In Denise Hamilton's Los Angeles, there are no Hollywood power moms, no uncensored celebrities, no one from any kind of top 100 list. Hamilton's Los Angeles is one of those places that's hidden in plain sight, a roiling stew of recent immigrants, skeletons dancing on the Day of the Dead, resourceful heroin traffickers, abandoned children and, ultimately, moments of grace.
Hamilton's Los Angeles is virtually a recurring character in her three mystery novels, including the newest, "Last Lullaby" (Scribner), which penetrates the shadowy world of international trafficking in children. Indeed, the city is second only to Hamilton's protagonist and alter ego, Eve Diamond, a tough-but-vulnerable Los Angeles Times reporter endowed with super-sized nosiness topped with a generous dollop of moxie and heart.
L.A. may be a world capital, but Hamilton takes her readers to a place most of them have never seen.
In many of the best mystery novels, where it was "dun" is as important as whodunit. And already critics and readers are comparing her to mystery writers whose depiction of place, time and tone remains as indelible as any in contemporary fiction. In its review of "Last Lullaby," for example, The Times said, "comparisons with Raymond Chandler aren't too far out of line."
Hamilton, 44, is thrilled to be keeping such rarefied company.
"I read Chandler and also Ross Macdonald, not because I wanted to write like middle-aged white guys in 1950s L.A., because that's not my L.A.," she says. "My L.A. is a very multicultural place where fourth-generation Angelenos butt up against people who've just come off a boat from somewhere. This is very grandiose of me, I realize, but I wanted to update Chandler's tone and his noir feel for L.A. to a millennial, multicultural L.A. from a female perspective."
Hamilton, a married mother of two boys, is sitting on the second-floor deck of her Spanish-style Glendale home. On the street below, palm trees sway lazily in the afternoon breeze blowing down from a nearby arroyo. Her sunny suburban neighborhood is as pristine as Diamond's world is gritty, but she knows both well.
Like Diamond, Hamilton was a reporter for The Times, primarily covering the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys from 1985 to 1995. As an education reporter, she covered a lot of crime involving kids. And if her novels' depictions of youth at exotic risk are persuasive, it's because she's seen the real thing close up.
