Bad Moon Rising

The loner who descends into the city’s underbelly cuts a familiar figure in novels about Los Angeles: The brooder both detached from and ensnarled by a city on the verge of eruption. Depending on the character’s state of mind and the amount of guilt and grief he is bearing, he either witnesses evil but escapes its entrapment or he explodes in violence.

Think of Tod Hackett, “a very complicated young man” in Nathanael West’s “The Day of the Locust,” published in 1939, the same remarkable year that Raymond Chandler’s wise but rootless crime solver, Philip Marlowe, first appeared. Years later, in “Play It as It Lays,” Joan Didion chillingly presented a female version of the loner on the edge (“Some people ask what makes Iago evil. I never ask.”), a character burdened by migraines and the Santa Anas and the turbulent 1960s. More recently, Joyce Carol Oates’ “Blonde,” one of the finest novels ever written about Los Angeles, chronicles the long, short life of Marilyn Monroe.

Now three novels by Los Angeles writers have just been published, and if they share anything, it is a protagonist suffering from isolation and despondency. The fullest of these, at least in terms of plot twists and evocation of the city, is John Kaye’s second novel, “The Dead Circus.”

The book is about a mildly crooked ex-cop named Gene Burk, whose fiancee recently died in a plane crash. Burk nurses his grief by returning to a nearly 20-year-old obsession: the mysterious death of rock’n’roller Bobby Fuller in 1966. As music fans and connoisseurs of L.A. crime know, the Bobby Fuller Four had one Top 10 hit (“I Fought the Law”) and Fuller was about to make it big when he was found dead in his car with gasoline in his lungs at the age of 23. Both in reality and in Kaye’s novel, the police declared Fuller’s death a suicide, an unsatisfying conclusion that for years has led to rumors of murder by the mob.

Burk’s investigation into Fuller’s death takes an unexpected turn when he discovers, among his fiancee’s things, eight mysterious letters from a woman named Alice McMillan, who, we eventually find out, is one of Charles Manson’s girls, on the run from the law since the notorious summer of 1969. Alice knew Burk’s fiancee when they were both teenagers, and now Burk has two mysteries on his hands: Who killed Fuller and did his fiancee have a connection to Manson?

That’s enough plot for any crime novel. What ensues are two story lines that crisscross through the underside of Hollywood and the music scene, shifting between California in the doped-up late 1960s and the hung-over mid-1980s. The novel begins a little loosely with too many threads (more on that later), but halfway through, Kaye has established that one element that every mystery--no, make that every novel--requires: The reader is compelled to turn the page to find out what happens next. The book’s weakest moments are in its opening pages, because Kaye’s narrative style at first lurches sideways rather than seizing the momentum skillfully established in a prior scene. There are flashbacks within flashbacks and important clues revealed through minor characters who have no real reason to open up to Burk.

Burk is a music junkie, and Kaye often relies on musical arcana to set his scenes and tone. In describing a bar, for example, he tells us, “On the juke box, Howlin’ Wolf was singing ‘Moanin’ at Midnight,’ a top ten rhythm and blues hit from 1951.” Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. Similarly, Kaye routinely introduces characters by surface description: “She was in her late thirties, decent-looking but certainly not pretty, dressed in a Levi’s jacket and corduroy pants with a light blue crew-neck sweater underneath the jacket.” Again, sometimes this succinctly sums up a character (as when Kaye describes Burk as “sitting on the edge of his couch, making phone calls and chain-smoking Marlboros”) and sometimes it falls short because the details, although ably written, don’t really add up to much.

Throughout the novel, celebrities appear, boldface names taking the place of imaginative detail: Frank and Nancy Sinatra, Steve Martin and Jack Nicholson are among those who make cameos in the way they might in a gossip column. Even so, Burk is a strong, likable character: the lonely guy peering into the city’s pool of scum and seeing his own blurry reflection. Once the novel’s momentum takes hold, his pursuit becomes ours.

The grief that propels Hubert Selby Jr.’s “Waiting Period” is of a more volatile nature. The protagonist is a man named Jack, about whom we know little except that he bears a grudge against society. He is looking for “a quiet, simple, satisfying way to get back at this world for suffocating me, for crushing me, for trying to kill my spirit.” What exactly this refers to is never made clear, although the first target of Jack’s sociopathology is Harry Barnard, a clerk in the benefits division of the Veterans Administration. Apparently, Jack and many other veterans have suffered from Barnard’s bureaucratic indifference. Anyone who has ever waited in line at a government office can understand red-tape rage.

The waiting period of Selby’s title refers to the timeout required when purchasing a gun. But waiting is more symbolic than actual, for Jack decides the best way to do away with his nemesis is not by shooting him but by putting E. coli in his Coca-Cola. The novel’s most fully realized scene has Jack carrying out his crime at a federal building, thinking to himself in an unapostrophed rant: “I guess all governments, at all levels, want you to know youre on government property by making it, at the very least, unattractive. Its incredible, as soon as youre out of the government area the streets are lined and shady, birds sing, everything looks, sounds and feels peaceful, then one more step and youre approaching the pits of hell.”

Selby, the author of “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” has written a monologue as much as a novel. Jack’s disembodied voice drives the narrative, sinking into a bottomless pathology. At its best, “Waiting Period” is a frightening portrait of senseless fury and tells the terrible truth about a man who is setting out to kill for no reason at all.

Readers familiar with Dennis Cooper’s work will recognize his time-bomb Los Angeles and the lonely boys crouching to light its fuse. In his new novel, “My Loose Thread,” a teenager named Larry thinks he has killed his best friend, Rand, during a fight. In truth, Rand suffered an aneurysm, but Larry doesn’t believe anyone who tries to wrest away his guilt.

In fact, Larry and Rand were fighting over Larry’s 13-year-old brother, Jim. Larry is in love with Jim, and the two have been sleeping together for some time. Larry, who is gripped by a child’s all-consuming fear, is more afraid of losing his brother than anything else. It is this fear that unleashes a series of killings, carried out with a teenage numbness to the world: Even as triggers are pulled, we know that the characters don’t know what they are doing. In this anonymous Los Angeles high school, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine killers, are heroes, and the wan students stoop with pre-guilt, resigned to their vicious fates.

Despite his cold, hard eye, Cooper is an empathetic writer, one who seems to loathe the world he is depicting as much as he loves the people in it. He never condemns; he is only concerned with dissecting adolescent desperation. He is intimate with the feeling of nothingness that overtakes teenagers slouching toward violence and random cruelty.

Recently, the writer J.T. LeRoy has explored similar emotional territory, perhaps with an even more authentic adolescent voice than Cooper’s, but what makes Cooper’s work fierce and unforgettable is the bleakness of his vision. Cooper has seen a Southern California, an America, of hopelessness and he has written about it without pity. His novels are not dispatches from the fiery future but calls for help from the world today.

At the end of “My Loose Thread,” Larry is sitting outside his school when a student shooting erupts inside. He ponders the sound of death and searches for meaning and eventually gives up: “I keep thinking [the gunman] stopped, or was tackled and stopped by someone. Then I’ll hear another shot. They’ve gotten weirdly far apart. So I guess he finally cares about who’s getting killed. Maybe they’re even people he knows. Eventually the shooting just ends. Maybe when he started to care who was dead he realized he could die. Or he finally figured out what he wanted to do, and either did it or knew that he couldn’t. Maybe the last shot was aimed at himself. It sounded like all the others.”

The Los Angeles novel has come a long way from “The Day of the Locust,” or has it? The city’s violent undertow continues to pull and tug at a certain type of imagining, at a certain type of writer. The books that result tell us a little more about our city and about our own darker impulses.