It’s a bright and sunny day in California. Isn’t it always? No dark storminess here. Waves kiss golden beaches, and flowers sprout nonstop. There’s movie-star glitz and glam, and palm trees sway like swooning lovers.
The perfect state for murder.
It must be, judging by the sheer volume of mystery novels, detective stories, whodunits, heart-throbbing thrillers and noir nightmares set amid Cali’s pleasantries, thanks to some of the best crime writers around.
Bodies push up happy little daisies in Lee Goldberg’s latest SoCal novel. Gumshoes get in sticky situations on the streets of L.A. in Michael Connelly’s hands. And corpses crop up on San Francisco’s Maiden Lane when John Lescroart holds the pen. The Gold Country offers a mother lode of criminal pay dirt in Penny Warner’s pages, while a friendly NorCal college town brings pastoral carnage to Catriona McPherson’s latest crime novel.
So what is it about California’s sunny-side-up reputation that takes these writers down dark and deadly rabbit holes of murder, mystery and mayhem? Well, we asked. They talked.
Opposites attract
Light always casts a shadow, they say.
“There’s something about dark deeds lurking underneath something that’s so ice-cream, polka-dot on the surface,” says McPherson, a Scotland-born crime novelist and author of the “Last Ditch” series, set in a fictional town that’s a spot-on stand-in to her adopted home of Davis. “It’s the same principle that made ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ the genius it was. The dark against the light. To this day, because of Buffy, I fully believe every frat house probably has giant lizards in the basement.”
Goldberg – author of more than 30 novels and writer of hit TV shows like “Diagnosis Murder,” “SeaQuest,” “Monk” and “The Glade” — offers a book-full of ideas on the subject of Cali as crime capital of the literary realm.
“It’s obvious why, no question why, but I’ll give you a whole bunch of reasons and you can pick one you like,” he says in a recent phone interview, quickly building up speed and enthusiasm. “First of all, there’s the climate. It’s sunshine and beaches and the land of dreams, so of course, there’s a dark side.
“And it’s more than just a hypothetical land of dreams. It actually manufactures dreams here. The whole of Hollywood is Dreamland. And the opposite of Dreamland is Nightmare-land,” he says. “Dreams rarely come true — so many crushed hopes. And when you come here to make your dreams come true, you’re not gonna let anybody stand in the way, so you’re set up right there for a perfect motivation for murder.
“I can’t think of a better place for crime,” he says. “I think it would be malpractice for a crime writer not to set a crime story in California!”
Michael Connelly, bestselling author of the Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller series, admits he was one of those dreamers himself, lured out to California to follow in the footsteps of literary icons Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
“I grew up in Florida, but I read all the Chandler books when I was 19, all set in California, and I think I was drawn out here by that,” he says. “I even tried writing crime novels set in Florida, but they just didn’t work. So I moved to the land of my heroes.
“A lot of people come here because, wherever they came from, it wasn’t working for them,” Connelly says. “California is a place you can remake yourself. It has the mythology, the lore of the Wild West — there’s almost a palpable sense that anything can happen. L.A. in particular is a city where everybody comes from somewhere else. And more specific to the crime novel, lots of people come to attain a dream and only a few make it. There’s definitely the sense of haves and have-nots. There’s a line of friction between those, and that’s where a lot of good crime fiction comes from. Not to mention real crime.”
Location as character
Authors say the setting practically becomes a character in a book. And what has more character than California? But placing a murder mystery here can also be too much of a good/bad thing.
“California has been done to death, so to speak,” says East Bay writer Penny Warner, author of the Connor Westphal mystery series about a deaf reporter in the Gold Country. “When I started looking for a setting for my first book in the series, ‘Dead Body Language,’ I wanted to feature our local heritage, our California attic, if you will. So I thought it would be unique and fun to set it up in places like Jamestown, which doesn’t get used a lot for mysteries.”
Warner has also used settings at the de Young Museum, the old barracks on Treasure Island and the Winchester Mystery House. In Warner’s “Death of a Chocolate Cheater,” food truck vendor Darcy Burnett unwraps a murder at the San Francisco Chocolate Festival.
As John Lescroart, often called the “master of the legal thriller,” began crafting what would be his bestselling Dismas Hardy series, he also saw the writing on the wall — or on a magazine cover, that is — about the oversaturation of L.A. crime stories.
“Early on, I decided I was gonna write a hard-hitting P.I. novel set in L.A., and I had just started writing an outline when a mystery writers magazine came out with the lead cover article saying, ‘Please, no more P.I.s in Los Angeles!’” he says, laughing. “It was like it was addressed to me purposely. I thought, well I could do San Francisco. I know it well. So I’m still gonna do Dismas Hardy, but put him in San Francisco, and instead of a P.I., have him be an attorney. That magazine cover was really fortuitous.”
Lescroart once worked as a bartender at The Little Shamrock, an old watering hole in the Inner Sunset, so he made Dismas a bartender there, too.
“The place goes back 100 years,” he says. “My characters meet there on certain nights. They’ve had murders happen to their membership. It’s really very much part of the whole zeitgeist in the city.”
Lescroart is also fond of using hidden glades in Golden Gate Park, nooks in Maiden Lane and even lesser-known spots like a “scary little cul-de-sac” called Edgewood Avenue near UCSF. “I’ve had a few bodies end up there,” he says. His 30th novel — working title “The Missing Piece” — will be out in September.
Goldberg also went for lesser-traveled locales for his latest books, “Lost Hills” and “Bone Canyon” (due out in January) that feature Eve Ronin, the youngest female homicide detective in L.A. county history, promoted to homicide at Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station.
“Lost Hills is a real sheriff’s station here – it’s where Mel Gibson was arrested in 2006,” Goldberg says. “The whole Lost Hills area is a weird unincorporated area where Calabasas, Agoura, the Santa Monica Mountains reside. You have the super-rich in Malibu, hippy-dippy in Topanga Canyon, people growing pot in tucked away corners. There’s this whole mix, a microcosm of California right here.
“Nobody, in terms of writers — well except the people like me, who live here — knows about this area, so it gave me a blank slate to do L.A. the way nobody has done before,” Goldberg says.
He also uses many real-life locations for his deadly deeds. “I use The Commons a lot. It’s this fake-Italian-village shopping center in Calabasas where it has the world’s largest Rolex in its clocktower. I also use the corner of Mulholland (Drive) and Mulholland (Highway) for a big dispute over who has jurisdiction of the dead body lying across the border line.”
Goldberg even posts little videos of himself standing in front of places he’s used in the books, from the Lost Hills station in Calabasas to The Commons, with its giant Rolex.
The murder next door
And, of course, there’s the notion of convenience. A lot of writers live in California, and it helps to write what you know.
“I had to do a tremendous amount of research for these last books,” Goldberg says. “I walked out the door to get my newspaper. It was grueling.”
When McPherson was still in Scotland, she naturally set her Dandy Gilvers series in the old grey towns of Scotland. But her move to Davis inspired the Lexy Campbell books – the latest is “Scot Free” — set in the fictional town of Cuento.
“But it’s absolutely Davis,” she says. “So much so that I’ve got a little quiz on my website,” so people who know the town can guess the spots she’s renamed.
“When I’m writing here, and there are hummingbirds dancing around outside, I have to keep reminding myself it’s probably raining in Scotland,” she says. “I keep thinking there’s blue sky and sunshine everywhere, like California.”
The perfect state for murder.
