"It's raining in Los Angeles ... "

... a friend tells me, a fine opening for a hard-boiled story. Said friend tells me that rain is rare enough in El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Río de Porciúncula that Angelenos and Angelenas make a big deal of it. But I'm no Raymond Chandler; I'll take the sun when I visit there in a few weeks.

In preparation for the trip, I've been riffling crime novels and stories set in and around L.A., seeing how authors manufacture their own versions of the city. Thomas Pynchon does it with period vocabulary in the opening pages of Inherent Vice, his 2009 novel set in the Los Angeles of 1969 and 1970.

Pynchon has his characters say things like: "But say I just wanted to hang out and rap with this Wolfmann dude?" But what caught my eye even more than obvious gambits like that was Pynchon's use of speech patterns I associate with the slackers of recent years but that nonetheless feel right for the time of the book's setting.

Characters turn declarations into questions, or, should I say, into questions? They begin statements in the middle and trail off into irrelevance without supplying intervening detail.  They open with "So...," as if resuming, without being asked, an old story. Today, that's a precious, annoying affectation. For a book set in 1969, it's a nice objective correlative of the era's proverbial druggy self-involvement. (I don't know if people talked that way back then; I was just 10 years old and had not developed the ear for speech that I have now. But so far, it works in Pynchon's book.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

What I'm about to read on my sort-of vacation

I'm off to Boston tomorrow accompanied by Ciaran Carson, Cú Chulainn, Thomas Pynchon and, in case I get too cheerful, Dead Man Upright, part of Melville House's new editions of Derek Raymond's Factory novels.

I'll read Pynchon's Inherent Vice curious about why he chose the hard-boiled-detective form to tell a story set in the psychedelic 1960s and, according to a cover blurb, about the end of an era. (Reviewers call the novel noir, but I assume that most people who call a crime story noir really mean hard-boiled. If I'm wrong in this case, I'll say so.)

There's no such doubt about Derek Raymond. He's noir, and I've heard tell that next to Dead Man Upright, his previous bleak, funny, touching Factory novels are light entertainment.

Here's some of what I've written about Raymond:

"He was a latter-day Hammett, I thought when I read Derek Raymond's I Was Dora Suarez. He was a new Chandler, I thought when I read the opening chapters of  The Devil's Home on Leave.

"With one novel-plus of Raymond under my belt, I say he's a bit of both. His nameless detective-sergeant protagonist is as dedicated to his job as was Sam Spade or the Continental Op, and he yearns like Philip Marlowe, only there's not a trace of nostalgia about him. He's as hard and as heart-breaking as the best of the dark crime writers who followed him and who invoke his name as reverently as they do Hammett's and Chandler's."

And here's some of what you'll find about Derek Raymond on the Melville House Web site.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012