Violent Ward. Len Deighton

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,