According to Freedman, Monkkonen documented a long history of violence, as well as a homicide rate that has consistently exceeded that of other major cities.
The scholar also found that what goes up at some point goes down, and that one of the ebbs in L.A.'s murder rate occurred, surprisingly, after World War II.
Conventional wisdom held that wars begat violence at home, that men returned from combat with a propensity to use weapons and kill. Monkkonen speculated that returning soldiers were so sickened by gunplay that they were less inclined to murder. He also suggested that their domestic orientation -- they came home and started families, launching the postwar baby boom -- actually had a calming effect, as far as murder trends were concerned.
"A lot of the value of Eric's work is this combination of insight and imagination that a great scholar brings," Freedman said.
A Kansas City native who grew up in Duluth, Minn. -- "in a big house right next to the woods" -- Monkkonen attributed his passion for murder studies to nothing in his childhood. It wasn't until he was a graduate student studying urban crime at the University of Minnesota in the late 1960s that he began to develop an interest in murder.
"I focused on murder in part because murder is something that can be pretty clearly studied over a long period of time," he told Associated Press in 2001.
After earning his bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees from the University of Minnesota between 1964 and 1973, he taught at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte for a few years. He came west to UCLA in 1975, partly on the strength of an innovative dissertation that was published that year by Harvard University Press.
That work -- "The Dangerous Class: Crime and Poverty in Columbus, Ohio" -- previewed one of the themes he would expand upon in later research, that economic neediness does not automatically cause a spike in the homicide rate.
"In some of New York City's most miserable periods," including the Depression, "murder rates were at their lowest," he wrote in "Murder in New York City."
He also found that murder was, by and large, "a problem of men," and he exhorted men to take responsibility for it. "If men take charge of anything," he wrote, "it must be of the notion that real men don't kill, that self-respect means shrugging off an insult, and that the better manliness accrues to him who does not fight. Other countries have done this, and so can the United States."
