em dead, if only Booker Taylor, one of the band leaders, would give him a chance.

Central Avenue was something to see. The heart of colored Los Angeles in the 1940s during the war. And at the heart of Central was the Club Alabam, and the Dunbar Hotel next door. Neon marquees lit up the night sky, beckoning passersby to enter their realms of music and mystery and see the likes of Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and every other colored act you could imagine.

Cars, with their bright white headlights and trailing hot red taillights, crawled like lifeblood up and down the avenue. Cigarette smoke wafted in and out of the clubs, wrapping around street lights, forming halos in the L.A. fog, creating an ethereal world—another world. And it was another world from most of L.A. and the L.A. Bobby grew up in. A world that Bobby would have sacrificed almost anything to be part of.

***

Whitley Heights: One of my favorite L.A. neighborhoods, across the freeway from the Hollywood Bowl. Bowl, if you know L.A. Of course it was much bigger before the freeway took out a good chunk of it. The houses, mostly Spanish and Mediterranean, go up-or-downslope on the hillsides. My research for this consisted of knowing people who live there and exploring as much of it as I could on foot, both inside the houses and out on the streets. From my story Fade Out on Bunker Hill (Ellery Queen, March/April 2019):

Howard threaded the maze of tight streets, rills of amber light hitting the Mediterranean Revival houses dotting the hillside. He watched the unlit Hollywood Sign fade out in the increasing darkness the way so many actors’ careers seemed to dim to an early fade out. Like Sunset Boulevard and Sarah Gilmartin, and even her Whitley Heights neighborhood, that had once been home to the likes of Rudolph Valentino and Bette Davis, the sign was a ghost of Hollywood’s past.

***

The Salton Sea, in Southern California near Palm Springs, is a relic of a different time – a time when the SoCal Dream was everything to some people. It was going to be a tourist destination at one time, a resort, a place for people to live or get away…at one time. But those dreams went up in a puff of dead fish and hot desert air. And what research did I do for my novel Vortex – I spent more time at the Salton Sea than I care to think about:

So here I was at the Salton Sea in SoCal’s low desert, sitting at the edge of the water, a gusty breeze pitting my face with briny spray and fine, gritty sand. Watching that eddy swirl, sucking water and fish and whatever else down into its endless spiral and wondering where it all went wrong. It had to start somewhere, but there’s really no beginning and no end. It just happens. And you have to roll with it. Have to live with the choices you make. I sure as hell was living with mine.

Jess walked up, sat down next to me. “This isn’t my idea of heaven.”

“It’s not heaven, it’s Mecca.”

“Mecca’s farther north, this is Bombay Beach.” Mecca, Bombay Beach, Desert Shores, Salton Sea Beach, were towns that were on or near the Salton Sea. The original Mecca might be a place that people pilgrimage to for salvation. I didn’t think that was true of the Salton Sea’s Mecca or any of the other towns around here, filled as they were with the detritus of dreams gone bad. The American Dream crashed and burned right here at the Salton Sea.

***

So, there’s a variety of different types of research I did for several different stories or novels. What about you – how do you go about it?

~.~.~

And now for the usual BSP:

New May issue of Mystery Weekly is out. And I'm honored to have my new story The Box featured on the cover. Hope you'll check it out. -- This link is to the Kindle version, but there's also a paper version available.

https://www.amazon.com/Mystery-Weekly-Magazine-2019-Issues-ebook/dp/B07RC8XS93

***

Our own Dietrich Kalteis interviewed me at his blog Off the Cuff. It was a lot of fun and thanks for having me, Dieter.

https://dietrichkalteis.blogspot.com/2019/05/off-cuff-with-paul-d-marks.html?fbclid=IwAR1K9zIM6DpYnRFQ27FSeagqlqZ3L2-TAYqtNhVUSr3Qjm1w5O4wHClWIpk  

***

My short story House of the Rising Sun and lots of other great stories are in Switchblade - Issue 9, which is available on Amazon (Kindle version): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QW5GVZF. The paperback version to follow in May.

Please join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/paul.d.marks and check out my website www.PaulDMarks.com

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The Vandals Took the Handles…or in this case the Newel Post

What is the strangest thing you’ve done while researching a book?

by Paul D. Marks

The things we do for our art: I’ve braved riots, vandalized classic Victorian buildings, suffered through the rich and delish food of New Orleans. It’s a tough life.

Does pre-research count? Did I just invent a term?

I’m not sure I’ve done anything particularly unusual while specifically researching a book in advance, pretty much all the usual stuff that’s been talked about here earlier in the week. But I have lived life to some extent and many of the experiences I’ve had make their way into my stories or inform them one way or another.

Los Angeles - "Rodney King" Riots

Way back in the 90s, I lived through the “Rodney King” riots in Los Angeles. It was an ugly and scary time. Smoke rising, traffic snarled, looting, people in panic mode, etc. My novel White Heat takes place during those riots. PI Duke Rogers screws up an easy case and inadvertently causes someone’s death. To make amends he wants to find the killer. To do that he backtraces the victim, going to see her family in South Central LA the day the riots break out. He’s harassed by angry mobs, his car is torched and he’s stranded in the middle of South Central while everything erupts into chaos around him. And that’s just the beginning of his problems.

Of course that just touches on what the book is about. But one of the things that made me happiest was hearing people who were in the thick of it, cops, rioters, civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time, say how real my descriptions of the riots were. How well I captured them. One person even told me she had to skip over those parts because they were too real and brought back too many memories. Not that I want to cause someone discomfort, but what better compliment could I have? So maybe living through the riots helped me write a story that rang true.

My short story Howling at the Moon (Ellery Queen 11/14) takes place in Southern California’s Death Valley, the lowest and hottest spot in the US. Though it’s been some years since I’ve trekked there, I have been there and drew on those experiences to hopefully give the story a sense of verisimilitude. I remember how hot it was – hotter than hell and if you squinted just right that’s where you thought you were.

Death Valley, California

I recently sold another story to Ellery Queen called Ghosts of Bunker Hill (no publication date yet). This one takes place in an area of downtown LA, not the famous Revolutionary War site in Mass. And today’s Bunker Hill is very different than what it used to be.

Bunker Hill was LA’s first wealthy residential neighborhood, right near downtown. But it got run down after WWI and became housing for poor people. Lots of film noirs were shot there (Criss Cross, Cry Danger, Kiss Me Deadly and many others). It’s also where John Fante lived when he wrote Ask the Dust and other books. But in the late 60s it was all torn down and redeveloped. They even flattened the hills. Ghosts of Bunker Hill is set in and around there in the present.

Bunker Hill, Los Angeles

I love the old Bunker Hill and was lucky enough to “explore” it under the radar before it was totally razed. A friend and I went down there and did some “self-guided tours” of many of the grand old Victorian houses before they were torn down or moved to other locations. I took a souvenir from one of those Victorian houses, the finial off a newel staircase post (if I have the terminology correct). It’s a prized possession and since I want to write more stories with the characters in Ghosts of Bunker Hill, I see the finial as the “logo” for that series. What makes it really special to me is that it’s not just any old finial, but one I actually took from Bunker Hill. So it has both real and personal history.

Bunker Hill is also where the famous Angels Flight funicular railway is/was, from which Michael Connelly takes the name of one of his novels and which I used as a short story title before his novel came out. And I got to ride the original Angels Flight as well, which I’ve used in multiple stories including the eponymous Angels Flight. It was later moved up the street and a “new and improved” Angels Flight was put there, but it closed not too long after it opened.

Back in the day, my friend Linda (though not the friend I explored Bunker Hill with) and I used to go around LA, just point the car and drive and explore. We would just get in the car and head out in any direction, exploring “old” Los Angeles. We’d go anywhere and everywhere. We explored much of So Cal and I treasure those memories and what I learned while we were having fun doing that. And, of course, I’ve used much of what we saw in my writing.

But something just occurred to me that wasn’t pre-research. I was working on a screenplay set in New Orleans and I had never been there. Now, I could have researched it in books in those days or asked people about it – I could have gone to New Orleans Square at Disneyland – but I felt I needed to have the real feel for the place. So I just had to go there and see it for myself. I don’t know if it made the screenplay any better or more real, but it sure made me and Amy happy to be there.

And now that Bouchercon is going to be there in the fall, I guess it’s time for more research.

So, in terms of research, I draw on all of these experiences, plus others, as well as traditional research methods, such as book learnin’, the internet and talking with people, to hopefully give my stories a feeling of really being in the place or with characters who come off as real.

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Adventures in La La Land Redux

Settings play a key role in mysteries. Where do your mysteries tend to be set and why?

by Paul D. Marks

Since it’s Thanksgiving weekend, I hope you don’t mind if I repost a piece I did for another blog I write for (Sleuthsayers.org). This was the first post I did for them and I think it pretty much responds to our question this week.

And though I have stories set in other places, I consider myself an LA writer and Los Angeles does play a major role in many of my stories. Many people have said it’s another character and I agree. S.W. Lauden said, “I just read your novel Vortex. I loved how the action bounced around Southern California, almost as if the region was one of the main characters.”

So here are (some of) my Adventures in La La Land (with a couple of minor revisions from the original as posted on Sleuthsayers):

I thought I’d write about two things I know pretty well, Los Angeles and me. Sort of an introduction to my writing and me, my influences, especially my inspiration for setting. And since it is an intro it might be a little longer than a normal post...

I’m old enough to have grown up in Los Angeles when both Raymond Chandler’s L.A. and Chandler himself were still around. When I was a kid L.A. still resembled the city of Chandler's "mean streets," Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer and Cain's Double Indemnity. In fact, I grew up in a Spanish-style house very much like the one that Barbara Stanwyck lives in in the movie version of Double Indemnity.

L.A. was a film noir town for a film noir kid. And that certainly had an influence on me and my writing. And a lot of my writing involves L.A., not just as a location but almost as a character in its own right. Of course, we’re all influenced by our childhoods, where we grew up and the people we knew. And those things, whether conscious or unconscious, tend to bubble to the surface in our writing like the black pitch bubbling up from the La Brea tar pits.

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Two things that Los Angeles means to me are movies and noir, oh, and palm trees, of course. Movie studios and backlots were everywhere in this city. You couldn’t help but see the studios, feel their presence and be influenced by “the movies” one way or another. Many of the studios and backlots are gone now, but almost everywhere you go in this city is a movie memory and often a noir memory. L.A. is Hollywood’s backlot and many films, including many noirs, were filmed throughout the city.

As a kid, a teenager and even a young adult, I experienced many of the places I read about in books and saw in the movies, once the movies got out of the backlot and onto those mean L.A. streets. Not as a tourist, but as part of my “backyard.”

So Los Angeles has insinuated itself into my writing. Here’s some examples of how it might have gotten there and how it reflects my view of the ironically named City of Angels.

photo credit: Angels Flight via photopin (license)

Angels Flight is a funicular railway in downtown Los Angeles. Star of many films and many noirs, including Kiss Me, Deadly, Criss Cross and others. Chandler visits it in The High Window and The King in Yellow. As a young boy, my dad took me to the original Angels Flight (now moved down the road and since closed). And though I may not have known about noir films and hardboiled novels then, it was an experience I’ve always remembered. Such a cool little pair of trains going up and down that hill, the tracks splitting in the middle just as each car approaches the other and you think they’re going to smash into each other head on. Angels Flight slams back to me in memory every now and then and makes its way into my writing, most notably in the eponymous story Angels Flight, which I must say came out before Michael Connelly’s novel of the same name.

That story, about a cop whose time has come and gone, is still pretty relevant today. The world is changing and he’s having one hell of a time catching up, if he even wants to. He’s a dinosaur. And he knows that Angels Flight is an anachronism, just like he is. He says to the other main character:
 

“Will Angels Flight bring back the glamour of the old days? Hollywood’s lost its tinsel. Venice’s lost its pier. And there are no angels in the City of Angels. What can Angels Flight do to bring that back?”

“Sometimes you need something for the soul,” the other person says.

I think that sums up a lot of my attitude not only toward Angels Flight but to the City of Angels as well. 

In Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, Tod Hackett comes to L.A. thinking he’s an artist. And like so many others he gets trampled by that dream. Not much has changed all these decades later in my story Endless Vacation, when a young woman comes to Hollywood with big dreams and a bigger heroin habit. The narrator tries to help but he also knows:

Who the hell am I to talk? I came to L.A. looking for a Hollywood that died before I was born. A glamorous town of movie stars and studios and backlots. A studio system that nurtured talent, whatever you say about how it also might have stifled it with the other hand. A town that made movies in black and white but whose streets were, indeed, paved with gold. Yeah, I bought it – hook, line and clapboard.

Luis Valdez examines the Zoot Suit Riots that took place in L.A. during World War II in his play Zoot Suit. I remember my grandfather, who lived through that time, talking about “pachucos” when I was a kid. In my story Sleepy Lagoon Nocturne, set during the war, I take a stab at dealing with the racial tension of that era.

Hot jazz—swing music—boogied, bopped and jived. And Bobby Saxon was one of those who made it happen. Bobby banged the eighty-eights with the Booker “Boom-Boom” Taylor Orchestra in the Club Alabam down on Central Avenue. It was the heppest place for whites to come slumming and mix with the coloreds. That’s just the way it was in those days, Los Angeles in the 1940s during the war.

Venice Beach and boardwalk is the number one tourist destination in Los Angeles. People think it’s cool and flock to see the “freaks,” and maybe the nearby Venice Canals. Developer Abbott Kinney wanted to recreate Italy’s Venice in L.A., and he did, to some extent. But it didn’t quite work out. Many of the canals were drained and filled in, though some remain. They can be seen in several movies, too numerous to name. And, because they were another place I’d done time at, they pop up in my short story Santa Claus Blues, which opens with a bunch of kids playing along the canals and coming across a dead Santa floating in one of them.

Staring at the canal, Bobby thought about Abbott Kinney's dream for a high culture theme park, with concerts, theatre and lectures on various subjects. Kinney even imported Italian gondoliers to sing to visitors as they were propelled along the canals. When no one seemed to care about the highbrow culture he offered he switched gears and turned Venice into a popular amusement area. And finally the people came.

My grandparents always referred to MacArthur Park, on Wilshire Boulevard on the way to downtown, as Westlake Park, its original name. It was renamed for General Douglas MacArthur after World War II. But for my grandparents it was always Westlake. When I was a kid it was the place they took me to have a picnic and rent a boat and paddle around the lake. A nice outing. In the movies it’s the scene of a murder in one of my favorite obscure noirs, Too Late for Tears. By the time of my novel White Heat, set during the 1992 “Rodney King” riots, the nature of the park had changed from when I was a kid:

MacArthur Park is midway between Hancock Park, not a park, but an upper class neighborhood, and downtown L.A., a neighborhood in search of an identity. When I was a boy, my grandparents used to take me to the park. We’d rent rowboats and paddle through the lake, tossing bread crumbs to the birds. The park is a different place today. You can still rent paddle boats – if you want to paddle across the lake while talking to your dealer. Sometimes on Saturdays or Sundays immigrant families still try to use it as a park. Most of the time, it’s a haven for pushers, crack addicts, hookers and worse. Even the police don’t like treading there. If they were scared, who was I to play Rambo?

Even if someone’s never been to Los Angeles, most people know Sunset Boulevard and the Sunset Strip. Sunset begins or ends, depending on how you look at it, at Pacific Coast Highway on the west and continues to Union Station in downtown L.A., though recently the last part of the jog has been renamed. It goes from wealthy homes in Santa Monica and the West Side, into Beverly Hills, through the Strip in West Hollywood, where hippies back in the day and hipsters today hang out. Into Hollywood and on to downtown. It’s a microcosm of Los Angeles. Of course, both Union Station and Sunset have made multiple appearances in movies and novels and have made several appearances in my writing. Sunset was a major artery in my life as well as in the city. One time I walked almost the entire length of Sunset on a weekend day with my dad, ending up at Union Station. Later, I hung on the Strip. I drove it to the beach. I slammed through the road’s Dead Man’s Curve, made famous in the Jan and Dean song. Sunset appears in my stories Born Under a Bad Sign, Dead Man’s Curve, L.A. Late @ Night and more. In the latter, Sunset is as much of a character in the story as any of the human characters.

She'd only noticed the mansion. Not long after that, her parents had taken her to the beach. They had driven Sunset all the way from Chavez Ravine to the ocean. She had seen houses like the one in the movie. Houses she vowed she'd live in some day. 

What she hadn't realized at the time was that there was a price to pay to be able to live in such a house. Sometimes that price was hanging from a tag that everyone can see. Sometimes it was hidden inside.

And who doesn’t know the famous—or infamous—Hollywood Sign? Something I saw almost every day as a kid, and which a friend of mine and I hiked up to many, many years ago, before it was all fenced in and touristy. In Free Fall, originally published in Gary Lovisi’s Hardboiled magazine, a man recently separated from the service, heads west, as far west as he can go until he comes to the terminus of Route 66 in Santa Monica, near the Santa Monica Pier. This is the end of the road for him in more ways than one.

I kept looking at the Hollywood Sign, wondering about all the people down below, pretending to be in its glow. Where do they go after L.A.? There is nowhere, the land ends and they just tumble into the arroyos and ravines, never to be heard from again.

So this is a sampling of my writing and my relationship to L.A., La La Land, the City of the Angels, the Big Orange. Could I have written about these places without experiencing them? Sure. We can’t experience everything we write about. But hopefully it has made my writing more authentic.

Maybe there are other cities less well traveled that would be ripe for exploration in movies and books. Maybe L.A. is overworked and overdone. But Los Angeles is part of me. Part of who I am. So it’s not only a recurring locale in my writing, it’s a recurring theme. And I’ve only just touched the surface here of Los Angeles, the city, its various landmarks and neighborhoods and my relationship to it.

So that’s part of what shaped me and makes me who I am. And some of my L.A. story. You can take the boy out of L.A., but you can’t take L.A. out of the boy. Oh, and here’s an L.A. story for you (a true one): I’m one of the few people to pull a gun on the LAPD and live to tell about. But that’s for another time. Or you can see the story on my website at: http://pauldmarks.com/he-pulled-a-gun-on-the-lapd-and-lived-to-tell-about-it/

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So, thank you all. Hope you had a great Thanksgiving and will have a good rest of the weekend!

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Down and Out Books is putting a whole bunch of great books on sale for 99¢ for the next two weeks, including Coast to Coast: Murder from Sea to Shining Sea, with mystery stories from such luminaries as 4 Time Edgar Winner and Co-Creator of “Columbo,” William Link • Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Bill Pronzini • Scribner Crime Novel Winner William G. Tapply • Shamus Winner Paul D. Marks • EQMM Readers Award Winner Bob Levinson • Al Blanchard Award Winner James Shannon • Derringer Award Winner Stephen D. Rogers • Sherlock Holmes Bowl Winner Andrew McAleer and other poisoned-pen professionals like Judy Travis Copek • Sheila Lowe • Gayle Bartos-Pool • Thomas Donahue
 

Click here to go to the Down & Out Amazon sale: http://amzn.to/1HiabZG

And my new noir-thriller Vortex is also on sale in e-form for 99¢.

“…a nonstop staccato action noir… Vortex lives up to its name, quickly creating a maelstrom of action and purpose to draw readers into a whirlpool of intrigue and mystery… but be forewarned: once picked up, it's nearly impossible to put down before the end.”

—D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

And now for the usual BSP stuff:

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Midnight at the Internet Cafe

What is the research tool you turn to most often? How important is visiting the site of your story to your research?

by Paul D. Marks

These days my go-to research tool is the internet, what else? It’s close at hand. It’s easy. It has “everything” on it. And it’s right all the time. Well, most of the time. I mean much of the time. Yeah.

In the olden days, BI—Before Internet—one had to go to the library or the bookstore. But if you’re a night owl like me you’d be hard pressed to find a library or bookstore open at 3am, my prime time. Not impossible, but also maybe not close by. And much as I love browsing both of those places, I’d rather do it in the middle of the night, but I guess they want to sleep and I curse them for it.

Then, of course, there’s first hand research, going to the location/s in your story or to primary source people. For example, if you’re writing about the Hollywood Sign in Los Angeles and you live in Los Angeles you can drive up there, annoy the people who live in the neighborhood, duck potshots from them, get close to the sign and, after running the gauntlet of angry residents, find out it’s fenced off so you can’t get there anyway, at least not right there. But you used to be able to go there. I hiked up there with a friend one time when we were doing research on a screenplay. It was fun and exciting and before the neighbors were perpetually upset—and before it was fenced off. But today it’s hard to get to, at least to get right up close to it, because it is fenced off. So what do you do? You turn to the internet or books. Or people who’ve been there or you watch through binocs or you beg everyone you know to find someone who knows someone who can get you inside the fence. And when that fails you hit the books again or the internet.

I recently sold a story to Ellery Queen that takes place on and around Bunker Hill, no not that Bunker Hill in Massachusetts. The one in downtown L.A. L.A.’s Bunker Hill of today and the Bunker Hill of 30-40 years ago are two vastly different places. When it began in the late 1800s, Bunker Hill was a neighborhood of fancy Victorian homes for the wealthy near downtown. Over time the swells moved west and Bunker Hill became run down and the elaborate houses were turned into rooming houses. In the late 60s, redevelopment began. The people were kicked out. Some of the houses were torn down and others were packed up and moved to other locations. So, though my story takes place today it deals with elements of the long-lost and lamented Bunker Hill of yesterday. How did I research that? Well, the usual, the internet, books, etc. Watching old movies shot there—many film noirs were shot on and around Bunker Hill. But I had also spent time there as a young man, exploring the houses, getting into some, riding the original Angels Flight funicular railway. Going through the Grand Central Market that John Fante talks about in Ask the Dust, before it was remodeled. And I still have the top of a newell stairway post I liberated from one of those old Victorian houses—a memento both to L.A.’s and my own past. I’m also old enough to remember L.A. as Raymond Chandler describes it and before it started to change and “grow up”. And I remember it pretty well—first-hand research you might say.

My novel White Heat takes place mostly in Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots of 1992. I lived through that and used both personal experience and recollections of others, both civilians and cops that I know who were there to add flavor to the story. But parts of the story also take place in Calexico, California and Sparks and Reno, Nevada. I have recollections of both places, but it’s been a long time since I was there, so again I turned to the internet to be my researcher’s best friend.

But what if you’re writing something that’s set where you’ve never been. I’ve never been to the Amazon, though it’s one of my dreams. Pre-internet, I was working on a screenplay set there, so I researched it in books, etc. But I also drew on personal experiences of being in other riverine environs, transposing some of those experiences and adventures to the Amazon.

What if it’s a time you’ve never lived in or experienced firsthand? I have a character named Bobby Saxon who’s been in three published stories. I wrote a novel with Bobby that should be done soon. Those stories all take place during World War II on the L.A. homefront. Well, that’s before my time. But I know L.A. pretty well and I know a lot of its history. So I had a good foundation to start with. But I also turned to primary resources: my mom and her friends. My family goes back here a long way and my mom was an L.A. native, so she and her friends could tell me first-hand things about L.A. during the war. I supplemented that with—what else? —the internet and books. But also with maps. I wanted to know how people got from point A to point B in a time before freeways. So I bought several period street maps on eBay, as well as looking things up on the net. And, aside from the good research the maps gave me for the story, I just love looking at them and seeing how things change over time. I also got some of the flavor of the era from old movies and music of the time, both of which I love.

When I was working on a script set in New Orleans...I had to go research it in person. Had to. Wouldn’t you? I wanted it to be real and how could I make it real without actually tasting the food at Commander’s Palace?

But what about writing about professions or places that I have no first-hand contact with, well, it’s research and again you go to primary sources when you can. Example: I’m not a doctor so I ask doctors how certain symptoms might be treated, what meds would be used, etc. As for places I haven’t been, well, sometimes I try to go, but if I can’t it’s back to the internet drawing board.

So if I had to pick one winner, it would be the internet. The world is at your fingertips.

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It’s still not too late to read all the 2015 Anthony Award nominated short stories:

The five Anthony nominees in the Short Story category are Craig Faustus Buck, Barb Goffman, John Shepphird, our own Art Taylor...and me, Paul D. Marks. I’m honored to be among these people and their terrific stories.

I want to thank everyone who voted for us in the first round. And if you’re eligible to vote, people attending Bouchercon can vote at the convention until 1pm Saturday.

I hope you’ll take the time to read all five of the stories and vote. All are available free here – just click the link and scroll down to the short story links: http://bouchercon2015.org/2015-anthony-award-nominees/

But even if you’re not eligible to vote, I hope you’ll take the time to read the stories. I think you’ll enjoy them and maybe get turned onto some new writers.

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And now for the usual shameless BSP:

NEW from Down & Out Books – Coast to Coast: Murder from Sea to Shining Sea – an anthology of short mystery stories, chocked full of major award-winning authors, edited by Andrew McAleer and Paul D. Marks (Me!)

Released on 10/1 (that’s yesterday for those without a calendar, so hot off the presses)

“Envelope-pushers! A truly WOW collection by the best mystery writers out there – full of surprises only they can pull off.”
—Thomas B. Sawyer, Bestselling author of Cross Purposes, Head-Writer of Murder, She Wrote

With a Killer Cast Including:

4 Time Edgar Winner William Link • Grand Master Bill Pronzini • Scribner Crime Novel Winner William G. Tapply • Shamus Winner Paul D. Marks • EQMM Readers Award Winner Robert S. Levinson • Al Blanchard Award Winner James T. Shannon • Derringer Award Winner Stephen D. Rogers • Sherlock Holmes Bowl Winner Andrew McAleer and other poisoned-pen professionals like Judy Copek • Sheila Lowe • G. B. Pool • Thomas Donahue

Available in paperback and Kindle e-book on Amazon.  Click here to go to Amazon.

***       ***       ***

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The Long and Winding Road

How did your first novel/story come about and how long did it take to get it published?

by Paul D. Marks
 

Since I love using Beatle song titles, the path to my first fiction publication was a long and winding road.

There's really no simple or easy answer to the question of how my first story came about because it's so long ago who really remembers? I know who doesn't: me. I don't even remember what my first story was. What I do remember is that I was always writing something. I think I started off writing poems and song lyrics. One time I even wrote some lyrics in the margins of a science test. And the science teacher also happened to have a music publishing biz on the side – which I didn't know. He liked the lyrics so much he wanted to publish the song. Unfortunately, the lyrics I wrote were for the Beatles' I'm Only Sleeping.

But one of my early novels, a satire about a screenwriter trying to make it in Hollywood, was almost published way back in the 80s. Almost. It was accepted for publication (if that's the right terminology) by a major publisher. But then there was a "housecleaning" at that publisher: the old team of editors and assistant editors got swept out. And the new team didn't want most of the old team's slate of projects, so I got swept out with the "new broom". So that one almost got published. But by the time it was put into "turnaround" it was too late for it as a lot of the humor was dated. Remember Fawn Hall, Jessica Hahn, Donna Rice and Gary Hart – see what I mean, dated. 'Cause even though it was about a guy trying to make it in Hollywood, it had a lot of topical and satirical humor of the day. I work on it every once in a while to remove the dated satirical elements and make it more neutral in terms of topicality. So one of these days it might see the light.

The first writing that I got paid for was a piece in one of the L.A. papers about John Lennon on, I believe, the one year anniversary of his murder. It wasn't fiction, but it felt awfully good to actually get paid for writing something. But even though it felt good to be paid, there were mixed emotions because of the subject matter.

My first published fiction was a story called Angels Flight (before Michael Connelly borrowed the title from me 😉). It was published in the Murder by Thirteen anthology and recently republished in L.A. Late @ Night, a collection of five of my stories. A new review of L.A. Late @ Night in the current issue of All Due Respect calls Angels Flight the reviewer's favorite story in the collection and says this about the two main characters, "They're a dynamic pair, and I'd like to see them together in more stories," so I might just have to oblige him.

The title for Angels Flight was inspired by the famous funicular railway in downtown L.A. and my love for old Los Angeles. I think the story was inspired when they drained one of the lakes in L.A. and found all kinds of junk there. So in my story they drain Echo Park Lake, finding a dead body and the story takes off from there. And even though it was originally published in 1997, it's still one of my favorites. I think it's (hopefully) surprise ending brings to mind Shakespeare's quote, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

After Angels Flight, I had more stories published and eventually my novel White Heat. And all I can do to end is quote another rock band, the Grateful Dead, "What a long strange trip it's been."