“The succession of booms has bred in the people of Los Angeles a rather easy code of commercial ethic,” McWilliams wrote. “To put it bluntly, the booms have periodically corrupted the civic virtue of the body politic.” Thus was Los Angeles, contrary to its pretty face, vulnerable to corruption: It grew too fast. Either the cops couldn’t keep up with the growing vice industry, or they were in on the action. In the twenties Los Angeles was the national leader in embezzlement, bank robbery, narcotic addiction, and bizarre murders. In the thirties Los Angeles led not just in the number of bankruptcies but also in total net losses due to bankruptcy. Into the forties the divorce and suicide rates of Los Angeles were more than double the national average.
It was a good place to be Philip Marlowe.
As the Great Depression eclipsed the city sun, and the latent criminality of a country emerging from Prohibition started to manifest, detective fiction took hold of Los Angeles. Along with the postwar introduction of European artists and intellectuals into Hollywood, many of them critical of their new setting, which felt to them like a decadent Weimar-by-the-Sea, writers of L.A. detective fiction “radically reworked the metaphorical figure of the city,” according to Mike Davis, into a “pessimistic antimyth” of American free enterprise that the German exile Theodor Adorno, adept at recognizing totalitarianism, would decry as “the absolute power of capitalism,” and the French, when they saw its likeness on screen, would call noir. But the fiction—distinctly Southern Californian—preceded the film. On the heels of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, set in a San Francisco that could be Any City, USA, came the stories and novels of Chandler; James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Double Indemnity (1936), and Mildred Pierce (1941); Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935); and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939). Their nightmare was the city. As critic David Wyatt observed, these were tales characterized by speed of a particularly Angeleno strain. It was the boom sound, the race of get-rich-quick, of get-’em-before-they-get-you. “[The novel of speed] tends to be short,” Wyatt wrote, “and to be marked by striking economies of style. It leaves little room for the direct expression of emotion, preferring fascinating surfaces to mere depth.… And it is a kind of novel that seems to arise from, and to be especially suited to, the place called Los Angeles,” where haste is always a question of life or death, and contemplation, or any consideration of the past, is intolerable.
These authors, each compromised by his tenure writing for Hollywood, its own microcosm of the capitalist antimyth, used hardboiled fiction as an emotional exhaust valve. It was desperately needed. Since Hollywood had only started talking in 1927, this first wave of screenwriters had been early and unprepared to discover what their scions would almost take for granted—that their kind, in the words of Lester Cole, were “the niggers of the studio system.” “Like every writer, or almost every writer who goes to Hollywood,” Chandler wrote, “I was convinced in the beginning that there must be some discoverable method of working in pictures which would not be completely stultifying to whatever creative talent one might happen to possess. But like others before me I discovered that this was a dream.” Be they dreamers or detectives, the original heroes and antiheroes of L.A. crime were palpably screenwriters in disguise, losers of varying degrees of honor as far from their big score or big bust as were screenwriters, divested of their creative ownership, from their dream, their writing. For, as Chandler wrote near the end of his Hollywood career, “I am a writer and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me.… It doesn’t have to be great writing, it doesn’t even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.” (The Screen Writers Guild was formed in 1933, in tandem with the hard-boiled takeover.) Chandler’s portrait of the archetypal screenwriter—a figure of “brief enthusiasms [that] are destroyed before they can flower,” who “wears his second best suit, artistically speaking, and doesn’t take things too much to heart,” who has a touch of cynicism “but only a touch,” who is “scrupulously honest about his work, but should not expect scrupulous honesty in return,” who, when he’s ready to quit, says “goodbye with a smile, because for all he knows he may want to go back”—could easily describe his alter ego, Philip Marlowe. Why don’t they quit if they’re so miserable? Just like a screenwriter, “Marlowe knows everything,” Chandler wrote in The High Window, “except how to make a decent living.” Yes.
A Southern Californian. A screenwriter. Towne’s patrimony was crime.
* * *
Memories. The lost sensations McWilliams described agreed with the orange blossom still in his nose; the chill he remembered when October chiseled the sun; the whoosh of muddy tires in the February dump of rain; the prickled scent of Santa Ana pepper trees and hay; the ocean air racing Santa Monica Boulevard as far east as Westwood—erased, all of them, by smog and time. “Along with Chandler,” Towne said, “[McWilliams] made me feel that he’d not only walked down the same streets and into the same arroyo—he smelled the eucalyptus, heard the humming of high tension wires, saw the same bleeding Madras landscapes—and so a sense of deja vu was underlined by a sense of jamais vu: No writers had ever spoken as strongly to me about my home.”
The chapter “Water! Water! Water!” particularly seized Towne’s attention. It told the nefarious history of water in Southern California. While the Los Angeles basin is home to nearly half the residents of California, it contains—according to McWilliams’s statistics—only .06% of the state’s natural water flow. There is not a single Southern California river, natural lake, or creek with a steady year-round supply of water, he writes. In fact, the entire region is no more than a semi-arid desert masquerading as a paradise. Without the water imported from Owens Valley, the Colorado River and other sources, life as it exists in Southern California would be unsustainable.
In 1905 and again in 1910, as the city’s population increased and water worries escalated, a group of Los Angeles’s most prominent and wealthiest residents acquired a hundred thousand acres of the San Fernando Valley and approached the Water Board of the City of Los Angeles with a proposition: The city should build a 238-mile aqueduct from the Owens River to Los Angeles, “and,” McWilliams wrote, “thereby hangs a tale.”
“The Owens Valley Tragedy,” he continued, was a scheme kept secret from both the citizens of Los Angeles and the members of the city council. The first maneuvers took place two years before the first land purchase, in 1903, when J. B. Lippincott, chief engineer of the U.S. Reclamation Service in California, notified the residents of the Owens Valley of an extensive reclamation project, persuading many residents, mostly farmers and low-wage laborers, to forgo their priority claims on water they desperately needed. But it was a trick. Once a sufficient amount of their land had been purchased, Lippincott announced that the “reclamation project” was off and promptly resigned. In short order, the City of Los Angeles, seeming to come to the rescue, submitted to the citizens a bond issue of twenty-five million dollars to build the Owens Valley aqueduct—and to force the passage of the bond, to create scarcity, they secretly dumped thousands of inches of water into the sewer, manufacturing the effects of drought. The citizens of Los Angeles, naturally, approved the bond issue to build the aqueduct. They needed the water.