Wednesday, August 21, 2019

MYSTERY AUTHOR ANNE LOUISE BANNON USES OLD LOS ANGELES AS INSPIRATION FOR A NEW SERIES

Los Angeles, circa 1875--Spring Street at Court Street
Aside from her tendency to think of weird ways to kill people, Anne Louise Bannon is appallingly normal. Her only real quirk is wearing earrings that don’t match. She is the author of the 1920s set Freddie and Kathy series, the Operation Quickline series of cozy spy novels, and the Old Los Angeles series about a winemaker in 1870. Learn more about Anne and her books at her website. 

Old Los Angeles as the Setting

I call it the Cabot Cove Syndrome, after that old TV show Murder She Wrote. It was a tiny town in Maine that had, like, a murder a week. You’d never want to live there. Nor would you want to live in most of the small towns, fictional and otherwise, featured in cozy mysteries because the murder rate is so incredibly high.

Most cozy writers simply ignore this and most of us play along because that is, after all, the convention of the genre. In my Freddie and Kathy series, it’s ridiculous that they come up against so much murder and mayhem, even in the series’ 1920s New York setting. But we all know that in real life the murder rate in most small towns is something like one every few years, and even in the “Big Bad Cities”, very few people apart from the police come nose-to-nose with a real murder.

However, as I was doing the research for my Old Los Angeles series, I quickly realized that I had a time and place where one really could run into enough murder to make a series plausible. L.A. in 1870, was an incredibly violent place. It probably wasn’t as bad as one wag put it, with a murder a day. Historian Scott Zesch put the rate at 13 murders a year around this era, based on newspaper and court reports, and it’s likely that those numbers are a little low.

Even if we go with 13 murders a year, it doesn’t sound like much until you think about it. Los Angeles now has roughly four million people and gets around 300 murders a year, which is considered a relatively high rate. That’s between six and seven murders a year for each 100,000 people living in L.A. In 1870, there were roughly 5,000 people living there. At 13 murders a year, that’s a murder for roughly every 350 people. That’s a very violent place.

What made it so violent was that it was a frontier town. The population was largely transient, with all manner of men coming and going as they looked for work or to make their fortunes. Most of the murders were bar brawls, knife fights, and shootings.

One of the reasons I picked 1870 to start my series was that L.A. was on the cusp of civilizing. They had just set up the police force in 1869 (in fact, this year is the 150th anniversary of the LAPD). The city would double in population during that decade, with more women and families moving in. This makes for a really nice cross-section of social strata. Add in the mix of Whites, Chinese, Blacks and Mexicans, and you’ve got one heck of a set-up for plenty of mayhem.

It gets even better when real history cooperates. The incident that Death of the City Marshal is based on really happened. Okay, I massaged the facts a little when Marshal Warren does not actually die of his wounds. But he really was shot by his own deputy in a dispute over the bounty on a prostitute.

I’m not knocking the small-town cozy. I love books like that. I’m more than willing to suspend my disbelief for a good puzzle and some quirky characters, like the lovely Ms. Pollack, whose blog this is.

But, dang, a real-life time and place that already has an abundance of nefarious goings-on? How could I resist? Cabot Cove is a wonderful setting. But so is Old Los Angeles.

Death of the City Marshal
Old Los Angeles Series, Book 2

When the city marshal gets into a gunfight with his deputy, winemaker and physician Maddie Wilcox is on hand to care for the marshal's wounds. Then the marshal is smothered in his bed the next morning, sending Maddie on the hunt for a killer prepared to do the worst to keep that most basic of human desires: a home.

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