Butcher, Baker, Troublemaker

Most of us - most writers everywhere - do something else first, or do something else alongside. What bits of your other career(s) have you found useful in the business of writing and what bits have you had to ditch?

by Paul D. Marks

Generally, I don’t like to talk about most of my checkered past. Nothing illegal or anything like that, just checkered. Maybe Chancellor of the Exchequer (or should that be Chancellor of the Excheckered?). But if it’s the “ex” chequer wouldn’t that make one the Ex Chancellor of the Chequer? But I digress.

I did a lot of things before my vaunted prose writing career. Juggler. Trapeze artist. Tail gunner in a B-17. Gumshoe. Well, the only one of those that even comes close to true is gumshoe and that’s only because I’ve had gum on my shoe…more than once even.

As you’ll see below (and above, too), I think this Covid-19 House Arrest is getting to me. I think virtually all of our experiences, good or bad, come into play in our writing one way or another. I’ve done a lot of things, written for radio, rewrites for films, made deliveries for a small business, worked in the mail room for a big company, pulled a gun on the LAPD and lived to tell about it (see the "about" section on my website for an abbreviated version of that story) and other things. But many things that play into my writing aren’t necessarily job-related.

Of some of the things I am willing to talk about:

I kidded the kidder:

I was visiting a friend on the set of “Mork and Mindy” during a rehearsal and I freaked out Robin Williams.  They were blocking.  No audience.  I was the only stranger there, someone he didn't recognize. He was anxious seeing a stranger on the set, having had some recent trouble with the tabloids.

He asked me if I worked for the National Enquirer. Strange question, I thought.  But I can give as well as receive, "Yes," I said, joking.  He freaked, though he didn't get nasty or anything like that, just uptight.  I finally told him I was kidding.  After the rehearsal he apologized.  It was fun kidding the kidder though.

I ran into him at a party for a rock star a couple weeks later. He smiled. We chatted a bit. He remembered “the incident”. He didn’t sic anyone on me. I count that as a victory. I don’t remember if I’ve used it in any writing, but it will make in there some day. But hey, I have to make this article interesting, don’t I? I did, however, use a Mork-Pam Da wber connection, Rebecca Schaeffer, as one of the inspirations for White Heat…


I did use this incident:

I went to a producer’s house in the Hollywood Hills above Sunset Boulevard. I drove up. Two Jaguars in the huge driveway. I go inside, nice (read expensive) art, nice (read expensive) furniture, expensive house (read insanely expensive) all the way around. Have my meeting with said producer and his partner and they want to option something…for free. All that ostentatious wealth and they don’t want to pay me for my property. That, in a roundabout way, made it into Broken Windows:

That was an easy one. But I was sick of being famous. I never asked for it. Sick of working for the Hollywood crowd, who thought they owned you just because they paid you, late more often than not, pleading poverty as they lived in the mansions above Sunset and drove Jags and Lamborghinis. Who knows, maybe it was all rented? Most of them were as much façade as the sets they filmed on. Which made me wonder about Susan Karubian? Why pick the Hollywood Sign to jump off? Another disappointed actress who didn’t know the ropes? Who didn’t know what it would take to make it in this town? She should have just gone home and slipped under the covers until the dream passed. Then she could have woken up one day with a smile and faced the world. After all, a new world’s born at dawn.

My friend Linda:

A long time ago, my friend Linda and I used to get in one of our cars, point it in a direction and drive. Go exploring L.A., from Pasadena to downtown to San Pedro and all points in between. It was fun. It was educational. We both love L.A. And we both love swing/big band music. So we’d also go to swing concerts, sometimes by unknown bands and sometimes by the remnants of the big bands from the 30s and 40s. We saw Tex Beneke, Glenn Miller vocalist and saxophonist, lead the Glenn Miller Orchestra. We saw Bob Eberly and Helen O’Connell sing their hits Tangerine and Brazil. And more (see my article https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2020/04/it-dont-mean-thing-if-it-aint-got-that.html at SleuthSayers). (And, unfortunately, this was all before digital cameras and the pix aren’t digitized or even easy to find.)

All of this has paid off in my writing. I’m a rock ‘n’ roll kid but I’ve been lucky to be exposed to all kinds of music and see much of it in person, too. And that certainly helped in my writing of various stories/novels, especially my upcoming novel The Blues Don’t Care (June 1st, 2020), a crime story set amidst the jazz scene on L.A.’s Central Avenue during World War II in the 1940s.

And all that driving around L.A. has certainly helped when I write things set in L.A., which I do a lot and sometimes maybe too much.

Linda and I both worked in the film biz. And that, too, has provided a lot of fodder for things in my stories. My 2019 story Fade-Out on Bunker Hill just placed second in the Ellery Queen Readers Poll (see the virtual awards ceremony on YouTube). It’s part of my Howard Hamm series. In that story, which riffs off the classic movie Sunset Boulevard, Howard Hamm gets “lost” on a Hollywood backlot. Whenever I had a meeting or other occasion to be at a studio I would always wander the backlots. I love them and the magic they stand for. So when Howard does his backlot wandering in Fade-Out it’s really me reminiscing about those days, though he finds much more trouble there than I did...

There are various Hollywood types in many of the things I write and you can bet that all of them are based to one degree or another on people I’ve met or worked with, though sometimes several people composited into one.

Much of my early Hollywood experiences made it into a satirical novel that was picked up by a major publisher and then dumped when they kicked out their old editorial staff for a new one and, as a new broom sweeps clean, my book was swept out with the new. The moral of that story is don't write topical humor, because by the time my book was thrown, er, swept out some of the humor was already dated so it was too late to try another publisher without a major rewrite. Though I will probably rewrite it one day sans topical humor cause I still like the story.

Crew member and me on the Warner Bros backlot

And people often ask how much of you is in your characters. There's a little of me in all my characters.  Some corner or part of them is based on me—and those parts are, of course, based on my experiences.  Other parts are based on people I've known or have come across.  Of course, I write a lot about crime and murderers and I've never murdered anyone…except on paper.  But still, you can reach into the dark side of yourself and draw on that for inspiration.  At some point we all want revenge of varying degrees on people who dun us wrong and in a novel or story you can get that revenge without worrying about going to jail.  So you reach into that dark corner of your mind and write as if you had a get out of jail free card.

So everything we do or experience turns up in our stories, if not directly then indirectly.

And then there’s the other things I did that I can’t tell you about ….or as they say “I’d have to kill you”.

~.~.~

And now for the usual BSP:

Frank Zafiro grilled me for the Wrong Place, Write Crime podcast. I survived...and so did he. Hope you'll want to check it out. (And thanks for having me, Frank!)

https://soundcloud.com/frank-zafiro-953165087/episode-75-open-shut-w-paul-d-marks


Coming June 1st from Down & Out Books – The Blues Don't Care:

 “Paul D. Marks finds new gold in 40s’ L.A. noir while exploring prejudices in race, culture, and sexual identity. He is one helluva writer.”
                                                               —Michael Sears, author of the Jason Stafford series

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

Click here to: Subscribe to my Newsletter

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.

* * *

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/

*** *** ***

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

*** *** ***

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:

Click here to subscribe to my Newsletter: Subscribe to my Newsletter
Please join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/paul.d.marks and Twitter: @PaulDMarks
And check out my updated website www.PaulDMarks.com