Violent Ward

My secretary, the indomitable Magda Huth, came running out of…

13

A week later a call from Felix Chiaputti brought a…

14

Petrovitch had a place up on Hillcrest, where the folks…

15

The trial of the policemen accused of beating Rodney King…

16

Like most of the city’s inhabitants, I spent many of…

About the Author

Other Books by Len Deighton

About the Publisher

Cover designer’s note

Prompted by seeing the renderings of my two murals for Cunard’s new ship, Queen Elizabeth, Len Deighton suggested that I illustrate some of the covers of this next quartet of re-issues. I am delighted to be given the opportunity to draw once again, as it has been well over thirty years since my days as a regular illustrator for the Sunday Times.

It is amazing to think that it is also nearly twenty years since the 1992 Los Angeles riots, an event which looms large in this book. When first reading Violent Ward, it struck a chord with my wife and me as we had just moved into our new apartment in Hollywood when the riots took place.

On the first night we were awoken by loud shouting: ‘Get out, get out, your building is on fire!’ The warning came from a police officer who was banging his night-stick against our building’s wall. In the alley behind us were a couple of LAPD black-and-white patrol cars, and I could hear an officer speaking on his radio urging the fire department to come as quickly as possible. Meanwhile my wife, wielding a garden hose, attempted to douse the flames that were engulfing our neighbouring garages.

The next night, along with several neighbours armed to the teeth, we formed a vigilante watch on the roof of our remaining garage. Apart from the sounds of a stray cat I am pleased to report that it was an uneventful night.

In the morning I visited Samy’s, the professional camera store across from our home, to purchase a few rolls of film in order to record the damage of the previous day. A couple of hours later, while sitting at my desk, I heard three loud explosions. Looking out of the window, I saw an enormous mushroom-cloud rising up from the camera store, which had been torched. It appears that their large stock of photographic chemicals were responsible for the enormity of the explosions.

The following morning I ventured to the scene of the crime to discover the burnt-out shop front strewn with the remnants of expensive cameras, including a gold Leica that had become molten by the inferno, and a large shattered fish-eye lens. These later became part of an exhibit in the store’s new premises.

The composition on the front cover draws upon all these events, with the addition of a National Guardsman who stands ready, and perhaps too eager, to respond to the civil unrest and general chaos that is unfolding. For the book’s title I chose a bold font within which could burn the flames of civil unrest; the falling ‘D’ an apt symbol of the city’s descent into ‘war’.

The back cover collage includes a book match cover from the Beverly Hills Hotel, a valet parking stub with Murphy’s Cadillac circled, a couple of Hollywood postcards, and a movie clapper board. Sitting behind all these is an edition of the ‘Los Angeles Messenger’, beneath whose fictional masthead shouts a contemporary headline that was all too true. When applying some authentic fire damage, we did not realize how flammable the newsprint would be, and nearly ended up burning our apartment down – it’s a good job Isolde was standing by with a bucket of water! Each item in the montage has been selected to convey a facet of the City of Angels, its glamour and charm that is always just a hair’s breadth away from a seedy underbelly full of corruption and violence.

The book’s spine features an LAPD badge. Observant readers will notice that each of the spines in this latest quartet of reissues features a metallic object; a subtle visual link that draws together four books written and set in very different times and places.

I have taken the photograph for this book’s back cover with my Canon 5D camera, and my illustration was drawn with a HB Staedtler pencil.

Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI

Hollywood 2011

Introduction

Not all of the world’s greatest cities are old. Paris (where I set An Expensive Place to Die) is a great city. Cairo (the setting for City of Gold) is indisputably great but so is Los Angeles. People frown and argue when I say that but I stand by my assessment. And Los Angeles is dynamic; no sooner than you start to think you understand something of it you find it has substantially changed yet again. It is big, a vast sprawling city of low buildings that follow the freeways so that you can drive all the way to Mexico while believing you are still in the city. It is only when you fly over it that you see the uninhabited expanses that lie behind the freeways. The off-ramp signs offer a wonderland of realtor’s poesy: Tarzana, Hidden Hills, Thousand Oaks, Malibu Canyon, Lake Sherwood, Woodland Hills. But you are never far from the wild outback; listen to the raccoons pattering across the roof to invade your attic; hear the noise of a rattlesnake lurking in your woodpile, go into the yard and see a coyote rummaging through your garbage; go for an early morning round of golf and be confronted with an impudent mountain lion in no hurry to depart. This is Los Angeles County.

I had first visited Los Angeles as a very young man but it was meeting Bill Jordan, a detective with the LAPD intelligence division, that enabled me to see the inner life of the city. Bill arranged for me to go out with the police cars on such expeditions as raiding the home of a drug dealer. Bill showed me the downtown streets and alleys he had walked as a young police officer, a Pacific war veteran just out of the US Marine Corps. Eventually Bill became a private detective and he is as near to being Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe as anyone could be. But although also armed with a Law Degree, Bill Jordan is a very far cry from Mickey Murphy. Bill is a sober and reflective man whose honesty, skills and charm combined to make him into a very successful investigator. As I witnessed one night when riding in a police car, he could even make a drunken driver believe that being taken into custody was an act of goodwill. ‘How would you face your family if tonight you killed someone on the road?’

Bill showed me the many faces of Los Angeles, including the comfortable suburbia where a lot of this story is set. I returned many times and I was in Los Angeles during the days of the riots. It was a devastating time when mild-mannered citizens were suddenly brandishing guns. But writers are always apt to be opportunistic and I decided that the acrid smoke, drifting across the city’s stately skyscrapers like a net curtain, should become the climax of this book. The description of the riots is as accurate as I could make it. It was my publisher who provided me with a close view of Los Angeles at the height of the violence. Due at a book fair in Anaheim, I was collected by an out-of-town driver who carelessly took the direct route through the smouldering streets of South Central.

Many of my stories are written in the first person. Eight of nine of the Bernard Samson books are in the first person and this one is too. Deciding to set a story in the first person is a major decision in the planning of a book. Some authors prefer to have their first-person narrative written in what is sometimes called the authorial voice. Somerset Maugham did this and did little to change the idea that his tales are that of an author gathering material and reporting on the follies and misfortunes of his friends and acquaintances. Other writers use the voice and actions of the main character to create a person quite different to themselves. Bernard Samson exaggerates and distorts the world he tells us about. Without deliberate, self-serving lies he is apt to parody his superiors and ridicule his father in law. Well, this is not unknown in our real lives and it provides a chance to see into Bernard’s mind and judge his skills and his courage. Just as we love our friends and relatives as much for their failings as for their virtues, so we love and admire Bernard. The anarchic Mickey Murphy is also depicted by means of the first-person narrative and few men could be quite as different as Mickey is to Bernard. I hope that these characterisations provide something you enjoy for I devote a great deal of thought to creating these first-person people.

I am the luckiest of lucky men and I take pleasure in my work but I am a very slow worker. I envy those writers who find their characters speak to them and are able to dash off books at lightning speeds. I plod; writing books demands more than a year; no vacations, seven days a week and that includes wide-awake nights as I worry about whether to slim down characters, dump chapters or move them all to another town and start again. It is my family who deserve sympathy and have to be thanked for their understanding. Violent Ward was a specially happy book for me. Reading it again to write this introduction reminded me of all the fun I had creating the maverick Irish lawyer who has to be the hero because there is no one else around to play that role. More than one of my friends said that Mickey Murphy was exactly like me; quick to anger; quick to repent and tormented by self-doubt. Perhaps they were right. I admit to finding it relatively easy to create this rebellious Irish sinner; I admired him. Mickey’s abrasive, cynical manner cloaks the fearless morality that arms those with little or nothing to lose.

Most of my stories are love stories. And most of these love stories are set in a commanding environment such as Cairo, Los Angeles or Berlin; or an environment of hazard, such as war or espionage. Or both. And the love is tempered by the asserted masculinity of men who declare their failure to understand women. Mickey Murphy does not resemble Bernard Samson in any way other than a failure to understand the women he loves, but this failure can be a fatal one. The theme of what might have been is a sub-text of fiction and of life. This story was different to all the other books I had written. Mickey was different so when I finished the first draft of Violent Ward I asked Mickey to write to my publisher to explain the change:

Hear me out, buddy. They say if America is a lunatic asylum then California is the Violent Ward. My name is Murphy and I’m a Mick lawyer with an ex-wife who sends her astrologer around demanding money so she can pay off her orthodontist. My kid has hocked his 9mm Browning using false ID. I’m in love with the wife of my wealthiest client and the cops are trying to pin a nasty homicide on me.

But there’s no recession in the crime industry and my business is fine, or it might be if my German secretary could write and speak English, and my clients didn’t get wasted before they paid my bills. The kind of crooks I defend never plead the Fifth because they can’t count that far.

Okay, Okay. So nobody loves a lawyer.

See ya in court.

Len Deighton, 2011

If America is a lunatic asylum

then California is the Violent Ward.

1

‘There’s a woman sitting on my window ledge,’ I said quietly and calmly into the phone.

‘I can’t see you, Mr Murphy!’ said Miss Magda Huth, my secretary. Her German accent was more pronounced when she was agitated, like now, and her voice was strangled whenever she stood on tiptoe to see into my office over the frosted glass partition.

‘There’s a woman sitting on my window ledge. You can’t see me because I’m behind my desk.’

‘You must be on the floor.’

‘Yes, well, I’m trying not to frighten her,’ I said. ‘Will you please just do something about it?’

Miss Huth has no sense of urgency except when she is leaving work. ‘Your coffee is losing its froth out here,’ she said. ‘Perhaps if I brought it in to you—’

Jesus! ‘Are you listening to me?’ I said. ‘She didn’t come by for a cup of coffee and a Danish. She’s going to throw herself into the street. Any minute.’

‘There is no need to become belligerent.’ Magda Huth wasn’t young. She’d been some kind of schoolteacher in Dresden until reunification gave her a chance to leave, and at times she treats me like a backward pupil in a totalitarian kindergarten. That’s the way she was treating me now. ‘I will see if I can reach the Fire Department,’ she said primly.

‘Yes, you do that,’ I said.

Miss Huth had not been with my law partnership very long. Previously, for five years I’d had Denise, a really sensible woman and an efficient secretary. Then she went off on a package-deal skiing weekend in Big Bear – I must have been soft in the head to give her so much time off – and within eight weeks she was married to a Mexican orthodontist she met in a singles bar there. For a long time I kept hoping she’d tire of living in Ensenada and ask for her job back. But then last Christmas I had this long chatty boilerplate letter, plus a blurred snapshot of her and her husband and twin bambinos, and now I was trying to get used to Miss Huth all over again. It wasn’t easy.