LEIGH BRACKETT (1915–1978) was born in Los Angeles. Although best known for her fantasy and science fiction, she also wrote mystery novels and Hollywood screenplays. Her first novel, No Good from a Corpse, published in 1944, was a hard-boiled mystery in the tradition of Raymond Chandler and led to her cowriting the scripts for The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye (both based on Chandler novels). Shortly before her death, she wrote the screenplay (with additional revisions made by Lawrence Kasdan and Geroge Lucas) for The Empire Strikes Back, which won a Hugo Award in 1981.
KATE BRAVERMAN is the author of Lithium for Medea, Palm Latitudes, and two other novels that define the sordid pseudo-tropics of Los Angeles. She is also a poet and essayist, but is best known for her short stories, described as the “gold standard” for contemporary female fiction. All the rumors are true.
JAMES M. CAIN (1892–1977) was born in Annapolis, Maryland, and served in World War I. After a stint as the managing editor at the New Yorker, he moved to Hollywood in the 1930s. His first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, a crime-fiction classic, was said by Albert Camus to have inspired him to write The Stranger, and has been adapted into several films. Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce are among his other classic novels that inspired classic films. In 1970, the Mystery Writers of America named Cain a Grand Master.
PAUL CAIN (1902–1966) is the pseudonym of George Carol Sims, who authored a series of hard-boiled detective novelettes for the pulp magazine Black Mask beginning in 1932. The son of a police detective, Cain was born in Des Moines, Iowa, and moved to Southern California in 1918. He eventually scripted nine films for major studios under the pen name Peter Ruric, including The Black Cat in 1934. His increasing problems with alcoholism killed off his pulp career by 1936, and his Hollywood career ended in 1944. Sims spent much of the late 1940s and ’50s in Europe. He attempted a Hollywood comeback in 1959, but found his reputation kept studio doors closed to him. Cain contracted cancer and died in a cheap apartment in Hollywood in the summer of 1966.
JAMES ELLROY was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L.A. Quartet novels—The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz—were international best sellers. His novel American Tabloid was a Time magazine Best Fiction Book of 1995; his memoir, My Dark Places, was a Time Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book for 1996. His novel The Cold Six Thousand was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book for 2001. Ellroy lives in Los Angeles.
WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT (1910–1995) was born in Milwaukee and began his career as a sports and mystery writer in the mid-1930s, publishing short stories in McClure Newspaper Syndicate and many pulp magazines. He wrote under his own name as well as the pseudonyms Roney Scott and Will Duke. Gault wrote two crime-fiction series, including one that featured Brock “The Rock” Callahan, an ex—L.A. Rams lineman turned South California PI, and another that featured Los Angeles—based Italian PI Joe Puma. He won an Edgar Award for his first crime-fiction novel, Don’t Cry for Me, in 1952, a Shamus Award in 1982 for The Cana Diversion (featuring Joe Puma), and a Life Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America.
DENISE HAMILTON writes the Eve Diamond series and is editor of Los Angeles Noir, an anthology of new writing that spent two months on the best-seller lists, won the Edgar Award for Best Short Story, and won the Southern California Independent Booksellers’ award for Best Mystery of the Year. Her latest novel, Los Angeles Times best seller The Last Embrace, has been compared to James Ellroy and Raymond Chandler. For more information, visit www.denisehamilton.com.
JOSEPH HANSEN (1923–2004) wrote nearly forty books under a number of pseudonyms and in a variety of genres. He is best known for his Dave Brandstetter mystery novels about a tough but decent insurance investigator who is also unapologetically gay. The first novel in the series, Fadeout, was published in 1970 a year after the Stonewall Inn riots in New York, with the final book A Country of Old Men (1991) appearing twenty-one years later and winning him a Lambda Literary Award. He won the 1992 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America and continued to write throughout his life, publishing the mystery story collection Bohannon’s Women (2002) and the Nathan Reed novel The Cutbank Path (2002) as his health deteriorated. An openly gay man, he had an unconventional but happy home life, living for over fifty years with his lesbian wife, the artist Jane Bancroft, and their transgendered child, Daniel. Hansen died from heart failure at his California home in 2004. A new Brandstetter omnibus, containing all ten mysteries, was published in 2007.
CHESTER HIMES (1909–1984) was born in Jefferson City, Missouri. After being arrested and found guilty of armed robbery in 1929, he began writing fiction in prison, and his early short stories were published in national magazines such as Esquire. Upon his release in 1936, Himes joined the Federal Writers’ Project and became friendly with the poet Langston Hughes. He spent the 1940s in Los Angeles, working as a screenwriter and publishing two novels, If He Hollers Let Him Go and Lonely Crusade. His brief career as a screenwriter for Warner Brothers ended due to racial prejudice, and he eventually moved to Paris, France, where he joined a group of black writers and artists that included James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ollie Harrington. There, he concentrated on writing a series of books about two Harlem detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, including The Real Cool Killers, All Shot Up, and Cotton Comes to Harlem. In the 1970s, he published two volumes of autobiography, The Quality of Hurt and My Life of Absurdity. He died in Moraira, Spain, from Parkinson’s disease.
NAOMI HIRAHARA, born and raised in Southern California, won an Edgar Award for her third mystery in the Mas Arai series, Snakeskin Shamisen. She writes crime fiction and also novels for younger readers; her short story “Number 19” was published in the original Los Angeles Noir. She contributes a mystery serial for an English-language weekly in Japan and regularly leads writing workshops. Her fourth Mas Arai mystery, Blood Hina, is being published in 2010. For more information, visit www.naomihirahara.com.
ROSS MACDONALD (1915–1983) is the pseudonym of the American-Canadian crime-fiction writer Kenneth Millar. He is best known for his highly acclaimed series of eighteen hard-boiled novels set in Southern California featuring private detective Lew Archer. The series includes the best sellers The Goodbye Look, The Underground Man, and Sleeping Beauty, and concluded with The Blue Hammer in 1976. In 1938, he married writer Margaret Millar. Several of his books were adapted into film, two of them starring Paul Newman as Lew Archer. In 1973, the Mystery Writers of America named him a Grand Master.
MARGARET MILLAR (1915–1994) was born in Kitchener, Ontario, and moved to the United States after marrying Kenneth Millar (better known under the pen name Ross Macdonald) in 1938. They resided for decades in the city of Santa Barbara, which was often utilized as a locale in her later novels, under the pseudonyms of San Felice or Santa Felicia. Her book Beast in View won the Best Novel of the Year Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and in 1983 the MWA named her a Grand Master.
WALTER MOSLEY is one of the most versatile and admired writers in America today. He is the author of more than twenty-nine critically acclaimed books, including the major best-selling mystery series featuring Easy Rawlins. His work has been translated into twenty-one languages and includes literary fiction, science fiction, political monographs, and a young adult novel. His short fiction has been widely published, and his nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and the Nation, among other publications. Mosley is currently working on a new mystery series set in New York City, about a private investigator named Leonid McGill. The first of the series, The Long Fall, was published in March 2009. He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy, and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives in New York City.
YXTA MAYA MURRAY is the author of six novels, including the forthcoming The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Kidnapped and The Conquest, winner of a 1999 Whiting Writers’ Award. She is a professor at Loyola Law School and lives in Los Angeles.
JERVEY TERVALON lives in Altadena, California, with his two daughters. He teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California and is currently revising the manuscript of Hope Found Chauncey, a sequel of sorts to his best-selling novel Understand This. His essay “The Slow Death of a Chocolate City,” originally written for the LA Weekly, won a Los Angeles Press Club Award in 2008.