Noir Valley

Denise Hamilton's Los Angeles Crime Ring

By Peter Gilstrap
Published: Mar 31, 2008

Given the law of averages, a place blessed with overwhelming amounts of sunshine, blue sky and bounteous natural beauty must have a flipside, a dark, ripe world of crime, lust, secrets and backs that need stabbing. That place is Los Angeles, a town where laws are ritually ignored, but not the aforementioned one.

The City of Angels is and always has been a tantalizing melting pot of things gone bad, a burg where the worlds of show business, governmental corruption, land development, water rights and plain old cops and robbers intrigue provide a perfect yin/yang setting for writers in search of nefarious material. From Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Chester Himes and Nathaniel West to the current crop of crime chroniclers like Michael Connelly and James Ellroy, all have feasted upon the meaty noir underbelly of a thriving metropolis where hangovers and health food live side by side.

Denise Hamilton has her feet in both worlds. The native Angeleno worked as a reporter for The Los Angeles Times for ten years, covering all manner of stories, from appalling homicides to wild bears bathing in swimming pools of the rich. Hamilton stepped away from journalism some seven years ago to write crime novels; she’s currently authored five best-selling books featuring Eve Diamond, a murder-solving reporter for the L.A. Times. Hamilton has her first non-Diamond work due out in July, and most recently has compiled and edited Los Angeles Noir, a compelling compendium of contemporary crime fiction. The book offers tales by 17 scribes including Michael Connelly, Janet Finch and Hamilton herself, but the stories aren’t confined to traditional noir locales; dirty deeds take place throughout the L.A. geography, from blue blood San Marino to blue collar Mar Vista to overlooked Koreatown.

The writer’s non-fiction career was born out of her newspaper experience and the demands of motherhood. “When I was between assignments I would chip away at this thing I was working on,” she says. “I think that journalism really teaches you good work skills, in terms of sitting down and writing whether you feel like it or not, and we had two very young kids at the time, so it was sort of like my escape.”

Initially, the escape was little more than that. “I actually didn’t know of it was a novel or a novella or a short story, it was just a something I wanted to tell about a young woman journalist, and this story she runs across in the San Gabriel Valley that was inspired by something that had happened to me.”

While many would-be authors hone their craft holed up in the solitary confinement of bedrooms and coffee shops, Hamilton found a group experience that proved invaluable.

“I was living in Silverlake at the time and was lucky enough to find out about this fiction writing group, the Silverlake Fiction Workshop,” she explains. “It was eight or nine ladies, and we would meet every other Sunday night at someone’s house, read what we were working on out loud, and go around the room and critique it.”

Though punches were not pulled in the evaluation department, Hamilton—who had never even written a short story at this point—found the feedback crucial. “They were very critical, but they were also very curious to know what happened next. That really gave me the kind of peer reinforcement that I needed to just keep writing. And to find out myself what happened, because I hadn’t plotted it out.”