#arcanoir

Over the next several months my dream would slowly grow into a sprawling web of historical research and tortuous plotting that at points consumed nearly every waking moment of my life. I figured if I was going to do a noir AU I wanted to do it right — to capture hardboiled Los Angeles in a way that fit into the genre without seeming like a parody or a caricature of detective fiction tropes, while also feeling somehow intrinsically Arcane-ish. I’m typically a science fiction writer and I wanted the chance to do a period piece, which was in its own way stranger than writing about an imaginary world.

First of all, I need time to focus on my characters’ other interpersonal hangups, so not now, gay panic. Second of all, it was widely understood or suspected that major Hollywood actors were into men, and Los Angeles had a significant gay community during this period — as noted matter-of-factly if not positively in Day of the Locust, for instance — so the odds of being unfazed by it are about as high as they could be in '30s America. And third of all, Jayce in all universes is just a weird little guy!

Less seriously, from what I can tell, it’s a bit of a toss-up whether Jayce would have a refrigerator or an icebox in his apartment. In favor of iceboxes, his apartment is described as being fairly plain in a period where home fridges were still a bit new and fancy, and he’s a bachelor who doesn’t have particularly heavy meal planning duties. In favor of refrigerators, refrigerators had become cheap enough by that point that they weren’t huge luxuries. I ultimately decided Jayce has a refrigerator because he thinks Freon (which was invented in the late 1920s) is super fucking cool.

That said, it felt cheap to retcon central elements of LA history and culture or just… not acknowledge the gender and implicit race or ethnicity of major characters. Arcane is all about power differentials and how people’s social circumstances shape them! In America that means more than class.

My general position is that characters don’t need to hold “period-typical” beliefs, but they can’t break major institutional barriers far ahead of real history. Cait isn’t a rookie beat cop, for instance, because the LAPD cordoned policewomen into specific departments where that wasn’t an option. There’s very little overt on-screen bigotry and no racial/homophobic/sexist slurs, like I’m not Elmore fucking Leonard here, but characters acknowledge and are shaped by prejudice. A Mel that’s a Black woman in the 1930s is going to be a slightly different person than someone from the very top of the social food chain in Arcane, even if she’s still rich and powerful. A Mexican American Jayce and Czech immigrant Viktor don’t fall as neatly into a social hierarchy as Piltover Jayce and Undercity Viktor.

I don’t have a formal background in early-20th-century LA history, so my understanding of it is drawn from journalistic and academic secondary sources, archival newspapers and photographs, and roughly contemporary fiction; there’s a bibliography of books and films that I drew on if you happen to enjoy that kind of thing. From the Arcane side, it’s like a partial post-timeskip arc where Mel is in The Maltese Falcon, Jayce is in Chinatown, and Viktor is in The Big Sleep. True to the conventions of the genre, most people are seedy and possibly criminal. There’s lots of Council slander that’s not meant to reflect their characters in the Arcane universe. At some point I am going to snap and summarize a chapter as “Forget it, Jayce, it’s Chinatown.”

This wasn’t the only way to handle things, but it opened the door to several interesting adaptational challenges, and it felt more true to the best parts of Arcane than mimicking the style of hardboiled period fiction while stripping out its cultural context. I’ll have more specific notes on later chapters, but in general I owe a huge debt to Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, the 1930s WPA-commissioned guidebook Los Angeles: A Guide to the City and its Environs, and any film starring Humphrey Bogart.

So anyway, welcome to the most needlessly elaborate fic I’ve ever written: a novel about a lonely bisexual detective and a reckless photographer with a dark past hunting stolen diamonds for a cryptic antiques dealer during the Great Depression and discovering dangerous secrets about the Los Angeles labor movement and the California Water Wars, except everyone is from a Netflix cartoon about League of Legends.

FIlms:

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

The Big Sleep (1946)

Chinatown (1974)

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

Nightmare Alley (1947)

Double Indemnity (1944)

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

In A Lonely Place (1950)

L.A. Confidential (1997)

Books:

The High Window, Raymond Chandler

The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler

The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett

The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West

Los Angeles: A Guide to the City and its Environs, WPA Writers' Program

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Mike Davis

Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, Mike Davis

City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s, Otto Friedrich

L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City, John Buntin

American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century, Howard Blum

Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty, Dennis McDougal

Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945, George Sanchez

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Marc Reisner

Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, And Lipstick Lesbians, Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons

Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink, David Margolick

“Vander and Silco are the guys who bombed a newspaper on behalf of a Midwestern union and accidentally killed socialism in LA.”

The thing is, I laid out Blood and Blue Diamonds with a couple of ground rules.The first was that it had to start with parallels to both the major beats of the Arcane universe and the real history of LA. The second was that it had to include hypothetical space for the other major characters to have their own arcs in separate stories.

I’m not totally convinced this will work, and I think it’s going to lead to some weird plotting choices. But LA is such a bizarre place that I didn’t want to flatten it out with a bunch of over-the-top historical changes, and I felt uncomfortable turning things into the “two guys take over the entire plot of Arcane” show. I like the challenge of imagining there’s this whole parallel CaitVi hardboiled odd-couple story and a straight gangster tragedy with Jinx.

But this meant I needed some kind of real historical parallel to the topside-undercity conflict, and I ended up going with the LA labor struggle. In short, LA in the 1900s through the 1930s was one of the most intensely anti-union cities in the country, and also the target of essentially a pro-labor terrorist campaign.

So… anyway. Vander and Silco’s roles are loosely based on John and Jim McNamara, a pair of brothers and union activists who helped orchestrate a nationwide bombing campaign in the early twentieth century. The McNamaras nearly killed Harry Chandler by destroying the headquarters of the Los Angeles Times (a huge anti-union force) in 1910, then were probably-illegally detained by a private investigator and taken to California, where they were so obviously guilty that their attorney Clarence Darrow (yes, the Scopes monkey trial lawyer) tried to bribe the court instead of defending them. Eventually they pleaded guilty and went to San Quentin, while the mainstream LA labor and socialist movements were nearly wiped out partly by the reputational damage of having supported them.

This was more or less the end of the McNamaras, so they were not involved in the 1923 San Pedro dockworkers strike, which along with the bombing is my extremely loose parallel to Arcane’s uprising. In real life the International Workers of the World organized a strike that was put down by the police and protracted activism that led to some brutal attacks by the KKK, who were virulent opponents of organized labor in addition to their better-known racism.

The Council for Progress is a combination of the San Fernando Syndicate (which we’ll get into later) and the Merchants & Manufacturers Association, one of the biggest anti-labor forces in the city at the time. I don’t think they carried out anything precisely like Viktor’s backstory here and particularly not as late as the ‘20s, but M&M and the LA Times played just absolutely vicious hardball with any business that flirted with unions, and it’s not far outside the scope of their actual operations during the roughest periods. I’m drawing a bunch of this from the LA Times history Privileged Son, as well as American Lightning, a history of the bombing and somewhat oddly also D.W. Griffith.

Sky had iterations that were closer to her assistant role in Arcane (including actually a librarian), but depressingly enough they kept getting nixed by segregation. So I figured why not translate her research skills into being a classic muckraker newswoman. While somewhat different from Sky’s position here, Los Angeles had what’s likely the first newspaper published by a Black woman, Charlotta Bass.

And finally, I’m getting into things people likely already know, but the Pinkerton Detective Agency was famous for two things: very effective private detective work and violent strikebreaking. It was also at one point the employer of Dashiell Hammett, who arguably codified the hardboiled genre.

“Phaeton” was a general term for an open-bodied proto-convertible in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and the Ford Phaeton specifically is the car Jack Nicholson drives in Chinatown*, so I gave Jayce one too. (Internally, it was interchangeable with other Model A or B cars, depending on the production year.) This period was a crossover point between cars that started with manual cranks and electric buttons, so you’d typically pump a starter on the floor that sparked the engine, but you could also slot a crank in the front and physically turn the engine over if the battery died. Thus... the scenario I am creating is a little bit contrived, but so sue me, I couldn’t resist the obvious joke.

I was worried I’d find some logistical reason Viktor couldn’t drive a ‘30s Ford, and based on my car guy’s description crank-starting it would be extremely hard or impossible for somebody with our boy’s post-timeskip build, but beyond that it would just be fairly difficult — it was before hydraulic brakes or power steering, so you were effectively pulling the wheels the direction you wanted to go and levering the brakes onto them with your foot.

Meanwhile my guidepost for Jayce is “literally capable of any human-level feat of strength” so of course he can start the damn thing almost unconscious. (Fun fact about car crank-starting: apparently never ever grip it between your thumb and fingers, because if it backfires the crank will snap back and so will your thumb.)

Now back to the chembarons. Los Angeles had a real tradition of gangsters from Chicago and New York showing up and fucking with the existing criminal ecosystem, including ones who had gotten too notorious or difficult back home. The city had homegrown organized crime and the legal power players were sketchy as hell, but its best-known figures — Bugsy Siegel, Mickey Cohen, Jack Dragna — came from Jewish or Italian operations on the East Coast. LA was, as noted by Jayce in the last chapter, also full of totally corrupt but disorganized cops that made it harder to run large-scale coordinated mob operations at this point. Great town to be a criminal, bad town to be a great criminal.

A random aside I learned from LA Noir: Bugsy Siegel claimed somewhat dubiously to have planned an assassination of Hermann Goering when they ended up at a mansion together in Italy while Siegel was trying to pull a get-rich-quick scheme involving selling experimental explosives to Mussolini. None of it worked out.

So obviously I’m writing a pretty stock detective pastiche, but a huge amount of Blood and Blue Diamonds was inspired by something I’m not sure counts as noir or hardboiled: The Day of the Locust, a 1930s novel about a failed artist in Hollywood during the Depression. It’s an amazing book — acerbic and witty and quietly sad — and I highly recommend it, although if you read it you will recognize just how much of its style I’ve badly ripped off.

Jayce’s building was based on the Villa Primavera, an apartment complex built by a husband-and-wife architecture team that worked in LA during the 1920s. The villa was probably the inspiration for the setting of In A Lonely Place, a (likewise absolutely fantastic) classic Humphrey Bogart noir. Let’s just… not think about how my fic’s whole plot is basically “Humphrey Bogart is blorbo now.” The Villa Primavera never ended up a weird decrepit ghost building, but in my defense the LA housing market did flat-out crater during the Depression and sometimes resulted in places being all but abandoned by their owners.

Viktor’s camera is (well, was) a Leica I, a high-end compact design that set the 35mm film standard in the mid-1920s and completely revolutionized photography in the process. The market would get flooded by far cheaper imitations (roughly starting with the Argus), but mainly in the later '30s and '40s, a little after where I’m staking my claim.

Incidentally at one point I had Viktor as a newspaper photographer, but it gave him too much steady work to let him go running around with Jayce, and I liked the dynamic of him being the demimonde foil to Jayce’s relatively upstanding citizen. But it means we don’t get to imagine his gorgeous hands on one of those giant Speed Graphic press cameras.

Jinx’s (spoilers for the unnamed girl who looks exactly like Jinx, I guess) outfit is premised on the popularity of flowing women’s slacks and beach pajamas in ‘30s fashion. As seen on this McCall's cover, beach pajamas could be extremely extra, but think something more along the lines of flared capris.