The House at the Top of the Canyon

Start on the deck

The same quiet scene turns up in almost every one of these twenty novels. A man drives home late, up the long climb of Laurel Canyon, through eucalyptus and cut rock, into the mountains above Hollywood. He parks in the carport and lets himself in through the kitchen. A hatch in the door clatters and a large black cat walks in, ears shredded, head carried at an angle from the day somebody shot him with a .22. The man feeds the cat. Then he cooks something good for himself, carries it out onto the deck of his small redwood A-frame, and sits with his feet hanging over a twenty-foot drop while the canyon fills with dark and the basin below fills with light.

His name is Elvis Cole. He is a private investigator, and he is very good at it.

If you want to know whether these books are for you, that scene is the test. Nothing happens in it. Somebody feeds a cat. Robert Crais has been writing versions of it since 1987, across twenty novels, because it is the thing the violence is measured against. The cases are fast, tight and often brutal. What gives them weight is that the man solving them has built a life he actually wants to come home to, and every case threatens it.

Elvis Cole: a small life, built on purpose

Cole’s office sits four floors above Santa Monica Boulevard, with French doors onto a balcony where he waters plants that die anyway. On the desk are figurines of Jiminy Cricket. Above the filing cabinet hangs a Pinocchio clock whose eyes swing side to side as it ticks. The phone is a Mickey Mouse phone, and when it breaks he glues it back together rather than buy a new one. Clients frown at all of it, which is partly the point.

He drives a 1966 Corvette convertible, Jamaica yellow, which he never washes. He wears loud shirts. He cooks properly and often, for one, with a beer going while he works. Every morning since he mustered out of the Army he does twelve sun salutations on the deck, then tae kwon do, then push-ups, while a red-tailed hawk rides the thermal over the canyon. He answers his phone with a joke and calls himself the world’s greatest detective often enough that you understand the phrase is armour.

Underneath the clowning the design is deliberate and rather severe. The agency stays small on purpose. No employees, no growth, no career, and he turns down retainers from powerful men because a retainer is a leash. That smallness is exactly what lets him work for nothing when a client cannot pay, keep going after he has been fired, and finish a case his own way. Asked once whether being a detective in Los Angeles is exciting, he says it is mostly phone bills, credit-card receipts and being left on hold by the DMV, and then adds the sentence that runs the entire series:“But sometimes you get to help people and that feels pretty good.”

His wisdom is not delivered as wisdom. It has to be assembled from what he does. Childhood is his moral standard: he decided at eighteen, in a rice paddy, that he wanted to be Peter Pan, because innocence, loyalty and truth all live back there. Jiminy Cricket is on the desk as counsel in moments of temptation, and Crais eventually says outright that everybody needs a Jiminy. Humour is a discipline he learned in bunkers under rocket fire, alongside breathing exercises, and he uses it the same way, to keep his mind right. Loyalty outranks the law, and he knows what that costs. When his girlfriend Lucy Chenier argues that if every man defines justice for himself there is nothing left but anarchy, he concedes she is right and goes on doing it anyway. Lucy also gives him the cleanest description of his own life anyone manages in twenty books: he defines himself through his service to his clients.

The tragedy built into that design is that it has a hole in it. He wants a family, imagines one in detail, and keeps losing the chance because the work drags violence toward whoever stands closest to him. Crais lets that run unresolved for decades before finally paying it off.

Joe Pike: the arrows point forward

Joe Pike wears the same thing every day of his life. Grey sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, faded Levi’s, flat black pilot’s glasses he does not remove at night. Six foot one, about a hundred and ninety pounds, with bright red arrows tattooed on the outside of each deltoid. He is a vegetarian. He owns a small gun shop in Culver City, staffed by former cops who run it without him. He owns half of Cole’s agency and refuses to let his name go on the door. His condominium is immaculate and nearly empty: sofa, chair, table, bare walls, no photographs. He runs at four in the morning through empty streets and meditates for exactly fifteen minutes. He does not smile. Now and then the corner of his mouth twitches, and if you know him you understand that for Pike this is helpless laughter.

The arrows are the key. They point forward because he does not back up. He explains them once to a terrified young woman as a rule about controlling who you are by moving forward and never back, which is a statement about agency rather than a piece of optimism. Crais is careful to test it. In one novel Pike’s shoulder fails him on a hunt, he retreats, and he is left with shame and the conviction that he is lost.

Where the discipline comes from is the saddest thing in the series and its emotional centre. A father who used his fists. A nine-year-old who learned to read the set of a man’s shoulders to know when a beating was coming, and who hid in the woods because to be hidden was to be safe. Marines are not frightened of brutal drunks, so the boy made himself a Marine. Everything austere about the adult follows from that. His creed is four words long: effort is prayer, commitment is faith. He calls these catechisms from childhood and admits he had nothing else.

The rest of what he believes is equally short. Protection is chosen rather than inherited; asked why he became a police officer he says that some people cannot protect themselves, and years later he condenses it further by saying he still hates bullies. You must consent to your own life, which is why he will spend himself for someone but not on someone who has quit, and why he makes a woman say out loud that she wants to live before he will carry her any further. His training officer taught him to tell truth from lies and, harder, not to come to despise the people he deals with, because contempt for others is the first step toward contempt for yourself. And there is his theory that every person is built from the inside out, the outer self a mask the inner one holds in place. Sleep, drink or great emotion loosen the grip and the original shows through. The aim is to make the two identical. Pike thinks Cole has managed it. He built a fortress instead, and he knows what a fortress is like to live in.

Crais writes Cole in the first person and Pike in the third, so you are permanently inside one man and outside the other. The friendship is not a subplot. It is the form of the books. Neither man ever says much about it. While Cole is missing, Pike washes his filthy car. When they get home from the desert, Cole washes Pike’s Jeep.

The third character is the city

Los Angeles in these novels is not Chandler’s wilderness of mean streets, and it is not Ellroy’s abattoir. Crais loves the place, and says so on the page. In the eighth book Cole calls it a great sprawling spread-to-hell city that protects us by sheer size, four hundred and sixty-five square miles and eleven million beating hearts, and then explains the arithmetic of that comfort. The odds keep you safe. The girl found under the Hollywood sign is not your sister. Until, one day, she is. That is the engine of the crime novel, stated in a single paragraph while a man drives to the water and back.

The geography does moral work. Down in the basin there are freeways like sluggish arteries, minimalls standing where orange groves used to be, the Sunset Strip running its nightly carnival, the smog pressed white under an inversion layer and everyone in sunglasses. Up in the canyons there is eucalyptus and sage, coyotes with ruby eyes at the roadside, an owl on a power pole. Cole climbs out of the city every night in order to sleep above it. Crais gives him a line about that climb which works just as well as advice for living: the canyons go dark first, and if you leave the canyons you can find the light again and get a second chance at the day.

Then the Santa Anas arrive and the ridgelines burn and ash falls on the city like grey snow, and Crais notes drily that fires rank with riots and earthquakes among the local spectator sports. He also writes the best explanation anyone has given of why people go there in the first place.

Looking at hillside houses that keep being torn down and rebuilt into something else, sometimes worse and sometimes better, Cole finds himself admiring the courage in that willingness to change, and observes that the people who came to Los Angeles came looking for change. Everyone else stayed home.

That is Cole’s biography. It is Pike’s. It is the biography of nearly every client and a fair number of the villains across twenty books. The city is not scenery here. It is the argument.

Where to begin

Each novel is a self-contained case, so you can open any of them cold and be fine. Read them in order and you get something a single book could not do: one long story about two damaged men assembling a family out of clients, cops, neighbours, a lawyer from Louisiana, her son, and a cat who tolerates exactly two people on earth.

Start at the start, with The Monkey’s Raincoat (1987). The title comes from a Bashō haiku about a monkey in cold rain wishing for a little coat, which is the premise of the whole series in one image. Everyone needs shelter, and Cole has decided to be it. Cole describes his partner to a frightened client in four words: “Think of a samurai.” It is a fair warning.

If you want the book that shows what this series is capable of at full stretch, go to L.A. Requiem (1999), where Crais breaks his own form open, tells Pike’s childhood, and puts the city itself in the dock. A good many readers call it the finest American crime novel of its decade, and they have a case.

There is a scene near the end of a later novel in which Cole is badly hurt and people come to sit with him in the hospital. They are the clients from the previous books. Nobody paid him to earn that, and no one had to be asked. It is the proof of what the series has quietly been doing all along.

So: read them for the plots, which are lean and fast and fairly wound. Stay for the deck at the top of the canyon, the lights coming on across the basin, and a man holding a bad-tempered cat and asking it whether life is complicated. Then the phone rings, or somebody knocks, and there is a person downstairs in trouble.

That is how it starts. Every time.