"Because Murder is More Fun Away From Home"
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| Photos by Peter Rozovsky, your formerly humble blog keeper. |
© Peter Rozovsky 2014Labels: California, Southern California, what I did on my vacation
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 6:54 PM
This blog is a proud winner of the 2009 Spinetingler Award for special services to the industry and its blogkeeper a proud former guest on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth. In civilian life I'm a copy editor in Philadelphia. When not reading crime fiction, I like to read history. When doing neither, I like to travel. When doing none of the above, I like listening to music or playing it, the latter rarely and badly. Click here to find an independent bookstore near you.
11 Comments:
The Gaslamp Quarter photo tells me you were in San Diego, the city where I would prefer to live again (i.e., I lived there for about 6 years) if only I could afford to do so.
As for San Diego and crime novels, I can think of none off the top of my head, but I'm sure there are plenty -- the settings for crimes are plentiful. If I were writing one, I would begin with a body in one of the canyons in Balboa Park; perhaps a sequel could put a body in the Globe Theater; then another one could put one hanging from the Coronado Bridge. And the list goes on and on.
R.T., in re Balboa Park, I remarked on my visit that I would gladly spend the rest of my life there, camping out in a sleeping bag under a tree in one of those canyons. It is one my favorite places in the world.
I can think of no crime novels in San Diego off the top of my head, either. It likely got lost in the literary shuffle between San Diego and the Mexican border, and I'm not sure the city was of much account before the second World War. Also, I read or heard a passing reference recently to the unlikelihood that someone fleeing from Mexico would hole up so close to the border. Hence, exit San Diego.
R.T.: Here’s notice of a San Diego crime novel, courtesy of a friend who prefers anonymity. The title, Kitty With a Whip, is evocative, and the author(s) is one of the bigger names in paperback original crime writing.
Very interesting . . . and it gives us a new version of an old phrase: kitten whipped.
Of course, as I should have remembered earlier, we have crime fiction writers who live/lived in San Diego: Ross Macdonald is one. Didn't Chandler and Hammett also live for a time in the area? I will have to check on those two.
I'm still pondering a novel about being kitten whipped.
Oops! I may be wrong about Macdonald. Ignore my errors. Let's write it up to post-op medications.
Chandler lived for a while in La Jolla, where, I think, one of his neighbors was Dr. Seuss. I don't know about Hammett or MacDonald.
I apologize. Bing and Wikipedia tell me I was wrong about Hammett and Macdonald. But Macdonald did live in Santa Barbara, another great California town worth visiting but too expensive for being a resident.
That's probably the case with much of Southern California.
I like the idea of Dr. Seuss and Chandler as neighbors. If only they had collaborated.
Well, the Grinch was a thief, and God only knows what the Cat in the Hat might have been capable of doing in violation of the law.
And then you have the possibility of Chandler writing children's books. Yikes!
The recent Noircon in Philadelphia included an exhibit of Dr. Seuss noir paintings by an art student from Philadelphia--Thing 1 and Thing 2 as street toughs, and so on.
The Cat in the Hat as a criminal impresario leading a gang of young street urchins? I could imagine that.
Make that Kitten With a Whip, not Kitty.
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