SUGAR SKULL ESSAY
By Denise
Hamilton
As a cub reporter for the Los Angeles Times, I often worked weekends. And on
summer days when the mercury climbed into the triple digits, one thing was sure:
There would be a lot of murders.
People shot and stabbed and strangled each other in sleazy bars and hillside
mansions, strip malls, abandoned houses and parking lots. Often, there were so
many dead bodies clogging the news wires that the Times could barely mention
them all.
Unless they were rich or famous or had died in a particularly gruesome fashion -
such as the toddlers killed in a spray of drive-by bullets meant for someone
else - the deceased didn’t merit their own stories. There were just too many
murders and not enough room, and so most of them got folded as smoothly as egg
whites into cake into what we called the “murder round-up” that ran every
Monday morning.
Usually, that meant calling the police and coroner and getting only the most
basic details - age, occupation, residence, cause of death. Still, when you had
40 murders in one weekend, that was one long litany of death.
I often wondered what exactly catapulted victims across the threshold of
celebrity or gruesomeness into meriting their own story and how harried city
editors made the decision to relegate someone’s life to several sentences.
Where was the justice in that? And what did it say about my profession,
assigning value to a person’s life based on their “newsworthiness.”
So I’d sit there Sunday afternoon with my scraps of paper, pulling together
the “murder roundup” and trying to make sense of the city’s senseless
mayhem. And I began to imagine how some of those murders might be connected.
Because here’s the weird thing about LA. It’s so huge and geographically
diverse, and yet people know each other across all sorts of improbable lines,
especially when secrets are involved. Reporters hear many tantalizing stories
they can’t print, and it’s only when Hugh Grant gets caught off Sunset
Boulevard with a black prostitute or O.J. Simpson goes on trial for murdering
his wife that it becomes a story. And then all sorts of seedy and surprising
revelations trickle out, and we realize how swiftly the line can blur between
those on the street and those in hillside homes perched high above it.
“Sugar Skull” takes the reader into three very disparate worlds that end up
being connected in that improbable Angeleno way across frontiers of race, class,
money and geography. I examine this interlinked world through the prism of the
“sugar skull,” a gaily decorated confection that many Mexican families lay
on the graves of departed relatives during the “Day of the Dead” celebration
that follows Halloween.
Sugar skulls also provided a handy leitmotif for delving into the city’s vast
and varied Mexican-American community. I’m by no means an expert in this
field, but after all, Southern California was once part of Mexico - as Silvio
tells Eve in “Sugar Skull,” and you can’t walk around Los Angeles without
the strong sense that the two remain strongly linked. In addition, my husband is
Mexican-American, and while his experience is radically different from
Silvio’s, it nonetheless gives me a window into this world, as does my
understanding of Spanish. I realize that all too often, people are still judged
by what they look like, instead of who they are. That’s an issue that cuts
both ways, and it fascinates me.
In addition, I was haunted by a story I once wrote about a teen runaway from a
loving family who came to a bad end while hanging out with her street kid
friends. As I dug deeper into the story, I learned of a phenomenon in which
upper-middle class and wealthy girls sought out homeless “squatter”
boyfriends. It seemed to be the epitome of cool in a world that called for ever
more drastic extremes to shock one’s long-suffering parents. The teen
characters in my story are quite different from the unfortunate girl I reported
on, but the tragedy inspired me to try to get inside teen heads and explore
through fiction the eternal lure of life’s darker side.
Lastly, my novels are a paean to Los Angeles itself, the city of illusions. In a
place where the klieg lights of Hollywood cast their allure and people remake
themselves every day, no one is who they seem. Like revelers at a Day of the
Dead pageant, we’re all wearing masks, costumed by our professions,
ethnicities and socio-economic status.
I have a sneaking suspicion that if Raymond Chandler were writing today, he
wouldn’t focus on Hollywood and the city’s westside and beach communities.
His plots would unfold deep in the sprawling suburbs and ethnic enclaves of
L.A., places that didn’t even exist in his time, places where the third
generation Americans live next door to just-arrived immigrants in newly built
tracts and all sorts of terrifying and fascinating things can happen.
I read a lot of Chandler and Ross MacDonald when I first started writing
mysteries. Not because I wanted to write like them - they were white,
middle-aged men who lived in a mainly white, middle-class homogeneous city more
than 50 years ago. But there was something in their tone that made me swoon, how
they made love to the city, held it up for inspection like a discerning lover,
noting all its outer loveliness, its quirky, non-traditional personality as well
as its flaws.
My L.A. is not their L.A. -- it’s a bustling, vibrant, chaotic, clashing
millennial world capital where violence and lust and greed bubble over daily in
the papers and TV news shows, where the first world lives cheek by jowl with the
third, where a motley collection of underground tribes eke out a living well
below the radar of average, middle class folks. My jumping off point is where
all those words collide.
That’s the landscape Eve probes with her pen. Being a journalist gives Eve -
and me - an unlimited passport into the city. With her dogtags and notebook, Eve
gains entrée into the most rarified strata of society - that of power brokers
and blue blood - all the way down to homeless Latino transvestites who bathe in
the L.A. River. To Eve, as to me, we are all linked. And it’s only when
someone is killed unnaturally that we begin to trace back the threads to see
where it all connects.
Denise Hamilton, a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, writes the Eve
Diamond crime novels. “Sugar Skull,” the sequel to her Edgar, Macavity,
Anthony and Willa Cather award-nominated debut “The Jasmine Trade,” will be
published March 24 by Scribner. For more information, go to www.denisehamilton.com.
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