San Diego Noir

Начало книги

The southwesternmost metropolis in the contiguous United States, resting a mere forty feet above sea level, tends to garner positive national attention. San Diego is home to the world-famous San Diego Zoo, Balboa Park (with its history reaching back to the 1915–16 Panama-California Exposition), temperate climes, and a sunny reputation. It is also the home of shooter Brenda Ann “I Don’t Like Mondays” Spencer, disgraced Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham, and San Diego County medical examiner–turned-killer Kristin Rossum.

Joseph Wambaugh chronicled crime crossing the border in 1984’s Lines and Shadows, a saga about the challenges facing the Border Crime Task Force that continues today, even after the squad whose efforts it chronicled has been disbanded. My first strong sense of the city’s noir undertones came in the late 1980s, when La Jolla socialite Betty Broderick fatally shot her ex-husband Dan and his new wife Linda Kolkena, after gaining entrance to her ex’s new home with a key she’d taken from her daughter’s purse. (The incident where she drove a vehicle into his home was separate.) When Mysterious Galaxy, the bookstore I co-own, opened its first location in Clairemont in 1994, the Clairemont Killer, Cleophus Prince Jr., had already been convicted of killing six women in the neighborhood—including a murder in the apartment complex my family briefly resided in.

Читать дальше →