Sifting Through L.A.’s Shadows

It’s no secret. Even longtime Angelenos find the city a mystery, especially in the way the official story covers one, maybe two versions of an event, while everything else persists in the shadows. Writers Paula L. Woods and Karen Grigsby Bates know all about L.A.’s nooks and crannies, its stories on the fringes. As residents, they know Los Angeles is far more duplicitous than it allows the rest of the world to see. And as writers, they’ve tried to sweep a beam of light across long-marginalized city segments, giving readers a sense of the gears that make L.A. a working whole.

Woods, who works variously as a book editor and critic, is the author of two mystery novels dealing with recent L.A. history, “Inner City Blues” (W.W. Norton, 1999), winner of the Macavity Award for best first mystery novel, and “Stormy Weather” (W.W. Norton, 2001). Bates, a journalist and columnist who has worked for The Times, Salon and National Public Radio, is a West Coast correspondent for People magazine. She, too, has begun exploring the world of mysteries with her first foray, “Plain Brown Wrapper” (Avon, 2001).

Their respective sleuths, Charlotte Justice and Alex Powell, are African American professionals, Charlotte an LAPD detective and Alex a columnist for the fictitious Los Angeles Standard.

In a recent chat, Woods and Bates discussed issues of race and class, of projection versus reality and just how, in a place as vast and complex as Los Angeles, people wind through their lives--the stuff of day-to-day mystery.

--Lynell George

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Woods: Alex Powell, your protagonist, is with the Los Angeles Standard, and mine works for the Los Angeles Police Department. So here are people who are both insiders as opposed to the amateur sleuth. Was there a reason that you picked a reporter?

Bates: I wanted my readers to understand some of the struggles that a lot of black reporters have in predominantly white newsrooms. There’s this eternal push-pull. There is the reality that you come from a community that works a certain kind of way, that holds a certain set of values that may be completely foreign to those who are assigning you, but it doesn’t stop [the editors] from forming erroneous opinions about what your community is. So you’re in this odd position of having to correct [their opinions] in a way they can live with, and still be respectful to the place that you’re covering .... I wanted to explore that tension, that dichotomy.

Woods: When I thought about the kind of contemporary Los Angeles history--’90s into the new century--that I wanted to write about, I thought about who would be at ground zero. For me, it was a cop. I was really interested in addressing a question similar to what you’ve described: What happens when a person who comes to a career with a certain set of values, [thinking] those values are espoused by your employer, and you find out mid-career ... that they are not who they pretend to be? I could see that in corporate America, and I knew many other people who were going through the same thing. [So] when the uprising occurred [in 1992], and I was watching officers of color policing their own, it gave me the strange notion that I am both in it and of it.

Bates: That’s exactly the same for reporters of color. And I think it’s very true of the people who look at the folks who are doing this job. The people in the black community who are looking at black members of the LAPD are like, “OK, brother, did you pull me over because the quota thing is happening again, or did you really think I was going 10 miles over the speed limit?”

Woods: Or “Are you a sellout because you’re working for the man?” I had a gentleman at a book signing in Northern California ask me, did I feel that I was an apologist for the LAPD, and by virtue of that all urban police departments, because I chose to make my protagonist a cop? Absolutely not!

Bates: I did interviews at one point where somebody said to me, “Well, I’m going to tell you this, and I know you’re going to run back to your white [newspaper] people and put their spin on it because that’s the way it is when you work for them.” Why could I not report on you fairly and report accurately what you said? Part of the tension in my job comes from my insistence on getting your stuff right, because I know what you’re talking about.

Woods: We’re talking about ethical standards of the jobs. And really, if you take your job as seriously as Alex Powell and Charlotte Justice do, then your high standard of ethics means doing your job right.

Bates: But they pay a price for that because they’re both called difficult by the people to whom they report.

Woods: So, it’s not without costs, but I think it’s worth it. It’s great to be able to explore those kinds of issues in the books.

Bates: When our communities or our society are beset by crime, whether it’s terrorism, murder or rape--all the things that go into mysteries and thrillers--my immediate reaction is [to think about] one of the primary responsibilities I think I have as a mystery writer, to never leave behind an exact blueprint.

Woods: You’re talking about the taking of life ... and I don’t like to approach that lightly. You really are responsible for talking about the solutions, not the crimes.... But what I also find interesting is that, thinking about this black female homicide detective investigating high-profile crimes, I thought I would have people not of color say, “That book isn’t for me.” Because, unfortunately, I’ve had those experiences. And so, it’s real interesting with “Stormy Weather”; people would walk up and say, “You know, the issues that she’s dealing with are the same things that I’m dealing with in my job at IBM.”

Bates: Again, it’s one of the things that as writers of color we struggle with. The fact that you are of color, or your character may be, does not mean that you’re writing such a narrow band of experience that is inaccessible to others.

Woods: And that’s one of the reasons why I think both of us have a kinship in writing about the black upper-middle class and the middle class, because that’s an environment that’s not black victim or black perpetrator.

Bates: Which makes it black mythology for a lot of people. I will tell you that I have gotten feedback from some people who tell me just sort of flat out, “Well, we think Alex lives a little too large.”

Woods: You mean that she’s above her station?

Bates: She’s above her station, that her job is too good. She eats out too often.

Woods: For a black person, you mean. Was it a black person who said this?

Bates: Yes. It has not been a lot, but it has been a few black people who have very pointedly said, “She has too much.” Well, she gets up and goes to work every day. Why should she not? She’s single. What’s she spending it on?

Woods: Again, it goes back to the issue of representation. If we only appear in the urban section of the newspaper, or in the crime blotter on the news, then ... the fact that there might be a black reporter reporting that story, it doesn’t penetrate that that person is a highly paid professional, and they, because of what they do, move in certain circles and know certain things and do certain things.

Bates: Urban doesn’t mean that you can’t be urbane. There is no one urban life. I see all kinds, up and down Crenshaw. There’s people walking their children to school who are agitating like crazy to make L.A. live up to its advertised potential. There’s upscale African American urban life almost completely ignored by the mainstream.

Woods: Charlotte Justice goes through the same thing. She comes from a family that’s upper-middle class .... She says, “I feel like a cloth coat in a room full of mink” in her own family. [Class] is something that comes out and we can play with in interesting ways in our books. I like being able to do it within the mystery genre, which for me is like writing a sonnet. You know, you have certain rules, you have certain things that you have to do, but your subject matter, what you choose to write about, is entirely up to you.

Bates: Did you always read mysteries?

Woods: I never read that Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys stuff. I looked at the covers and couldn’t relate. But I read Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, Robert Ludlum. And as time went on, I had read Chester Himes, but hadn’t known any other black people to read until Walter Mosley came along. What’s fun for me now is to tell the story, keep the plot going, and at the same time, dip into color consciousness among African Americans or class issues or, in “Stormy Weather,” the whole issue of perceptions and representations of African Americans in film. The joy is to be able to work it into a story people can follow, but along the line, they learn a little something.

Bates: Yeah, and I think that’s better than hitting them over the head with a two-by-four.

Woods: But had I wanted to write a nonfiction book about the riots, the uprising in ‘92, well, [the reaction would have been] “So, who are you?”

Bates: Sometimes people digest it better if it’s done in fiction. You fictionalize the institutions that you’re writing about, but the issues are still just as real as if you were doing it for the metropolitan daily.

Woods: That’s right.

Bates: Because those issues of race and of class and of marginalization and victimization don’t change just because you’re writing a 35-inch story for the newspaper or for a novel. That’s part of what attracted me to mysteries. I don’t remember loving mysteries per se as a kid. But I do remember having great affection for books that were not built as classic mysteries like “Rebecca” and “Jane Eyre,” which conveyed to me not just what Mr. Rochester did with his first wife, but other things about how people lived and thought.

Woods: Ann Perty’s “The Street,” that’s not a crime story per se, but it is such a realistic look at a young woman, raising a child alone in the ‘40s. I see her as a direct descendant of Jane Eyre.

Bates: Well, there used to be this delineation between mystery and novel because of the whole pulp fiction genre, and it seems to me that in the past 20 years, the whole notion of mystery has gotten much more mainstream and much more respectable, if you will, than it used to be. So that now, there are a lot of people who sort of made it OK for people to come out of the closet and say, “Yes, I am a mystery reader and I like it.” It doesn’t hurt when the president of the United States is seen with your book under his arm when he goes off to the Vineyard on vacation.

Woods: I remember going to a signing that Toni Morrison did for “Paradise,” and someone asked her what she liked to read. And her comment was, “I love mysteries! I read them like people eat candy.” And I thought, isn’t that amazing?