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May 18, 2011 08:46 pm PDT
Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/tJ4fV9tOJ_M/intro-to-la-noire-fi.html
Intro to L.A. Noire fiction anthology: a Boing Boing exclusive
Mulholland Books sent me a copy of L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories, featuring the work of Joyce Carol Oates, Francine Prose, Lawrence Block, Joe Lansdale, Duane Swierczynski, Megan Abbott and Andrew Vachss. It's available as an ebook for $0.99 on June 6. It's a tie-in of the video game of the same name that came out yesterday. I enjoyed Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai's introduction to the anthology, and Mulholland Books gave me permission to run it on Boing Boing. I hope you enjoy it, too. (And LA-based happy mutants: we should plan a Meetup at Musso & Frank soon!) On the infrequent occasions that I make it out to L.A., to work on the cop show I have a hand in, I always make time to have dinner at Musso & Frank. They've been serving the same menu since 1919, the same steaks and chops, the same sauerbraten and lobster thermidor. The seats at the counter in front of the grill have the same buffed leather upholstery, and if you lean in close you can see rings on the bar left behind from Raymond Chandler's shot glass. They say he wrote parts of The Big Sleep here, maybe all of it. They say Jim Thompson, author of The Killer Inside Me, often drank himself into a stupor here and had to be helped home. Charles Bukowski, too, and F. Scott Fitzgerald--writers of all stripes used to pickle themselves here. But because of Chandler and Thompson, and because of the look and feel of the place (it could be a set from Chinatown; it was, in fact, a set in Ocean's Eleven), it's got a special spot in the hearts of writers and readers of crime fiction. And not just crime fiction--the particular sort of crime fiction we call noir. You might wonder why a crime writer living in New York would have to fly across the continent to Los Angeles to have a proper noir experience. It's the same reason that the folks at Team Bondi and Rockstar Games decided to recreate L.A. inside a computer to give gamers the ultimate noir (or noire, if you prefer) environment to explore. If you want a proper Western experience, you go to Tombstone, Arizona; for romance, you go to Venice or Rome. For noir, you go to L.A. Ironic, I suppose, given how strongly California is associated with brightness and sunshine; even more ironic given how synonymous Hollywood is with happy endings (if you say that a movie has a "Hollywood ending," you mean pretty much the opposite of what goes on in a film noir). But facts are facts, and for generations of readers and writers and filmmakers, L.A. is noir central....
Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/tJ4fV9tOJ_M/intro-to-la-noire-fi.html
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