Five noir classics at the corner of Hollywood and music

Daniel Weizmann is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Billboard, the Guardian, AP Newswire, and more. Under the nom de plume, Shredder, Weizmann also wrote for the long running Flipside fanzine, as well as LA Weekly, which once called him “an incomparable punk stylist.”

His new novel is The Last Songbird.

At CrimeReads Weizmann tagged five noir titles that "feature mysteries, musicians, and mayhem against a Tinseltown backdrop." One entry on the list:

Speaking of L.A. in the freak-out Sixties, nobody has ever taken a more sobering look at it than the great Walter Mosley, in one of his many Easy Rawlins masterpieces, Little Green. The book starts with Easy half-comatose after a near fatal car crash, but just as soon as he steps off his sick bed, he slips, like Alice falling up, into a new Wonderland, the dizzying world of hippie counterculture. Easy’s assignment: find Evander Noon, a young Black man who has gone missing while up on the Sunset Strip checking out some rock bands. Reading Little Green, I couldn’t help but reflect on Arthur Lee and Johnny Echols, Black heroes of the band Love, and the insidious way that L.A.’s invisible color line has always tried in vain to keep worlds apart.

Read about the other titles on Weizmann's list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue