L.A. Confidential

Los Angeles has a bad press, at least as mirrored in Gardner McKay’s “Toyer.” It “has no history, no monuments, no statues, no comment.” The wind never blows in L.A., there are no weathered houses, the primary color is pearl gray and the inhabitants are all actors, including the psychopaths of whom the eponymous hero is a prime specimen. I do not recognize the Los Angeles McKay describes (but then, he lives on Oahu), except for the lunatics. You have only to drive the thoroughfares crowded with looming behemoths to concede that they are rife with nuts.

Toyer lobotomizes his victims (the medical term for the operation he favors is a spinal chordotomy); he deprives them of personality and reasoning power and leaves them aware of what happens but as effectual as bags of oatmeal. After nine such exploits and one copycat murder, the monster becomes a star news-hero. Author and actor of his personal psychodrama, he taunts his trackers, entices the press, seduces the public “touched by his openness.” We get the psychotics we deserve, and in the end, we get them, no thanks to the police. His psychiatric nemesis lobotomizes him before “he pleads insanity and enjoys his stay in Camarillo until he feels well enough to go apartment hunting and get on with his life.” And perhaps with the lives of others, once again.

Anyone who likes to see a recherche maniac run to ground by a hard-boiled (but vulnerable) neurologist should make a beeline for McKay’s novel. Those who prefer a first-class detective story might turn to Michael Connelly’s “Angels Flight,” which begins with a double murder on one of the cars of the short inclined tramway that carries people up and down Bunker Hill in downtown L.A. One of the victims of the unknown shooter is a black celebrity lawyer who forged his fame and fortune by suing LAPD’s finest for racism and brutality. Half the police force are suspects in his murder; half the city fears the other half is ready to explode, and the investigation is plagued by lies, leaks, misdeeds and misdirections enough to satisfy the most exacting of readers.

Though it is less expertly written and more cluttered, aficionados will also enjoy Paula L. Woods’ “Inner City Blues.” Connelly’s detective is a man. Woods’, like McKay’s, is a feisty woman: seasoned robbery-homicide detective Charlotte Justice. Justice is black or, as she puts it with a fine sense of pigmentocratic nuance, “high yellow.” And the tale Woods spins around her is as much about race and racism in L.A. as it is about crime.

Both “Angels Flight” and “Inner City Blues” unfold in the shadow of ghetto riots complicated, as Woods nicely puts it, “by the alliance of the poor and the befuddled”: looter-shooters killing each other and their neighbors, gang members whacking their rivals while they can get away with it, the police caught in the middle and the authorities trying to drown politically explosive crimes in politically correct euphemisms. Violent, fast-paced, more twisted than a pretzel, “Inner City Blues” offers a good read laced with knowledgeable sociology.

Another kind of racism, as vivid but less porous, underlies Pavel Kohout’s “The Widow Killer.” Kohout is a well-known Czech political dissident, novelist and playwright, and some of his gripping fiction has already been translated into English. He also belongs to the shrinking band of those who lived through the Nazi occupation of his land, so the local color that he etches reflects experiences as beastly as the tale he tells. “The Widow Killer” is the gruesome story of yet another deranged butcher who tortures and mutilates his victims and of the hunt for him conducted by a Czech police detective and a high-ranking Gestapo official.

The time is 1944, when from East and West, Allied and Russian troops prepare to overrun the Nazis’ last redoubts. The sleuthing is conducted mostly through a darkling Prague, and it is complicated by tensions between Germans at the end of their tether and collaborationist Czech police preparing to save themselves and their city from destruction. The body count is high, the sadistic killer as slippery as an eel, the atmosphere as full of menace as in an old German film of the 1920s. The beautiful capital radiates a degree of gloom at the best of times. War-worn and weary, smoldering in menace and in terror, it lends itself perfectly to the tense tale that Kohout has to tell.

Occasionally (and deliberately) incoherent, “Toyer” may appeal to those who are ready to supply the continuity its bitsy cutting denies. The other three books are sturdy representatives of their genre. Evil pedophiles, policemen on the take, lawyers who do well by doing good, news hounds slavering after scoops, law-abiding citizens of all shades turned into raging looters, detectives desperately trying to snag a cigarette or shun it, demented loons exalting in bloody obsessions, (mostly) innocent victims helpless in their grip and, finally, mercifully, indomitable cops, professional, tenacious and honest when it counts. Fallible, harried, imperfect but fundamentally decent, each stands for fictional nemesis, each triumphs--or at least survives to serve again.

In the dramatic conflict of detective novels, villains are antiheroes, a hooded, inapprehensible diabolus ex machina. Where policemen plod, they swoop; their cunning and their color make them, if not attractive, at least arresting. “The Widow Killer” looms over Prague more immediately than Hitler; “Toyer” terrorizes Los Angeles and almost gets his way in the end. Satisfyingly, though, all four books polish off their villains instead of sending them to trial, then to corrective confinement (unless a clever lawyer gets them off) or else to be interned, treated, restored and then released to haunt and hurt again. Kohout’s murderer cuts out his victims’ hearts and keeps them fresh on ice. Our way of preserving evil in institutional freezers seems just as rum but harder to avoid. Except when writing fiction.