L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories

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On the infrequent occasions that I make it out to L.A., to work on the cop show I have a hand in, I always make time to have dinner at Musso & Frank. They’ve been serving the same menu since 1919, the same steaks and chops, the same sauerbraten and lobster thermidor. The seats at the counter in front of the grill have the same buffed leather upholstery, and if you lean in close you can see rings on the bar left behind from Raymond Chandler’s shot glass.

They say he wrote parts of The Big Sleep here, maybe all of it. They say Jim Thompson, author of The Killer Inside Me, often drank himself into a stupor here and had to be helped home. Charles Bukowski, too, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—writers of all stripes used to pickle themselves here. But because of Chandler and Thompson, and because of the look and feel of the place (it could be a set from Chinatown; it was, in fact, a set in Ocean’s Eleven), it’s got a special spot in the hearts of writers and readers of crime fiction. And not just crime fiction—the particular sort of crime fiction we call noir.

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