Big Island LA
“Big Island L.A. is an action film on paper, filled with car chases, shoot-outs, sexuality, even attempted arson, as well as the rumble of local news and the pressure of big money trying to get bigger.”
There’s New York noir, and Nordic noir, and Glasgow noir—but the point of origin for American noir in crime fiction remains Los Angeles. In Big Island L.A., Boston Teran (a pen name) offers one of the best crime novels of the year, deceptively presented as 250 small segments, each a page or two long. With a look back to film noir, each small chunk could stand for a spin and focus of the lens, an adjustment of the light, and a long, scary, held note in the music score of the unspooling action.
The book represents the thoughts behind the “Big Island L.A.” podcast of William Worth, an eccentric and wealthy man who peels apart Los Angeles politics daily. “Inside him, somewhere, he was on the hunt for an escape and believed that out there, in that big island of a city somewhere, was a story that would free him . . . imbue him with the courage he needed to become that other, new self.”
Most of the action and emotion pour through another character: Ana Ride, a military combat veteran missing both a foot and a mother, whose quick effort around the edge of a crime cartel segues into investigating a gun-shop robbery that turns out to be dangerously political. To protect her father—she’s got reason to hate him as well as love him—Ana partners up with William Worth, who never (hardly ever?) leaves his home. She’s suddenly the legs (well, one is prosthetic) of Worth’s investigation of the robbery and of the corruption surrounding it, which in turn gives her the edge of danger and sharp direction she hungers for. “She was making her way through a landscape of people you never notice from the cradle to the grave, and who were struggling on gas prices and groceries they couldn’t afford but couldn’t do without, and any one of them she could imagine might try to score off a robbery . . . the Brinks truck known as America was in dire need of an overhaul before the wheels fell off.”
Soon she’s got a collaborating cop she can’t trust, a Hispanic neighbor whose husband’s been taken hostage, and an assemblyperson named Julia who wants and needs to make a lot of money by selling out her constituents. That’s fine with Ana, who feels most at home with darkness and threat: “It was like being back in the military—only better. Where death, like life, is complete. And you are in command.”
Ironically, Ana’s best partner remains the agoraphobic Worth, who relies on her intelligence as well as her combat skills. Worth is willing to back her with all the money and power he can pull together, in order to scrape off the scab of corruption. He tells her, “This whole city is a remake, that’s how I see it. It was a black and white classic of frantic energy that lost its way. And now a feature length disaster of punitive anxieties that are never gratified.”
Despite the sharp interludes of bitter philosophy, Big Island L.A. is an action film on paper, filled with car chases, shoot-outs, sexuality, even attempted arson, as well as the rumble of local news and the pressure of big money trying to get bigger. As a work of noir, it’s a modern update between Chandler and McIlvanney (have you read Laidlaw?), crossed into the justified feminist anger that Carol O’Connell and Julia Keller have harnessed.
Best of all, when all the action wraps up, the camera pulls back, and Ana and Worth retire from the focused lights, there’s a hint, just a small one but a delicious one, that Worth’s Big Island podcast must continue.