“Selflessness” may strike the reader as a highly topical story, ripped from recent headlines in the U.S. On a certain level, it is. But the issues it analyzes have afflicted Southern California for decades now. You may remember 1992. If you’re of a literary mind, you may recall the harrowing scenes of mob violence at the climax of Nathanael West’s brilliant, disturbing The Day of the Locust.
My short story reflects the influence of a number of writers, not least among them James M. Cain. If I had to pick one writer who decisively puts to rest the tired distinctions between crime writing and literary respectability, it would be Cain. It is not hard to see why Cain influenced none other than Albert Camus. He was a genre writer who transcended genres and showed up the inadequacy of the term.
In his novels, Cain evokes Southern Californian milieus in a way that feels completely convincing, naturalistic, and unpretentious. His narrators relate events in a darkly ironic idiom that reflects the way some people really do think and talk. Yet Cain reaches a level of high art in books like Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Sinful Woman, and Mildred Pierce. It’s not just the ingenuity of his plotting, though that’s always a marvel. The success of these books lies partly in their seemingly effortless evocation of a place and time in our history. That milieu is not there exactly as it was—you can never step in the same river twice, says Heraclitus—yet you can experience something pretty close to it, and, once you do, it won’t relinquish its claims on your mind and soul.
It’s no surprise when you read about all the buzz some of these books generated when they came out. What Cain did, he did extraordinarily well.
Partly under the influence of Cain—as well as Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, Bret Easton Ellis, and the aforementioned Nathanael West—I’ve been working on a number of stories set in and around L.A. Is it logically possible for a place to mesmerize and inspire a certain ennui at the same time? That’s been my experience in parts of L.A., and certain of my stories attempt to capture my impressions. At the same time, the deserts outside L.A. are a gift to writers interested in austere and haunting settings with philosophical and metaphysical resonance. I’ve set a number of my stories in the desert and plan to write more such tales.
Any writer who broaches the subject of L.A. must acknowledge the elephant in the room. “Don’t you know it’s been written about countless times?” Of course I do, but no two writers’ impressions and sensibilities are quite the same. To my mind, it’s an inexhaustibly rich setting.
Editor’s Note: Michael Washburn’s story, set in and around L.A., appears today in Litbreak Magazine.
