Murder is Parker's delicate art

By Mimi Avins

Sept. 29, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

After writing 12 novels in nearly 20 years set in the stretch of the Sun Belt south of Los Angeles, T. Jefferson Parker has earned the title of bard of Orange County. He’s familiar with all that is shabby and grandiose about the area, knows it intimately enough to see past the Jane Jacobs nightmare of sterile industrial parks, socially engineered gated communities and party-hearty beach towns.

But as a mystery writer, he recognizes a particular kind of ugliness beneath the surface of suburban sprawl.

“The promise you make when you sit down to write a story about a young woman who’s raped and decapitated is that there will be rivers of truth underneath that will sweep the reader away,” he says. “In a place like Orange County, you see the collusion between development and politics so baldly. It’s so open and plain, so transparent. San Diego is the same way and so is L.A. But you see it more clearly here.”

Outside a restaurant on the San Clemente pier on an 85-degree September day, the Santa Ana winds blow hard enough to make a line of tall, skinny lollipop palm trees shimmy against the cloudless sky. The sun is painfully bright, as bright as if a celestial rheostat had been dialed up to maximum. The cliffs of Dana Point hug the coast to the north. To the south, nothing clutters the view of open water. What bad things could possibly happen in this natural paradise?

“Love, lust, murder, betrayal, suffering and redemption all parade by as a brilliant tale-spinner once again has his way with us,” reads the Kirkus Review’s appraisal of Parker’s latest novel, “California Girl.” That’s nice, as far as it goes, but Parker says he had much more on his mind than mayhem when he planned the book.

“I set out to write the great Orange County novel,” he says. “I wanted to write about where I came from.”

It seems that under every mystery writer’s skin beats the heart of a novelist who yearns to transcend the genre. Reviewers feed that desire by bestowing left-handed compliments that inevitably insult mysteries and thrillers. Writing about Richard Price and Dennis Lehane, who spin tales of crime in New York and Boston, respectively, New York Times critic Caryn James describes them as “literary novelists who happen to write about criminal types, but whose work soars above genre fiction.”

“I think we all secretly want to transcend the genre,” Parker admits. “Chandler wrestled with that very heavily. He always wanted to be considered a literary writer. He died embittered about his position in the world of letters. I don’t mind being called a mystery writer. Some of my books are patently mysteries and others are not. If it says mystery writer on my gravestone, I could care less. It’s a term of respect, if it’s done well.”

Since “Laguna Heat” marked his high-profile debut in 1985, Parker has produced several bestsellers and has been favorably compared to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Thomas Harris and Michael Connelly. “Silent Joe,” Parker’s bittersweet thriller about an Orange County deputy’s search for his father’s killer, won an Edgar Award as best novel of 2001 and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for best mystery/thriller.

Parker is particularly admired for creating complex characters and, unlike many of his peers who write series that follow predictable formulas, he’s only brought one detective back for a second and third appearance. Nevertheless, he wanted to address bigger themes in “California Girl.”

Now 50, he was 5 when his family moved from Los Angeles to a tidy one-story house in a “Leave It to Beaver” neighborhood in Tustin, a typical inland town. Orange County wasn’t immune to the seismic social shifts most of the country experienced during his adolescence and young adult years. His novel spans from 1954 to the present, but most of the story takes place in 1968. “The things that were happening in Orange County in 1968 are a crucible of what was going on in the state and the nation,” the author says.

Parker watched the character of Tustin change as bulldozers decimated acres of orange groves. When the agriculture went, the community lost its elemental purpose. “It became just a place to sleep and raise children,” he says. “Seeing the simple agrarian citrus groves falling to the tract homes and the condominiums when I was growing up was particularly meaningful and difficult. There was a lot of activity going on in little Orange County that’s been kind of overlooked. Over the years, we’ve seen that those were seminal times.”

Although Orange County has had difficulty living down a reputation as the dull, conventional backwater where right-wing politics flourished and Richard Nixon was born, the counterculture had a presence there as well. Timothy Leary and Charles Manson appear in the novel, their imaginary activities based on true accounts.

Parker has expert command of surf-speak and can aptly describe “the blandly handsome, heavily mortgaged, marathon-running, aerospace department manager, driving to work in his Taurus,” but he says his important memories are about “the politics and the drugs, promiscuity and free love, the increase of divorce among the moms and dads of my friends.

“In the late ‘60s, Southern California became a pacesetter of homicidal weirdness for this country. The Tate-LaBianca killings were the go-to murders for a long time. Manson was unprecedented. The FBI tried to understand those kinds of killers, so in ‘California Girl,’ the cop is told by the FBI guy, ‘The mobility and success of this country is going to breed a different kind of killer. In the decades to come, there’ll be traveling people who do horrible things, and we’ll have a hard time catching them.’ That’s exactly what’s happened.”

Janelle Vonn, the beauty whose mutilated body is found in a SunBlesst orange packinghouse in Tustin and whose murder haunts two time- and secret-scarred families was, to Parker, “a symbol of her time. I wanted her to be what was beautiful and wonderful and sort of self-destructively innocent about that period. A lot of people were led astray in the ‘60s. That’s Janelle.”

Characters from real life

There was a girl who inspired Janelle. She wasn’t decapitated, but she was on the cover of Playboy, and she was the girl every hormone-crazed Tustin High male fell in love with, including Jeff Parker. “There’s a lot of autobiography in the book. I got to use the name of the great Tustin quarterback from my freshman year in high school.” He modeled Jesse Black, the singer-songwriter in the story, on Jackson Browne, who spent time in O.C.

Parker drives a visitor around Tustin, pointing out the sights -- the three-bedroom house his father bought new for $22,000 in 1959, the stores and offices built on the lot where the citrus packinghouse once stood. “When I was a kid, there was a dividing line between the newer houses and the old, beat-up houses. There was a house rented by a family who were like the Vonns in the book. There were lots of children and they were poor. They’d come from somewhere far away, and they wore ugly clothes that the kids at school would make fun of.”

Many of Parker’s memories are vivid. He recalls a fall day in 1974. He’s driving to class at UC Irvine in his battered blue 1964 Dodge Dart that he judged too embarrassing to take women out in. All alone, he’s singing Browne’s “Fountain of Sorrow.” He pulls over, overwhelmed by the feeling of how much he wants to convey emotions by writing fiction.

Before he got the chance, the only day job he could get was writing movie reviews for a now-defunct weekly newspaper in Newport Beach, then he was hired by a Costa Mesa daily. “I did everything but sports and business, because they had reporters for that,” he says. “I covered cops, arts, culture, everything. For a cloistered English major, it was a great crash course in the way the world really works. The white-collar crime in Newport, the hustles done by guys in suits and ties, were fascinating.” Every night Parker worked at writing fiction.

He was 31 and had just been fired from a technical editing job in the Irvine office of an aerospace company when “Laguna Heat” came out. The reviews were glowing, and HBO bought the rights. “The comedy of it is, starting out like that made me think that all books make bestseller lists and are made into HBO movies,” Parker says.

The professional and personal ups and downs he has endured since have made him a better writer, Parker believes. “When I started, I was an insanely ambitious writer. I finished ‘Laguna Heat’ on a Friday and started the next book on Monday. I wanted a good reputation and to be able to write what was considered a good novel. I’m still trying to maintain an upward arc of quality. I love the idea that the book I might write next year could be better than the one I just wrote.”

Four years ago, Parker moved to Fallbrook in northern San Diego county with his second wife, 13-year-old stepson and their 6-year-old son. “I used to think the development of Orange County was so endless and so bad and that it had destroyed so much of what was nice about the county,” he says. “But then I decided, what the hell. People want to live here, and if they want to keep crowding in I should either stay and join the party or go somewhere else. So I went somewhere else. It’s one less bone to pick in my life. Is my heart broken that Orange County is overdeveloped? Not really. I think it’s still kind of disgusting to see giant resort hotels in Laguna Beach that cater to people from out of town, but I’m not going to lose sleep over it anymore.”

Parker is sleeping and working well these days. He’s completed a draft of a new mystery that doesn’t yet have a title. It takes place in San Diego.

*Book signings

Where: Vroman’s Bookstore, 659 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena

When: 7 p.m. Thursday

Contact: (626) 449-5320

Also

Where: Borders, 14651 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks

When: 7:30 p.m. Friday

Contact: (818) 728-6593

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Where: Mystery Bookstore, 1036-C Broxton Ave., Westwood

When: 2 p.m. Saturday