Authors Clue In to Orange County as a Prime Setting for Whodunits

Meet Matt Murdock, Orange County private eye:

He’s a former career soldier, a small-arms expert who was wounded in Vietnam. To help make ends meet he does carpentry work on the side. He lives above a surf shop at the foot of the Newport Beach Pier and drives a ’69 Plymouth, a V-8 with dual carbs and a supercharger that boosts the horsepower to just over 500. He’s a blue-collar kind of guy. He drinks Budweiser.

Murdock’s not your man? Meet another Orange County private investigator. His name is Fiddler. No first name. Just Fiddler.

He lives in a vintage beach cottage in Crystal Cove, just north of Laguna Beach. He’s a man of independent means, thanks to Uncle Jake, a Laguna Beach dope smuggler killed in the ‘60s while smuggling drugs out of Mexico. Jake left Fiddler a steamer trunk full of greasy 20-, 50- and 100-dollar bills that Fiddler’s sexy investment banker ex-wife, Fiora, ran up into a respectable fortune. Fiddler is tall and rugged, a knock-about type who drives a hot ’66 Shelby Cobra. As a teen-ager, he was a promising violinist.

Murdock and Fiddler ply their sometimes-lethal trade along the same coastline, but it’s not clients the two rival gumshoes are vying for: it’s book buyers.

Murdock is the creation of Irvine author Robert Ray, whose debut Matt Murdock mystery novel, “Bloody Murdock” (published by St. Martin’s Press in August), manages to include everything from illegal cockfights in Laguna’s Bluebird Canyon to murder on Coast Highway.

Extortion Plot

Fiddler surfaced last year in “Just Another Day in Paradise,” the first in a series of Fiddler mysteries by A. E. Maxwell (actually the husband-wife writing team of Ann and Evan Maxwell of Laguna Niguel). In their latest, “The Frog and the Scorpion” (Doubleday), Fiddler becomes entangled in a Muslim extortion plot against a Jewish Iranian immigrant.

Murdock and Fiddler, however, are not the only heroes-for-hire nosing around Orange County’s dark underbelly. They are just the latest additions to what is a small but growing trend in mystery publishing: using Orange County as the fictional scene of the crime.

Indeed, after years of being a literary backwater, a mere pit stop for fictional Los Angeles detectives, Orange County is coming into its own as a colorful setting in one of the most popular of all literary genres.

Two of the most prominent Orange County mysteries are Kem Nunn’s critically acclaimed “Tapping the Source,” a gritty tale published in 1984 about a desert boy who comes to Huntington Beach, where his sister has mysteriously vanished, and T. Jefferson Parker’s more traditional “Laguna Heat,” a stylishly written 1985 novel about a Laguna Beach homicide detective delving into the brutal murder of one of Laguna’s old-guard citizens.

The number of Orange County mysteries published in the past five years is large enough to fill an entire bookshelf at the Anaheim Public Library. The ranks of Orange County sleuths now include everything from a Santa Ana female private eye named Delilah West to a roguish Costa Mesa character named Harry Gould.

And more are on the way. Parker has almost completed writing his second novel, “Little Saigon,” a mystery set in Orange County’s Vietnamese community, which is due out early next year. The second Matt Murdock novel will be out in March and the third Fiddler novel will hit bookstores next summer.

No Mystery

Why Orange County is providing the locale for a growing number of published novels--and untold numbers of manuscripts-in-progress--is no mystery, according to those close to the fictional crime scene.

One reason, they say, is that because of the county’s burgeoning population there simply are more writers living here today than there were 20 years ago, and writers tend to write about what they know.

The other reason is, to cop a cliche, elementary: Orange County has come of age over the past two decades, having been transformed from a quiet, rural-suburban haven into what Time magazine recently described as a “high-energy, high-rolling, high-living megalopolis.”

“I think what’s happened is that Orange County has discovered a personality,” theorizes Kevin Moore, central library manager for the Anaheim city library system and one of the leading West Coast scholars on the contemporary mystery. K

More Interesting Place

“It used to just be apple pie, motherhood, orange groves and Disneyland,” Moore said. “That’s all you associated with it, but I think the construction of Irvine as an independent city, the buildup of Newport Center as a financial center--looking at the cities as distinct areas with distinct personalities--has made it a much more interesting place to use as a setting.”

“You know,” Moore added, “there’s only so many private eyes you can have pounding the streets of Los Angeles before it gets a little tiring.”

Raymond Obstfeld, an Irvine novelist who teaches novel writing at Orange Coast College, agrees.

“So much has been set in Los Angeles in the past 40 years that it’s kind of been used to death,” said Obstfeld. “Now Orange County is fresh, and I think it’s somewhat capturing more of the imagination of people.”

As a writer, Obstfeld said, “the thing I find most interesting (about Orange County) is that you get this broad spectrum of people on the different ends of the American dream: You can’t be anywhere else and find more Porsches and Mercedeses and also clunkers parking right next to each other. I think it makes it kind of exciting to see people moving up and down that spectrum.

“And you’ve also got a lot of immigrants as you would in the ‘30s and ‘40s in New York City. So you’ve got this fresh view of what the American dream means to everybody who’s just come here and you’re looking at it through their eyes. In other ways, you’ve got an incredibly and horribly affluent and sassy group of kids. It makes for a good conflict and a good setting in terms of fiction.”

Hero Only in a Pinch

Obstfeld speaks from experience. He first used Orange County as a locale in the early ‘80s for his paperback comedy-mystery series about Harry Gould, a character who is “nobody’s hero except in a pinch.” In the series, Gould even shared the same Costa Mesa address as the author.

“For me, I felt it (Orange County) was an untapped locale. I didn’t worry about whether people would like it or not. I just assumed they would,” said Obstfeld, who recently completed the screenplay of a police procedural story that--like Parker’s latest novel--is set in Little Saigon.

For T. Jefferson Parker, Laguna Beach was a natural setting for his first novel, “Laguna Heat,” which sold about 22,000 copies in hard cover and recently received a 450,000 paperback printing. (A TV movie is also in the works.)

“For me, it was just pretty much a matter of writing about what I know: I’m here and I know the county,” said Parker, who lives in Laguna. “I think it feels like fresh territory to me. Los Angeles is, to me at least, another world, and to write about that would have been a whole other project.”

Parker said one of the reasons he enjoys writing about Orange County is that “there’s a kind of wide cast of characters here. Twenty years ago that wasn’t true. But the demographic and sociological and economic spectrum is just really wide right now. I think that’s interesting and really fertile territory” for a writer.

Debunking a Myth

When writing about Orange County, Parker noted, he feels like he’s debunking the persistent myth, among many outsiders, that Orange County’s population is relatively homogeneous.

“You drive inland in Orange County, and it’s absolutely fascinating how many different groups of people there are doing different things: Vietnamese, Korean, Cambodian, Laotian, Mexican . . . it’s exciting.”

The common misconception that Orange County is homogeneous rankles Ann and Evan Maxwell.

“You go to South Coast Plaza on a Sunday afternoon--and I did this--and in one 20-minute period I heard six different languages,” said Evan Maxwell. “This is homogeneous Orange County? That’s just not true.”

Maxwell observed that the blending of cultures sometimes turns violent; that, he said, “makes wonderful mystery material.”

Fictional detectives, including those created by Raymond Chandler, have been making occasional sorties into Orange County since the heyday of the hard-boiled detective in the ‘30s and ‘40s.

But, according to Moore, one of the first mystery novels to prominently feature Orange County settings was “Johnny Get Your Gun,” a 1969 novel by John Ball, who made use of both Disneyland and Anaheim Stadium.

About the same time, Disneyland served as the setting for a rendezvous for William F. Nolan’s hard-boiled private eye Bart Challis in “Death Is for Losers.”

But, Moore said, “it’s only been in the last five to six years that we’ve seen anything based in Orange County. And one of the things that started (the trend) here is that a children’s book writer, T. Ernesto Bethancourt, started a series of mysteries for young adults about a girl named Doris Fein.”

Town Needed a Coastline

The series, which began in 1980, features the spunky young Doris, an 18-year-old UC Irvine student and undercover agent who lives in the fictional town of Santa Amelia (actually Santa Ana). Explains Bethancourt, a former Huntington Beach resident now living in Alta Loma: “I manufactured Santa Amelia because Santa Ana doesn’t have a coastline. I sort of spilled Santa Ana over into Newport.”

After the eighth book in the award-winning Doris Fein series was published two years ago, Bethancourt turned to other writing projects. “I had this horrible vision of forever writing Nancy Drews,” he said. However, he added, the series is so popular among young people that “I may be doing another one.”

Other Orange County mysteries to surface in recent years include Newport Beach writer Elizabeth C. Ward’s “Coast Highway 1” about a university professor who sets out to find out more about one of his female students who was murdered on his Laguna Beach patio, and Mission Viejo writer Maxine O’Callaghan’s paperback mystery series about Santa Ana private detective Delilah West, who debuted in 1981.

Although O’Callaghan wrote three of the Delilah West novels, only two were released before the publisher, Worldwide, stopped publishing mysteries. O’Callaghan said, however, that she’s hoping “to resell, if not the whole series, at least the one that wasn’t published.”

While local mystery writers have been focusing on Orange County, outside mystery writers have not overlooked the area.

“You’ll find a lot of your writers who have an L.A.-based detective will do one or more books set in Orange County,” said Moore. “Arthur Lyons, who lives in Palm Springs, has a wonderful series about Jacob Asch, who’s a Los Angeles private eye, and one of the books is set in Orange County. It would have been very nice to have him hang his hat down here permanently, but no luck.”

Still a Foot Race

Despite the sound and fury being made by the growing band of Orange County gumshoes, it’s still a foot race to see which author will do for Orange County what Raymond Chandler did for Los Angeles.

“Nobody’s staked it out yet,” said Moore. “T. Jefferson Parker has a real shot at it. He needs to get another book out quick though, after that first one. He really does need to lay claim to that territory. That’s one of the things that makes it so appealing: Nobody has a stamp on Orange County.”

Moore doesn’t believe that Orange County will ever replace Los Angeles as the locale for mysteries.

“It will never supplant it because of Raymond Chandler,” Moore said. “You know, ‘Down these mean streets a man must go.’ That’s Chandler and he’s talking about Los Angeles, and there’s no way that you can take that away.

“But what I think is going to happen is that Orange County will have it’s own personality for the books in the same way that San Francisco has,” Moore said, reeling off the possibilities.

“In Fullerton and Anaheim you have a sense of the old history, going back over a hundred years, and the old families. And whenever you have old families you get old secrets, which makes it a very appropriate setting.”

“Then,” Moore said, warming to the subject, “you have your new money--your Newport Beach, your Irvine. And a lot of it may not have been made legally. Maybe it was a little shady, and they’re setting up down there. You have tremendous numbers of new immigrants with money. And whenever you have an influx of people from different backgrounds coming in, then you’ve got your chances for espionage and international intrigue.

“And then you’ve got your arts colony--you’ve got Laguna Beach and a whole different kind of subculture, so that gives you interesting things to write about. And at UC Irvine, of course, you’ve got your halls of academe, which is wonderful for crime. And then Newport Center. I mean that’s prime territory. You can have computer crimes, banking crimes, real escape scams. . . .”

Moore paused, then smiled: “Just think of all the fictional crime that can be created.”