About a decade ago I was tipped off to an odd, inscrutable film by a budding English director living in LA. Christopher Nolan's Memento, which starred Guy Pearce in an ill-fitting pale suit and bleached hair, knocked me out, and I spent an afternoon talking about movies, memory and fragmented narrative with the 30-year old director at his apartment near the LACMA while he played Radiohead's Kid A … [Read more...]
Jonathan Lethem to the Southland
Novelist Jonathan Lethem, though firmly associated with New York bohemia and a kind of Brooklyn renaissance, will be coming to Pomona College to take over David Foster Wallace's old job.The author of the Brooklyn-childhood novel The Fortress of Solitude and, more recently, the Upper East Side-set Chronic City is well known to readers of The Misread City: He's among the site's core writers, along … [Read more...]
The Return of LA Noir
ONE of LA's greatest exports has always been dread, and our signature writer is still, three quarters of a century later, noir novelist Raymond Chandler. And now, thanks to a new anthology, all that murder, deception and unpleasantness is back.A few years back, local mystery writer Denise Hamilton (The Last Embrace) and Brooklyn's Akashic Books put together a collection called Los Angeles Noir … [Read more...]
Robert Crais vs. LA Noir
TOMORROW is the release date for the new novel by Robert Crais, "The First Rule." Crime fiction aficionados know Crais as a deft, literate writer with a strong sense of place and of social history -- one of the great inheritors of Ross Macdonald in the world of West Coast noir.HERE is my profile of Crais, who is one of the best adjusted novelists I've ever spoken to -- someone who seems … [Read more...]
Amanda Knox and Italian Noir
THE strange case of Amanda Knox -- a cute American exchange student accused of killing her British roomate -- just took a yet stranger turn as she was convicted of the murder as part of a bizarre sex game. (She is sentenced to 26 years in prison; the family will appeal.)The fact that this took place in Perugia, the capital of the lovely and green Italian region of Umbria, known as the land of the … [Read more...]
Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles
BOOKS on chandler's LA have become a kind of cottage industry. still, i'm enjoying a new book of photographs called "daylight noir: raymond chandler's imagined city." the book could be a companion volume to judith freeman's "the long embrace," which visited the dozens of SoCal locations in which the novelist lived with his elusive wife cissy, tho the aesthetic of "daylight noir" is starker and … [Read more...]
Nordic Noir Finally Arrives
SOME called 1991 – a decade and a half after the rumbles in London – “the year punk broke.” If so, 2009 is shaping up as the year Nordic Noir finally arrived. Stieg Larsson – a Trotskyist sci-fi fan now, inconveniently, dead – is the movement’s Nirvana, and “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” a mystery novel with Nordic Noir’s coolest heroine ever, his “Nevermind.” The book’s recent sequel, “The … [Read more...]