"Authors, Artists & Friends" Series

Spend an evening immersed in the dark side of LA. Judith Freeman and Denise Hamilton discuss the birthplace of noir as seen through their new books, Freeman's The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, and Hamilton's Los Angeles Noir. Free at the Glendale Public Library, Wednesday March 19 at 7:00 pm.

Freeman and Hamilton have added their names to the long list of LA-based writers who understand both the hope and the dark horror inspired by the City of Angels.

In Judith Freeman's compelling, wholly original book, The Long Embrace, she examines vestiges of the Los Angeles that was the inspiration for Chandler's imagination. She also uncovers the life of Cissy Pascal, the older, twice-divorced woman Chandler married in 1924, who would play an essential role in how he came to understand his female characters and Marlowe's relation to them.

Los Angeles Noir, edited by Glendale author Denise Hamilton, is a collection comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within LA.

Houses of Los Angeles

Leslie C. Brand and his home El Miradero (now Brand Library) is included in Sam Watters’ two-volume publication Houses of Los Angeles, 1885-1935. These volumes profile 75 of the most original residences by leading architects and landscape designers in and around Los Angeles. Illustrated with over 800 archival images these books are part of Acanthus Press’ series Urban Domestic Architecture, examining great American residential buildings of early 20th century. El Miradero is featured in volume one, 1885-1919, and Leslie C. Brand is in the company of other city founders including Henry E. Huntington, Arthur Letts, and William Andrews Clark Jr. Volume two, 1920-1935, includes movie stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Harold Lloyd and Frances Marion along with other Hollywood celebrities.

The Los Angeles Times covered the release of these books with an article on Oct. 4, 2007. "Houses of Los Angeles documents many of the great heartbreak homes—magnificent architecture and gardens built to blend with extraordinary natural settings, all destroyed by developers, city governments and an assortment of tycoons." — Los Angeles Times. Not all of the homes included in the volumes have been destroyed, as Brand Library is a testament to a surviving treasure!

The book’s author Sam Watters did much of his research for El Miradero by using archival materials at the Brand Library and also the Special Collections Room at Glendale Central Library. Watters was educated at Yale University, the University of Marseilles, and the Royal Herbarium at Kew. He currently teaches at the architecture school of the University of Southern California.

Watters will present a lecture on Houses of Los Angeles, Saturday, December 1, 2007 at 1:00pm in the Brand Library Recital Hall. This event is free and open to the public!

Masters of the genre: Michael Connelly

There is a well-known genre of fiction (and film) called the "police procedural". Procedurals can be distinguished from standard murder mysteries by their virtual ignoring of any sort of "whodunit" writing or plotting. We don't care who did what to whom in procedurals, and in many cases, we may already know who committed the crimes being investigated. What the writer focuses on instead are the details and manner of solving the crime in question--the procedures used by the police (or other investigators) to find and capture (or kill, in more lurid tales) the criminal--and the characterization of the protagonist and his/her allies.

Michael Connelly has proven to be a prolific and uniformly entertaining author of police procedurals. His main character is a tough, rules-breaking cop with the unlikely name of Hieronymous Bosch. Bosch, who goes by Harry, rarely refuses to make waves inside the department when in hot pursuit of the truth, so we are consistently placed in the position of rooting for a man who is constantly under the gun to produce results. This tension plays out in what we see of Bosch's personal life, as he is almost never allowed to have a girlfriend beyond a few chance encounters that flame out over the course of a book or two due to his obsessive need to run roughshod over anything/anyone that stands in his way to solve The Case.

Connelly, who started writing in the early 1990s, seemingly tried to retire Bosch in the mid-1990s after 4 increasingly successful novels, creating a new crime-solving protagonist in newspaper reporter Terry McCaleb. The McCaleb character only lasted for a handful of books, however, although ironically the only major film to be made so far from Connelly's work--1998's Blood Work--was one of these. Connelly has written 18 novels and 1 autobiographical non-fiction book in 15 years and shows few signs of letting up, to the delight of his growing number of fans, yours truly included.

A select few of his works, starting from the beginning:

Night Swimming by Robin Schwartz

Overweight Charlotte Clapp is told she only has one more year to live. Stunned by the tragic news, she robs $2 million from the bank where she works and escapes from New Hampshire to Los Angeles. While in hiding, Charlotte manages to buy a posh apartment in the Hills, unexpectedly lose weight and make a few good friends.

This first novel by Robin Schwartz is a fun and worthwhile read. It's not perfect, and you may not believe every scenario that's described in the story, but you will have an enjoyable time reading it.