The Darker Side of Town

L.A. native Denise Hamilton was a reporter for the L.A. Times, based in the San Gabriel Valley, before she turned to writing mysteries and thrillers. Her intimate knowledge of the L.A. region's cultures and their deep secrets bring depth and local color to novels including The Jasmine Trade and her latest, Damage Control.

Hamilton will be signing books at South Pasadena's Book 'Em Mysteries at 2 p.m. Sunday Sept. 25 and on Tuesday Sept. 27 at 7 p.m. at Once Upon a Time in Montrose.

Eating L.A. and Variety editor Pat Saperstein chatted with Hamilton on how the themes of celebrity, crime and L.A. culture intersect in her books.

What kind of stories that you covered at the L.A. Times inspired you to write fiction?

When I was working for the L.A. Times in the San Gabriel Valley, I focused on human interest stories that illuminated a facet of a culture. I tried to find a story—often it involved a crime or a trial—that could serve as a prism to examine and reflect that culture.

My first novel, The Jasmine Trade, about immigrant Chinese kids who live alone in big mansions while their parents live in Hong Kong or Taipei or Mainland China overseeing family businesses, grew out of a story I covered for the LA Times. It was considered so surreal and bizarre when I turned it in that one of the editors downtown thought I might have made it up.

Real life out there is noir and surreal and bizarre and exciting enough. Often I felt like a gumshoe, going from place to place, chasing down people and getting them to tell me their stories. News journalism can be much like PI work. We track people down and persuade them to talk to us.

Sometimes we even find new witnesses or exonerate someone in jail. It's pretty exciting. Now I do that all day in fiction. Several of my books have been ripped from the headlines of stories I wrote: Sugar Skull and Last Lullaby too.

How did you get the idea in Damage Control of centering the story on a crisis P.R. firm? Did the political scandals in the news play a part?

Very much so! The Elliot Spitzer New York call girl scandal was going on and the John Edwards presidential hopeful campaign was melting down due to his love child with blond videographer Rielle Hunter while I was starting Damage Control. Then when I was writing, we had Tiger Woods and his multiple mistresses. It was incredible!

It occurred to me that a powerful politician or celebrity would have a lot to lose if he was engaged in a secret affair that was about to be dicovered. A tawdry adulterous affair that would destroy his marriage, ruin his career, dash his chances of higher office and make him a laughingstock. I figured that such a politician might resort to murder to keep his secret buried. So that was the set-up for Damage Control.
And I could not believe it this summer when we had two political sex scandals one after the other: First Arnold Schwartenegger's love child, then Weinergate. I guess this is a topic that stays eternally fresh!

What kind of mysteries do you think could be hiding in the stately Craftsmans of South Pasadena?

Last Lullaby has several important scenes that take place in a big Craftsman house in South Pasadena. I could easily see many secrets hiding behind the bucolic, green, quaint, small-town-near-the-big-city community of South Pasadena. Anywhere there are people engaging in the Seven Deadly Sins—and that is pretty much everywhere—you will find good topics for a crime novel.

How much do you identify with your female sleuth protagonists? Eve Diamond is a reporter living in Silver Lake, Maggie Silver is a driven young woman who owns a Cypress Park bungalow with a shaky mortgage. Are there parallels?

Eve Diamond my reporter sleuth was very much my wilder alter ego. She did things I would never do: engage in morally shaky behavior to get stories and take greater risks than I ever did. She also saved more innocent people, caught more bad guys and went on more dates than I did in real life. While I was writing the bulk of those novels, my husband and I were at home with very young children.

Maggie Silver, however, works in PR. She's not me at all! She's divorced, her mother lives with her, she's a bit older than Eve (33). What they have in common is that they are both ambitious, flawed characters who are trying to do the right thing.

Interestingly though, Eve lives in Silver Lake as it is beginning to gentrify, but with Maggie Silver in Damage Control, which takes place in 2009, I couldn't really have her in Silver Lake any more because she probably couldn't afford it. So like many people in their 20s and 30s, she's been forced farther east and north to the hills of Cypress Park to find an affordable home in Los Angeles. She probably couldn't afford South Pasadena either. Plus Maggie loves the rustic hills and her view of downtown, so I had to give her that.

Several of your books take place in Hollywood and on the Eastside, but "Damage Control" has a great feeling for beach communities. What's different about the characters you created on that side of town?

I've long wanted to write a novel with elements of "surf noir." I've long had a love/hate relationship with the sugar white sands and beach culture of my hometown. Yes it's gorgeous, with the bronzed bodies and surfers and endless summer and sandstone cliffs, but there's also something atavistic about the tides, about the cult of the body, about the drug and alcohol fueled parties that I attended in my youth.

The Beachboys were the epitome of Southern California sand-and-sea lifestyle, but their lyrics and chord progressions can be dark, and look at what happened to Brian Wilson. There's a dark side to hedonistic beach culture, and I wanted to explore that in this novel.