Urbicide

If Frank Defino were not a fictional character, Los Angeles County arson investigators would have arrested him by now. Antisocial, alienated, a loner, Defino waited until the Santa Ana winds began blowing. He then set at least fourteen fires from Malibu Canyon south to the Cleveland National Forest, including one that swept down a dry, brushy hillside toward an unprotected highway full of traffic. Ultimately, he couldn’t resist contacting a TV news personality, a move that brought about his comeuppance.

Familiar though he may sound, Defino doesn’t exist. A novelist named Edward Stewart created him for a widely forgotten 1980 potboiler called, eerily now, “The Great Los Angeles Fire.” It was not an especially good novel. Reviewer Sam Kaplan summed it up in these pages, observing, “This disaster book is just that.” But with “The Program” and “Beavis and Butthead” threatening to ignite a nationwide debate over, of all things, whether life imitates art or vice-versa, it seems fair to ask what Mr. Stewart would say if the culprit in our recent fires turns out to be a fan.

“I would say I was very regretful if it inspired him,” Stewart allows, on the phone from his home in New York City. “I was aware of the danger. It was alleged that people took inspiration from murder books and terror books, so...the specific way that (Defino) set the fires was a highly impractical way. It wasn’t going to work.”

But what about the very idea of an arsonist trying to kill L.A., apart from whatever tactics he might use? “I don’t think books encourage violence,” Stewart says. “I think violence encourages violence.”

An engaging man with few illusions about his early work, Stewart readily admits, “Nobody said this was John Le Carre.” The idea for “The Great Los Angeles Fire” came from a cold war think tank’s L.A. invasion scenario. “The scenario had two purported uses,” Stewart remembers. “One was, ‘what if an enemy occupied L.A. and you had to get it back? What if you firestormed it?”’ The other was, “What if foreign agencts decided to firebomb L.A.? How might they do it?” I thought, these guys are being paid a million dollars to come up with horror film scenarios. That was what made me think this could be an interesting story, if it was pushed just a little bit further.”

The incendiary effects of news coverage worry Stewart more than pulp fiction. “Of course, each fire gets massive publicity, and it’s a temptation to anybody who has a firebug impulse. In ancient Greece there was a guy called Herostratus and he burned down the temple of Athena so he would be famous. The Greeks forbade anyone to mention this guy’s name. That was how they took care of the danger. No other temples were burned down.”

“The Great Los Angeles Fire” shows the influence of movies, specifically the disaster movies of the 1970s. But while film producers have optioned some of Stewart’s other books, “The Great Los Angeles Fire” was never discussed. “No reputable company based in L.A. could have made that movie. But the idea was used in a Canadian movie called ‘City on Fire,’ and it’s very close to my book.”

Sure enough, “Leonard Maltin’s Movie and Video Guide” lists 1979’s “City on Fire” as a “dull, fill-in-the-blanks disaster film.” Henry Fonda is in it, and Ava Gardner, and Leslie Nielsen the year before he helped “Airplane!” kill off the whole genre. “Good cast wasted,” it continues, and then comes the kicker, the one it will take Los Angeles a long time to laugh at: “For pyromaniacs only.”