In Noire

And in Los Angeles

L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories, edited by Jonathan Santlofer

You’re an ordinary guy. The war’s just over. And you have an ordinary job. You’re a surveyor. A land surveyor of sorts. You’re a numbers guy. Not anything special to look at, not a lot of money to your name. All day you go out and measure things: measure distances with a device called a theodolite. You note the numbers down faithfully; do a few calculations and pray you’ve not made a mistake. Life’s a game of knowing the points of the compass and a little simple adding up. It makes your bosses some money.

And while you’re sitting around, or wandering empty lots where buildings may or may not go up, you’re waiting for something. Not for something to happen, because nothing happens to you. But for something to change. You might scrape a little money together at the end of a month or year. What would you spend it on?

Then once, unexpectedly, a beautiful girl gets you a drink. Gets you two: shot and chaser. And she wants to see you after her shift. This was not the thing you expected to happen to you, because nothing ever does. And when she wants to see more of you, keeping you out half the night on the regular, wouldn’t you notice something was odd? Something odd about those 2 a.m. meetings, those drives around the California coast.

Our protagonist doesn’t. He doesn’t notice. It’s quite the root of all his problems, as you’ll see.

That’s the premise of a stand-out story in the collection published to coincide with the 2011 game L.A. Noire, a game whose soundtrack I regularly listen to, but have never played. A game that is, in many ways, all atmosphere. An experience, a concept, a vibe.

There might have been nothing more obvious, then, if you were the marketing people at Team Bondi and Rockstar Games, when you were strategising and synergising your PR campaign for the game to come, to go all in on vibes. To look up those things people like about the noir genre, some of the biggest living names associated, and to put out some of the stuff that gives the genre its breath and its life. Commission some beautifully menacing jazz from one of the minds behind Sade. Commission an EP of tasteful twenty-first century remixes of 40s tunes. Put out a little fiction from your virtual city of angels. Variations on a theme.

Although this collection limps a little and is in places quite unsatisfying, the idea is a good one. Too many media properties traverse a very boring route when they lustlessly perform their multimedia marketing duties. They hire this or that hack to novelise a film or a game. (I’m available for such offers. My rates are good.) Or they commit the sin of so many estates: producing authorised sequels in a long downward slide as the property itself accelerates towards the public domain.

A novelisation of L.A. Noire would have been such a travesty because the story, on paper, does not have that kind of quality. Our protagonist, Cole Phelps, is taciturn — a decent guy wound way too tight, as one of his partners says. His story is ultimately not that important. What L.A. Noire implies and needs, then, is the idea that Los Angeles seethes with stories. With murder and vice. With hundreds of thousands of tragedies as absorbing as the ones we know about directly. That for every Marilyn Monroe, there’s a Betty Short, a Black Dahlia, as it were.

The centrepiece of this collection is the monumental Joyce Carol Oates story ‘BLACK DAHLIA & WHITE ROSE: Unofficial Investigation into the (Unsolved) Kidnapping-Torture-Rape-Murder-Dissection of Elizabeth Short, 24, Caucasian Female, Los Angeles, CA, January 1947.’ An immense, sprawling and characteristic document, this is on vaguely the same lines as some of Oates’s other historical fiction: imagining herself not only into the lives of characters based on real people, but stealing their voices — or presuming to do so.

Oates already wrote very famously about Monroe in Blonde, and in this story she gives Monroe an annoying, possibly naive, possibly faux-naive voice which made me grind my teeth. It might be accurate. It’s certainly how she was in some of her movies. Parts I personally don’t much like. More interesting is Betty Short, of course, without whom the story could not have happened. Betty Short, almost as famous in death as her former flatmate Monroe was in life, here is deeply cynical. She thinks she knows the game. She thinks she knows what men are like and what they want.

Quite to her cost, as of course the whole world knows.

I rather enjoyed ‘School for Murder’ by Francine Prose, about a man who’s trying to scrape work as an actor in Hollywood but who can’t act. Can’t kill the girl he has to kill on the film set because he’s seen terrible things in the war. So a man whose accent slides from Parisian French to Brooklyn English has to teach him: to teach him to want, really to want, to kill on screen.

I enjoyed the story I started this review with, ‘Hell of an Affair’ by Duane Swierczynski, most of all of them. And I liked ‘Postwar Boom’ by Andrew Vachss, a story about two men meeting for the first time on a big cross-country drive, terminating in Los Angeles, where they’re set to do a mysterious job. I liked ‘What’s in a Name’ by editor Jonathan Santlofer. Most of this collection was what I wanted. It was a vibe.