LITERARY LANDSCAPES

Deadly Homes and Gardens

 By Paula L. Woods, Special to The Times, March 3, 2005

It was just a Spanish house, like all the rest of them in California, with white walls, red tile roof, and a patio out to one side. It was built cock-eyed. The garage was under the house, the first floor was over that, and the rest of it was spilled up the hill any way they could get it in.

 — James M. Cain

"Double Indemnity"

It's a common fantasy, wondering how other people live in Los Angeles. And whether we get our clues from a glimpse inside homes or apartments as we streak by on freeways or at an open house for a property we have absolutely no intention of buying, some of us are constantly trying on other lives for size — seeing if we can shed our familiar residential skin and live large in that midcentury cliffhanger, Moderne apartment building or Craftsman bungalow that looks so appealing from afar.

Most of us are too polite to actually violate someone's privacy this way, and luckily, we don't have to. There are people who can give us guilt-free trips inside the homes we covet. Only sometimes they leave a dead body in the living room, or in the hot tub, or the guesthouse.

Who are these lucky or possibly twisted souls? They're Southern California's mystery writers, and in most respects, they're like any other fiction or screenwriter, toiling to make sense of the jumble of characters, plot and dialogue in their heads.

But mystery writers — and I confess I'm one of them — are unlike others in their reliance on setting to evoke feelings, to stir memories, to illuminate character, to make, riffing on Gertrude Stein, the there there. For many readers who love Southern California, it is mysteries that take them inside those homes and gardens often spied only from a fast-moving car.

That first glimpse into the "otherworldliness" of mysteries often compels casual readers to become fans of the genre. Pearl Yonezawa, senior librarian at the Los Feliz branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, created the Lounge Chair Author Program and a Los Feliz in Literature collection because a book discussion of a local author's mystery stimulated such a rich conversation among her patrons.

"The discussion went from the story to architecture to history to good places in the neighborhood to eat," Yonezawa says. "Readers sitting around discussing their perceptions and sharing their sense of neighborhood. How great was that?"

The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair.

 —Raymond Chandler

"The Big Sleep"

Philip Marlowe's entrance to the Sternwood mansion in Chandler's "The Big Sleep" is often quoted by contemporary mystery writers when asked for the best description of a Southern California interior. Nina Revoyr, a novelist whose mystery "Southland" was praised for its evocation of the Crenshaw district in the 1960s, remembers the "cool-eyed humor" of "The Big Sleep" as well as James M. Cain's "Double Indemnity."

"Cain's description of the house in Glendale is one of my favorite descriptions of an L.A.-type abode. He did more with that brief description than many other writers can do in much longer ones. Houses do often feel haphazard and poorly conceived here. And yet, there's something so quintessentially L.A. about those places — forced into the landscape, yet working along with it."

For other writers, it was Ross Macdonald's ability to evoke vivid locations in a few words that inspired them. Gary Phillips, author of "Monkology," a collection of short stories featuring private investigator Ivan Monk, and other crime novels, remembers an L.A.-based short story by Macdonald called "The Suicide" as being among the best he's read.

"There a passage in that story, of Macdonald's P.I., Lew Archer, being led through a home that's elegant and lean but manages to convey the sense of the place as well as psychological insights into a character. I think about Macdonald a lot when I write, because I want my writing to be that spare, yet not so devoid of detail that it becomes dull. It's all about suggesting more with less."

She led me through the living room, which was simply and expensively furnished in black iron and net, into the master bedroom. The huge square bed was neatly made, and covered with a pink quilted silk spread. Clare avoided looking at it, as though the conjunction of a man and a bed gave her a guilty feeling.

 —Ross Macdonald

"The Suicide"

Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, husband and wife as well as bestselling writers of L.A.-based crime fiction, acknowledge Macdonald's influence. "I find Macdonald to be the master," Jonathan asserts. "I love his descriptions of Santa Barbara and its environs which, like L.A., has always provided fodder for crime novels because of the disparity between the haves and the have-nots, something I've tried to capture in my own work."

"No one does the broadscapes like Macdonald," Faye agrees, but she also cites contemporary favorite, Sue Grafton. "She describes these typical Santa Barbara houses with their perennial flowerbeds and brick patios. One of her recurring characters, Henry, is always puttering around with plants."

For me, Walter Mosley's description of 1950s Watts homes and gardens in "Black Betty" (1994) inspired me to write an alternative history of L.A., focusing on the modern-day black enclaves of View Park, Baldwin Hills and other ethnic communities, a plan that has sustained me through three novels.

Instead of a fence separating our properties there were planted all kinds of trees and shrubbery. Jacaranda, kumquat, magnolia, and trimmed bamboo made our borderline. Ferns and honeysuckle closed up any gaps that might allow you to see from one yard to the other. I kept my side of the yard cut back and trim. I liked the sun shining down on us. But Lucky let the trees hang over the driveway so that you had the feeling that you were entering a jungle path, some dark tunnel into another time.

 — Walter Mosley

 "Black Betty"

Naomi Hirahara, author of last year's "Summer of the Big Bachi," says Janet Fitch's descriptions of the "heat, the smells, the Santa Ana winds" in her novel "White Oleander" stirred a personal memory and got her creative juices flowing.

"I remember during one hot September during my childhood how the whole family, including Grandma from Japan, all slept outside on our Altadena backyard lawn on towels. The scene [in 'White Oleander'] of the mother and daughter lying on their roof reminds me of that."

Hirahara also drew on memories of her father and other Japanese gardeners she gleaned from editing the anthology "Green Makers: Japanese American Gardeners in Southern California,"  http://www.heritagesource.com ., to create Mas Arai, an Altadena gardener-sleuth. Readers of her first book were treated to a guided tour of Gardena apartments, Altadena and Pasadena gardens, and less savory parts of the San Fernando Valley. "I do insert descriptions of landmarks that I feel are meaningful to Southern Californians, especially Japanese Americans," she says.

Writers often draw on the familiar in creating their stories, whether it's a person or a place. T. Jefferson Parker, author of 12 crime novels, including the recent "California Girl," set his fourth novel, "Summer of Fear," in a Laguna Canyon home built on caissons, which is where he was living when he wrote it.

"The opening passage of the book is all about that house, and the way it stands up to nature's fury but may not always be able to do so. The novel is about love and courage versus random violence, chaos and cancer, and the house — precariously built over the rugged canyon — seemed to me to be a domestic embodiment of that struggle."

When a mystery writer uses her own residence as the home of a protagonist (or victim), it's fine, but to use a family member's or friend's own (or that of a stranger) raises issues of confidentiality. Jerrilyn Farmer, author of eight Madeline Bean catering mysteries, used a Whitley Heights home owned by her brother and sister-in-law for her heroine's home.

"It was formerly owned by silent film star Ben Turpin, so I suppose it had already given up its claim to anonymity," she says. But in her just released "The Flaming Luau of Death," Farmer found an even better choice for a home being renovated by Madeline's friend Wesley Westcott — one in real life being restored by Farmer's best friend, Brandon Hoskins. "The house Wesley restores is in the coolest, tucked away, historic neighborhood called Hightower, above the Hollywood Bowl. Most people have never heard of it. You have to take an elevator to get there and it's all pedestrian up there."

Historic neighborhoods also hold a special appeal for writer John Morgan Wilson, who lives in West Hollywood and set his latest Benjamin Justice mystery there. "The plot of 'Moth and Flame' revolves around the city's historic architecture," he says. I set scenes in homes ranging from turn-of-the-century cottages to the lush apartments of the historic Garden District to the famous Schindler House, which became the setting for a murder."

While Wilson can walk his West Hollywood neighborhood, more writers are like Farmer, who uses friends' homes as locations. "I am brutal with my poaching," confesses Ayelet Waldman, author of the Mommy Track mysteries. "I know that's terrible to say, but that's what writers do. We cannibalize other people's lives."

Sometimes, the cannibalization is long-distance: John Shannon, when dreaming up a "Persian room" for a character in 2003's "City of Strangers," described the home of an Iranian acquaintance in Phoenix.

But sometimes homes we know just won't do, which sends writers like newcomer Patricia Smiley, author of the recent "False Profits," to the L.A. Times' real estate section and to open houses. "But I always hold my breath, waiting for the real estate agent to point his finger at me and shout, 'Fraud! Looky-loo! Writer!' "

Other writers, especially those who write about fictional locations — Grafton's Santa Teresa or Jan Burke's Las Piernas (a stand-in for Long Beach) — have a different set of challenges and sources. "The homes I describe in my books," says Grafton, "are sometimes those I've seen first-hand and sometimes photographs from magazines or books on Santa Barbara-Montecito architecture. I see a fictional house as indicative of a character's status and taste. In 'P Is for Peril,' I used an exterior I saw in the L.A. Times Magazine. The interior, I invented."

Grafton is, in fact, so famous for her fictional locations that an entire book, " 'G' Is for Grafton," was written that details locations of her sleuth Kinsey Millhone's home, office and other important locations in the series. (There's even a floor plan of Kinsey's ever-evolving apartment.)

Jonathan Kellerman has drawn on this kind of creativity over the course of a career that spans 22 bestsellers. "I tend to be a descriptive writer and I attempt to create an evocative, hypnotic state for the reader," he says. Indeed, Kellerman is cited by Robert S. Levinson, author of "Ask a Dead Man," as one of the best of the modern writers who creates mood with his descriptions. "Chandler did it with economy, in a line or two," Levinson notes, "while Kellerman often employs layers of detail," as in a Holmby Hills garden party in "Silent Partner."

Formal gardens fronted the mansion: gravel paths, more cypress, a maze of boxwood hedges, limestone fountains, reflecting pools, hundreds of beds of roses so bright they seemed fluorescent. Partygoers clutching long-stemmed glasses strolled the paths and admired the plantings. Admired themselves in the mirrored water of the pools.

—Jonathan Kellerman

“Silent Partner”

In addition to Kellerman's garden parties, Mosley's backyards or Grafton's perennials and patios, Chandler's description of Gen. Sternwood's greenhouse in "The Big Sleep" also resonated for some writers when asked to recall their favorite garden in a mystery.

"It's more the atmosphere of the place than the specifics of it that got to me," Parker explains. "I could really feel big-shouldered Marlowe trapped in this nauseating humidor of a room, trying to make sense of the general and his daughters."

Gardens are also used symbolically by Smiley, who marvels at our region's "year-round sun-baked gardens [which] run the gamut from verdant, park-like landscaping to simple rows of ranunculus lining a cracked cement walkway to a half-dozen sunflowers clawing their way through the hard-packed clay soil. It is this diversity that makes L.A. attractive as a locale for writers. All you have to do is turn another corner, take another freeway exit and you arrive in another L.A. and in another writer's story."