L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

Parker’s job was in danger. The Herald-Express quoted “well-informed politicians” saying that taking potshots at Parker had become the favorite Los Angeles sport—“They’re shooting at him.” The Mirror insisted that it was “time to get to the bottom of these ugly rumblings of sadism and abuse of authority” (although it also carefully hedged its bets by not entirely dismissing “the possibility that Communist Party liners are fomenting antipolice prejudice”). Other papers noted that the average tenure for an LAPD chief was two years—and that Parker had been in office for nineteen months.

It wasn’t just Parker’s job that was in danger. So too was the department’s ability to function autonomously. The first threat to the power and autonomy of the police chief had come just before Parker was made chief, during the scandalous summer of 1949, when the county grand jury took the logical step of examining how well the Police Commission oversaw the department. Its conclusion was that the Police Commission “is virtually nothing more than a licensing agency and cannot take action against officers.” Newspapers such as Hearst’s morning Examiner also took up the cry against “an autonomous, star-chamber court for the police” and a Police Commission that “has no power whatever in the internal affairs of the department.” In time, these demands faded, in part because Parker himself seemed like such a straight arrow. But with what the press now called “Bloody Christmas,” the old concerns returned.

Of course, Chief Parker was not without allies. He continued to command support from the city’s many Legionnaires, from Los Angeles’s Catholic hierarchy, and, now that he was defending it, from the force itself. Defenders pointed to the accomplishments of his traffic bureau, which had reduced vehicular homicides by half in nine years and made Los Angeles the safest big city in the world to drive in. The chamber of commerce applauded his reorganization of the department and the cost-saving innovations of the new research and planning bureau. The Los Angeles Times was also warming to the new chief. At a (supposedly) off-the-record meeting of civic and business leaders at the California Club (called so that Chief Parker could present his perspective on the current controversy), Parker complained that the allegations of unchecked police brutality were the result of the liberal Daily News’s vendetta against him.

But the most potent defense of the LAPD did not come from the city’s business establishment or its dominant newspaper. It came from Hollywood, in the form of a fledgling new television show called Dragnet.

      DEAD BODIES, distressed dames, and dangerous games. Bombshell blondes and wisecracking private eyes. High heels, handguns, and homicide. Lonely days, rainy nights, and “streets that were dark with something more than night.” During the 1920s and ’30s, magazines such as Black Mask, Dime Detective, and Gun Molls created a new genre of writing—pulp fiction (so named after the cheap pulp paper on which the magazines were printed). Schlocky and shocking, full of stock characters and lurid tales, the pulps quickly attracted big readerships. Surprisingly, they also attracted gifted writers, among them Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain, who, in the 1930s, penned great books that in the 1940s became even greater movies—for example, The Maltese Falcon; Double Indemnity; Farewell, My Lovely; The Postman Always Rings Twice. In 1946, French film critic Nino Frank gave this style of filmmaking a name—“film noir.”

Then there was the noir radio drama Pat Novak for Hire.

Pat Novak took the classic private investigator formula to the nth degree. Set on the San Francisco waterfront, it featured a world-weary boat captain with a weakness for corny quips and a knack for getting involved in other people’s affairs. The show’s opening lines set the blase, world-weary tone: “Sure, I’m Pat Novak, for hire …” the show began, to the sound of foghorns on the waterfront. Invariably, Novak would agree to investigate a minor case—which led straight to murder. The dialogue was pure camp. Streets were “as deserted as a warm bottle of beer.” Dames who “made Cleopatra look like Apple Mary” appeared in Novak’s office at dusk, and spoke in voices “hot and sticky—like a furnace full of marshmallows.” What made it work was the tremulous, intimate voice of Pat Novak himself—a twenty-six-year-old voice actor named Jack Webb.