The Case of the Auspicious Allegory

   

One can always count on three things in a Michael Connelly mystery novel: Realism, idiotic cliff hangers, and dramatic tension created by putting his victims in jeopardy.

But the most fun of a Connelly novel is picking up the literary allusions to famous detective fiction. In at least two of the Harry Bosch novels, the detective dined at the Red Harvest diner, the title of a pre-Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett novella.

This time, in The Wrong Side of Goodbye, Connelly brings out the big guns, by paraphrasing the opening line of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.

Chandler, 1939: “I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.”

Connelly, 2016: “According to Wikipedia he (Bosch) was calling on
six billion dollars.”

In Florida where Connelly is from, allegory is what happens when you are eaten by alligators at a Disney resort.
In California, Chandler wrote a thinly disguised narrative of the Doheny oil murders, while Connelly apparently has picked the late Henry J. Kaiser, as a model for Vance, the billionaire employer for whom Bosch works as a private eye.

There is no point in discussing the plot, because Connelly (and all serial novelists) basically have only the one plot.

But he’s still a fun read, and it’s good to see him exploring ethnic diversity of the city. He implied, in the end notes to the novel, that Bosch might return to the little city of San Fernando.

Or maybe a gig with the L.A, County Sheriff will open up, being a lot of the personnel of that agency seem to be in prison at the moment.

The enduring mystery of the Wrong Side of Goodbye is how Connelly picked the Hispanic surname Sahagun for one of his characters.

My instincts tell me this is lifted from Louis Sahagun, the legendary L.A. Times reporter, a native La La Lander, who began his career covering organized crime for the Arizona Republic, and became the Times’ Wild West reporter for more than 30 years.

I’ll never be able to prove it in literary court, but if I use Connelly logic, I’ll get a slam-dunk conviction.

Bosch must pine for the days when Wyatt Earp worked for the L.A.P.D. in an off-the-books arrangement with Chief Two-gun Davis. Things went swimmingly until federal marshals arrested the lawman for claim-jumping a borax deposit in the Mojave Desert.

The first season of the Bosch Amazon.com television series continued the allegorical trend by adapting the character, Lou Escobar from the movie Chinatown. We'll probably see more of this in the two other seasons.

B.T. Raven - Ace Detective

About 5 years ago, I discovered a Sierra Club newsletter reprint authored by Peter Wild, who disclosed he was flummoxed by the connection between John Muir and Theodore Strong Van Dyke.

The newsletter article was dated 1995, which is the same as brand new to a researcher.

"A mountain and ice man, Muir didn't go willingly to the California desert. Rather, it was the health of daughter Helen that forced him out there in his final years. He had spent much of 1905-1906 worrying over Helen's condition and trying to find a healing climate for her respiratory problems, first in the mountains of eastern Arizona, later at the Petrified Forest in the northern part of the state. ... Helen suddenly took a turn for the worse, and Muir rushed her south to the Van Dyke Ranch, a mile east of Daggett."

"The details of why Muir chose this ranch are not entirely clear. In fact, Daggett had a particularly evil reputation," Wild wrote.

Left to right: Wanda Muir, Helen Muir, Louie Muir, John Muir at the house in Martinez

Muir's last day on this earth was spent in that desert railroad town, which still exists along a wide place in the road about 5 miles east of Barstow.

Muir was pronounced dead at Los Angeles' California Hospital on Christmas Eve, 1914,  soon after he arrived by rail, ill with pneumonia. It is possible Muir expired on the train and was pronounced dead at the hospital so the Santa Fe Railroad would not have to summon the county coroner in the dead of night.

Everyone knows Peter Wild is the premier (and only) scholar on the life of T.S. Van Dyke: Writer, naturalist, irrigator, ex-wife ducker.

The last item is how he got from San Diego to  Daggett, which was the western terminus of the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad (after that the Santa Fe railway took over the tracks and the freight).

Peter Wild about 1979

When I read that Wild did not know how Muir and Van Dyke were connected, I became very excited, because I knew the answer to this enigma: Van Dyke and Muir became associated through Theodore Parker Lukens (letter to Muir), of whom I am the premier (and only scholar). (reply from Muir)
 
I immediately made plans to contact Wild at the University of Arizona campus in Tucson. I knew Wild would be thrilled to solve the riddle.

Only to find out that Wild had gone to the grave in 2009, at the age of 69. Trust me, there is nothing worse than having possession of a secret, and having no one to tell it.

Bummer.

Wild was a great writer. A professor of English, ardent backpacker, and writer about Old West personages whom you have never heard of. His interest in the Old West had nothing to do with being rich or famous. Clearly, there is nothing better. It helps to have a reliable day job that involves 3-month unpaid holidays during the summer.

Much of Wild's writing was for the High Country News, a very eclectic journal of god-knows-what, in the gazillion square miles surrounding the Escalante Plateau.

Drawing of T.S, Van Dyke on cover of Wild's chapbook: #121 of the Western Writers series.

Wild also authored a chapbook on Van Dyke for the Western Writers series, published by the University of Boise. He also edited a book based on the papers of  Dix Van Dyke, son of Theodore, who, as an old man published a rememberence of the old days in the Barstow Printer Review newspaper before it was renamed the Desert Dispatch. I called it the Screaming Eagle, because of its idiotic banner.

What really ticks me off is that I worked for the Dispatch in the late 1980s and beyond and never knew of Van Dyke nor the demise of John Muir, right in my neighborhood. I spent a lot of time tramping the desert back then and cannot believe I missed this piece of western minutiae.

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Confessions of an historical stalker

History, once you’ve come down with the disease, is hard on the soul. It must be even harder on the souls of the dead, who are unable to defend themselves.

I have this idea that every moment in time still exists somewhere in some sort of parallel universe. It just doesn’t exist here, where I need it.

Which has forced me into stalking

That's become an annoyance to Miss Lukens, the unrequited love of my life, whom I first met 50 years after her expiration date.

1897 - Pasadena, California. From top left Helen Lukens, T.P. Lukens; Charlotte Dyer Lukens. Below, from left: William Ralph Jones and Charlotte Jones. The dog is only one enjoying the portrait sitting. Photographer is unknown.

For a decade, I would sneak into her house and search her parallel universe underwear drawer looking for the missing glass plate negatives of early Pasadena and the wilds of the turn-of-the-century Angeles National Forest.

The plates have since turned up, but probably would not have, had
I not been such a persistent stalker, helping to rescue her father from historical oblivion.

Instead of waiting for me for a century, like she promised, Helen Lukens ran off and married Edward Everett  Jones, and later married James Hamilton Gaut.

As Helen Lukens Gaut, she is best known for the flyleaf photograph
of John Muir in the Hetch Hetchy Valley. This is contained in the
Pulitzer-Prize-winning biography, Son of the Wilderness. You’ve got
to admit, I have pretty good taste in women.

Probably in the Angeles National Forest. Helen Lukens used both a Mitchell touring car and a Model T.

As with all long-term relationships, I became aware of some skeletons
in Helen’s closet.

The good, the bad, the strange

Helen Lukens Jones Gaut was a master wildland photographer, an unheralded pioneer among women photographers of the West. We assume most of her work was done on plate cameras, but the 116 flexible film was also available in the early 20th century. 

Marketing photographic art, however, was a dicey business, unless it was it was to accompany a story in newsprint or magazines.

Which turned her into a writer. Left to her own devices, she was a
terrible writer of Victorian prose. Her nonfiction account of the
mystique of Tahquitz Canyon in the San Jacinto wilderness, published in Out West is a wretched narrative of an American Indian Romeo and Juliet. Her chapbook, Trails to Peace, makes the Out West piece look like actual literature.

Helen sought to be a professional writer, that’s where the money was
in the great age of magazines, when the Post Office generously subsidized rates for the mailing of periodical literature.

Miss Lukens found her ecological niche in the celebration of the California bungalow. Almost all of her bungalow writing is pure fiction, but was not published as such.

She came clean to the census taker in 1910. She and Jim Gaut were
operating a rooming house that they did not own in Pasadena. She gave her occupation as writer; he as real estate tycoon. I guess they were kind of  between gigs.

Helen was the only child of Theodore Parker Lukens and Charlotte Dyer.

Dyer of Puritan stock; Lukens of sober German heritage. When the family migrated to the land of fruit and nuts, magical thinking was tolerated and always a close companion of the family. Theodore got a temporary gig as manager of the San Gabriel Timberland Reserve, which had everything except timber. Through the remainder of his life he sought to plant timber in the range - to grow a little hair on Mt. Baldy, so to speak.

His biographer said he was the Father of Forestry; others referred to him as Johnny Pinecone.

Helen Lukens at camp in the Angeles National Forest

Helen, who was both domesticated and adventurous, had a nice little
adventure in Palm Canyon around 1905. This was a Sierra Club expedition in the San Jacinto Mountains. John Muir was there, her father was there, and James Hamilton Gaut, of the federal Biological Survey, was there.

The next year, Edward Everett Jones was out and Gaut was in. The evidence that this transition did not go smoothly, is supported by the fact that Helen’s children, Charlotte and Ralph Jones became Charlotte and Ralph Gaut. Charlotte Gaut grew up to embrace mysticism. During her foray into life as a working girl in San Francisco, John Muir was asked to look after her. This occurred about 1910.

By 1920, Charlotte was an inmate at the Patton State Hospital for
the insane in San Bernardino. She remained there for 30 years, until
her death, reported in January, 1950. There is no evidence her body
was claimed although her mother, brother and children were alive then. The unclaimed dead at Patton were given to the Loma Linda University Medical Center.

When Charlotte was committed, her two children, Helen Lukens Jensen and Theodore Parker Jensen, became inmates of a Pasadena orphanage.

James Hamilton Gaut was not cut out for the rigors of the 20th Century:
James H. Gaut has lively experience with newly bought equine when the animal runs away today - Pasadena Evening Star, 9/29/1906,

Hit by train and may die : Shocking accident to well known realty
man : Foot caught in switch, he makes vain struggle : Right arm is
amputated and condition critical -  Los Angeles Times, 7/10/1909,

J. H. Gaut killed today : Automobile dashes down Arbor Street hill and over Arroyo bank : Control of car lost by driver : Machine makes spectacular flight; Death follows instantly -  Pasadena Star, 9/14/1914.

Helen Lukens Jones Gaut retired from the literary/photography scene soon after her husband’s death. She was getting older and the California bungalow - Arts and Crafts movement was waning. She dabbled in songwriting, performing live on KHJ radio in the early 20’s and lived another 40 years after her husband’s death.

Her father’s collection of photographs and papers were bought by Dawson’s bookshop in Los Angeles at some point in the 50’s or 60’s. Those papers were sold to the Huntington Library in Pasadena, where they still reside.

Sadly the Huntington will not allow us riff-raff to finger the glass-plate negatives.

But Helen’s photographs remained obscure until they were brokered
through an art dealer to the Pasadena Museum of History after 2002. The museum has made these images permanently available on Flickr photo sharing web site.

Regards, B.T. Raven

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Nighthawks West!

On our weekly trip through Railroad Square in Santa Rosa, California, Edward Hopper's famous Nighthawks suddenly appeared on the side of a boarded-up, long-abandoned Asian restaurant. The painter is Judy Kennedy, a local artist of some celebrity.

That's all we know so far. This thing is brilliant; I wanna go in for a cup of coffee each time I view it. The mural is on Wilson Street at the corner of College Avenue.

Around the corner  on College is a rendition of Jerry Garcia on another abandoned building. Artist unknown.

Eventually we could not resist and wrangled up a '42 Chevy and a time warp so we could have a cup of java at the Nighthawks cafe.

Here is the video

Best Regards, B.T. Raven